The Bland Leading the Bland

Last week as I was driving home from teaching a workshop, I saw this most amazing sight.  A man was walking three dogs.  He was holding the leash to one, and the other two were walking as you see in this (very blurry) picture.  The large dog (breed unknown, but it's my favorite kind of dog - someone else's!) had the leash to the smaller dog (breed unknown) in his MOUTH.  The large dog would stop when crossing the road.  He stopped to let me take this picture on his owner's command, and he kept the little yippy and disobedient dog in check and safely on the narrow sidewalk.  I'd never seen a dog walk a dog before.

It got me to thinking (it doesn't take much, but it usually takes some outside stimulus).

If you're training a dog to walk, stop, heel, and ... roll over... who do you want to teach the  dog?  Certainly a dog trainer can do the trick(s), but what better trainer than another dog!?  One who knows what to do, has proven he can do it, and will provide great influence and motivation as well as the proper instruction.  Brilliant! 

And not just any dog will do.  We once had two dogs, and all they taught each other was to be the first one through the open door and how to steal food from each other.  And I know lots of trained dogs (thankfully, YOUR dog and not mine!) that are trained, but could not walk another dog.  Or teach them to stop.

Now let's turn our attention to another skill.  This time with humans.  Let's find something to examine that is hard for most folks.  Oh, say, speaking.  Who are you going to use as your role model to learn to speak?  What I observe in the corporate space is that few people proactively spend the time to educate themselves, but EVERYONE learns.  Usually it goes like this:

A junior employee arrives at a company with excitement and sits in meeting after meeting, bored and too new and too timid to question anything.  Give him six months and he's asked to report on what he's learned, doing, or interested in.  What sort of report do you expect?  I've seen that they look an awful (and usually they are awful) lot like the presentations he has consumed during his short tenure. 

Fast forward ten years.  Now this employee is a manager, hiring other young and energetic employees, and showing the example of what is typical.  The cycle repeats.

When you go to meetings, conferences, and classes, there is usually very little variance.  The slides all look the same.  The structure is the same.  The phrases are the same.  The jokes are even the same.  Because everyone is copying each other.  Which would be GREAT, if the people being copied were spectacular.  But it's a small sampling of truly wonderful speakers worth emulating.  And the reason is that it's a lot easier to be a bad speaker than a good one.  And those that do see good speakers figure that out pretty quickly, and fail to put in the time to mimic that which is great. 

And that's why you don't see many dogs walking other dogs.  Or dogs teaching kids how to behave.  Or kids teaching dogs how to fetch.

Or speakers who truly capture your heart, mind, and motivations.  But they are out there.  And you should work hard to figure out what they are doing and follow their lead.

"If you don't like it as an audience member, why would you do it as a presenter?"