The Sole Isolater

Isolation:  The state of being set apart or cut off from others.
Solitude:   The state of being alone or solitary, by oneself.

We read from the Fifth Step this morning.  You know - the talking to another person Step.  Yuck.  

People.  They're the worst.

I make sure that I am able to be alone some of the time in each day.  People drain my energy and solitude recharges me.  There is, however, too much solitude.  This I avoid.

I share the story often of a man coming over to me after a meeting and asking about something that I had apparently shared the previous week - a job interview or a visit with my parents or some other weighty event.  I stared at him blankly, trying to figure out who the hell he was.  I didn't recall ever having seen him before.  The thing is that he was actually listening when I spoke, a technique with which I was unfamiliar.  The listening to someone else part.  I was far too busy thinking about what I was going to say as soon as the idiot who was talking quit talking so I could talk.

I figured I had better start paying attention to what I was saying because people were listening to what I was saying.  It put a real crimp in my lying, especially because I forgot most of what I had lied about.

One of the aphorisms I strove diligently to apply in the sales game was: Tell them what you're going to tell them.  Tell them.  Tell them what you told them.  The implication here, of course, is that I'm not the only person who does a shitty job of listening.  The stuff I sold was complicated enough that if my audience wasn't paying attention all was lost.

I also got good at discerning whether my clients were listening or just waiting for me to stop talking so they could say what they wanted to say.   I could see when they were almost holding their breath, saving energy for a big retching out of critical, important, indispensable information that usually had absolutely no bearing on the situation at hand.  Didn't matter.  I wasn't going to get anywhere until the person got to talk.