Trial Training

I came into the office in the morning to run a session. An ordinary day, people gathered.

I walked in, and everyone stared at me. Eyes wide, dead silent. Then someone finally worked up the nerve:

"What happened to your face?"

So you understand what that question cost them, let me remind you what I was like back then. A strict boss — tough, demanding, rough around the edges. A tyrant. People were afraid of me. And here these people had worked up the courage to ask about my face. I'm still amazed they dared.

And something really had happened to my face. The day before.

It was 1994. I already had my own office at Neways, my own team, and I was running presentations and training myself.

Remember the student from the teacher-training college? She needed to pass her class requirement: run a training session. And a training session needs people. Guinea pigs. I turned out to be one of those guinea pigs. Exactly how I ended up there, who invited me — I don't remember anymore. Too many years have gone by.

Back then in Russia, almost nobody had heard of personal-growth training. I didn't even know the term existed. I had no idea what was waiting for me there.

Two hours. Exercises, games. We split into pairs, then threes, then fours, and told each other things. Nothing complicated. The exercises themselves have faded from my memory. What stuck with me was what happened afterward.

And no stage. No standing up in front of a room to perform. For a guy who used to hide behind his classmates' backs at school, that was the whole point. First you talk to one person, then two, then three. Almost like those circles someone once drew for me at the dental clinic.

Somewhere in those two hours, something happened to me. I couldn't explain what, exactly, back then. There were some realizations, some kind of breakthrough. And the muscles in my face relaxed, right there during the training. Whatever tension I'd been carrying — probably since childhood — just let go.

I went home, went to bed. In the morning, I drove to the office.

Other people noticed first. My face had gotten softer. Kinder. Like someone had peeled off a mask I'd never even seen on myself.

That day I had a training session on the comp plan. And it was easier to run. I used the exact same words as always — I hadn't had time to learn any new ones.

Let's look at this with a clear head. In those two hours, nobody said one word about business. Not the comp plan, not the product, not how to invite people or where to find them. Not a single script. Pairs, threes, simple exercises. And the next morning, people who used to be afraid of me saw a different man. And it got easier for me to work.

How does that work? I couldn't answer that back then. It just stuck with me somehow.

Here's what I understood that day: people see you before they hear you.

You can learn all the right words. You can talk about a wonderful product and a generous comp plan. But the first thing a person reads is your face. And if what's there is tension, fear, or the hard edge of a boss everyone's afraid of, you can save yourself the trouble of trying anything else. My partners looked at that face of mine for a long time and said nothing. They only spoke up once they saw a different one.

If you just thought, "My face is fine, this isn't about me" — I thought that too. I knew I was being hard on people. It never occurred to me that it was written on my face before I'd said a single word. Not until someone showed me the difference.

Remember the rough diamond from Chapter 1? A dull-looking little stone on the outside. That day, a piece of its crust came off for the first time. Just a little, in one spot — like a small window. The actual cut was still a long way off. But through that window, the people in my office saw light. And they saw it before I did.

I've thought back on that student more than once since. She was still a student herself. Maybe it was the first training she'd ever run in her life, and on guinea pigs, no less. She probably wasn't some brilliant trainer. She passed her requirement and walked out of my life. I don't even remember her name.

But it was my face that changed.

From that day on, I fell in love with trainings.

The team grew. The ads worked, the phone rang so much that by evening my voice was shot. More and more people kept coming in.

But my check stalled. A thousand dollars a month, and it wouldn't move. I couldn't figure out why.

That's when I first heard about LifeSpring. Four days, morning to night. Three hundred fifty dollars. Huge money back then, and I didn't have it.

I remembered what had happened to my face after two hours with that student. And I thought: what's going to happen to me after four days?