You can do everything right and still not win them all.
I have spent the last few weeks writing about hard rooms. Inverted Is Perverted was about insubordination and what happens when the order of things gets flipped on its head. The one after it was about leading when somebody has decided to come at you. Both of those were essentially about endurance, about holding your position and your temper while the pressure is on, and I stand behind every word. What neither one said out loud is that enduring somebody was never supposed to mean converting them. You can do the work, keep your integrity, stay winsome the whole way through, and there will still be people you do not win. That is not a failure report. That is the job description.
Most audiences do not know that speakers get evaluated too. There is a stack of scored sheets that goes back to the client after every event with my name at the top of it, and I read them. The other thing people do not realize is that the platform is the best-lit seat in the house. From up there I can see all of you. I can see the person leaning in, the person who has checked their phone four times, and the person whose pen is moving in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with taking notes. Over the years I have looked out and watched somebody doodle their way through material I stayed up nights building. These days I move my eyes to someone who wants to be there, and I finish the session.
He told them before they left
In Matthew 10, Jesus sends out the Twelve, and the thing I cannot get over is where in the instructions this falls. Before they have gone anywhere. Before a single door has been knocked on or a single word preached. He tells them that if a house is worthy, their peace should rest on it, and if it is not worthy their peace should come back to them, and that if a town will not receive them or hear them, they are to leave that place and shake the dust off their feet on the way out. Rejection is not a footnote He adds later after the reports come in. He builds it into the commission itself, at the front, as standard operating procedure, because He already knows how this is going to go in some of those towns.
Two things stand out. The first is what He does not say. He does not say try harder, or stay and work on them, or go back through your material and figure out what you did wrong. He says leave, and keep moving, because there are other towns and they are waiting on you. The second is that business about your peace coming back to you. Your peace is yours. You offer it, genuinely and fully, and if it is not received, you pick it up and carry it out the door with you. You do not leave it lying on the doorstep of a house that did not want it, and most of us do, and then we arrive at the next town with nothing left to give.
If flawless winsomeness converted everyone, we would be reading very different Gospels. Jesus got run out of his own hometown by people who had watched Him grow up. The rich young ruler received a personal invitation from the Son of God and walked away from it grieving. Judas sat inside the inner circle for three years, close enough to share a meal, and still made the choice he made. Nobody in the history of the world has been more winsome, and He did not win them all either.
Charisma is not a force field
Everybody loved my father. Everybody loved my father. That is the truth about Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, and it is 99 and 44/100 percent true. When I came home seventeen years ago, I started going through his papers, and I am still finding things in them today. Among everything else was his audience feedback, and the vast majority of it consisted of letters from people whose lives had turned on an hour spent in a room with him. Real letters, the kind people sit down and write by hand because something got hold of them. And then, mixed right in there, the rare blast. Not gentle disagreement either. Some of it was not pretty.
Both piles were in the same box, in roughly the proportion they arrived in, and I think that box is the most useful thing he left me. Most of us only ever remember one of those two stacks, and it is never the thick one. If he had rated himself off the blasts he would have quit decades before he ever did, and every person he reached after that point would have gotten nothing. People who look like charisma is oozing out of them are dealing with the same negativity and the same stinkin thinkin as the rest of us, as Zig used to call it. They have simply stopped treating a minority report as a verdict.
What my father did wrong
A speaker wrote to me through our website a couple of days ago, seventeen years after my father died. He is well established now, but back then he was brand new in the business, and he had gone to hear my father speak. He wanted me to know what happened after that talk, because he had never forgotten it and he thought I should have it.
My father told him, unprompted, that partway through the speech he had said something that upset a woman sitting in the front row. He could see it land on her face. So he spent the entire back half of that talk working on her, aiming his material at her, trying to bring her back, and it did not work. She stayed exactly where she was. The young man in the audience had noticed absolutely none of it. He thought the presentation was tremendous. He walked out of that room having had a wonderful time, and the only reason he ever learned that anything had gone sideways is that my father volunteered it to him afterward.
Two things in that story matter. The first is that the room does not see what the speaker sees. While my father was privately losing a fight in the front row, an entire audience was fine. If you have ever read one cold comment on an evaluation and rewritten your whole assessment of yourself on the strength of it, understand that you are working from a view of the room that nobody else in the building shares. The second thing is that he told this on himself, to a kid who had nothing to offer him, who had not asked, and who had not even noticed. He gave away his own bad afternoon so a newcomer would not have to learn it the slow way.
Know which ones are your job
None of this is permission to go cold on a difficult person. Focusing on the people who are with you is not the same thing as avoiding a hard conversation.
So sort them. You are sitting in a board meeting and a member rolls their eyes at you. That costs you nothing. It is one person’s opinion arriving on their face; it does not change the meeting, and moving your attention past it is the entire skill. But you are leading a production meeting, and you can tell somebody is bristling for a fight, and that is a completely different animal. That one is live; it is happening in front of the team, and it does not stay put. It comes back next week, or it goes sideways into the group. You deal with that one. You just do not deal with it from the front of the room with an audience watching. You catch them afterward, one on one, where it belongs.
Know which ones are none of your business and which ones are your job, and stop spending the first category’s energy on the second. My father spent half a keynote on a woman whose reaction was never his to fix, and the cost of that was not paid by her. It was not paid by the room either, because nobody out there noticed a thing. He paid it himself, in attention and energy he never got back, on a fight that was not winnable and was not his.
What you still owe them
Not winning someone does not release you from anything real. You still owe that person fairness, honest feedback, a clean process, and their paycheck on time. You owe them the invitation, extended genuinely and more than once, because the leader’s job is to hold the door open. What you do not owe them is your peace, which is the instruction in Matthew. You also do not owe them the hours you keep pouring into the one holdout while the people who actually want to be led get whatever is left over at the end of the day. The weight of walking through the door was always theirs to carry. Ready, willing, and able is a description of the follower, not a project for the leader.
Some of them come back around, and when they do, it is worth everything. Some of them decided about you before you ever walked in the building, and no amount of charm or competence or late nights was ever going to touch that. Cleave or leave. Give grace or new place.
The last thing
What came out of that speech was not the woman in the front row, who does not appear anywhere in the story anymore and honestly never really did. It was a young man nobody was paying attention to, who got handed something true at the exact moment he needed it, carried it through an entire career, and then went looking for my father’s daughter so he could hand it back. The work outlasts the room it was done in by a very long way. So go find the people who are lit up and give them everything you have got. As for the rest, offer your peace, take it back with you when it is not wanted, shake the dust off your feet, and get on down the road to the next town.
As with all things in a tremendous life, the thing that was meant to work against us has a way of turning into the learning opportunity, and the blessing shows up in a disguise none of us would have picked out. My father walked off that platform having failed at the only thing he had spent the back half of that hour trying to do, and what he had actually accomplished was to hand a young stranger something that outlasted him by seventeen years. That is generally how the math works. You may not always be able to win some, but you will always be able to affect one.
