The Spacesuit

Men who take their training seriously tend to ask a version of the same question inside the first month: What's the workout? They want something to do, not just talk about.

Here's one. You run it with intentionality, before entering an environment where you'll need it.

Pick an interaction you're dreading. A board meeting with some genuinely difficult personalities in it, an investor call, even a situation where everyone is friendly but the task is painful.

Before you walk into it, you take a minute and imagine putting on a spacesuit. The kind you've seen in movies: inches thick, solar protection, cold protection, a layer that stops cuts and rips. Climate controlled inside, oxygen, comfortable as the best chair you've ever sat in. As specifically as possible, you imagine stepping into it, fingers into the gloves, helmet coming down and clicking into place.

It is not a brick wall, and that's the part that matters. A spacesuit has a visor you can raise and lower, a microphone and speakers you can turn on and off. It's a boundary, not a bunker. You can let in what you choose, reject everything else.

Then you walk in wearing it, and nobody can see it but you. If somebody makes a genuinely useful point, you take it in. When Mr. Toxic starts his song and dance, those are little meteorites: pew, pew, bouncing harmlessly off your suit.

Clients have told me it's what got them through closing a deal, through a meeting with investors who get reactive and then make everybody else reactive - even dinner with their mother.

It's an exercise, which means there is no way to fail. I hate to break it to Yoda, but there is "try." In fact, the exercise is the whole point, regardless of whether the spacesuit was completely impermeable. If something penetrates it (for example, pisses you off), the answer isn't that you didn't do it right. You wore the suit. That was the rep. You do another rep. And another. And it gets easier the more of them you do.

If this resonates… let's talk.