The Hour Before

The hour before is where most of it is decided, and almost nobody spends it well.

He fills it with preparation. He decides what he will say and in what order. He anticipates several versions of what I might say and prepares an appropriate response to each. If he is a particular kind of man he will have written something down, or at least composed it carefully enough that it may as well be written. By the time he actually arrives he is not bringing himself. He is bringing a document, and he will spend the whole time trying to deliver it while I keep asking about things that are not on it.

I understand why. The hour before is uncomfortable, and preparation is a way of doing something with discomfort rather than sitting in it. It converts an anxious wait into a task, and men are generally far more at ease with a task. The trouble is that the discomfort was the useful part, and he has spent an hour successfully avoiding the only thing that would have helped.

What I want from that hour is almost nothing. I want him to arrive without a plan. Not empty, not blank, simply unrehearsed, so that what he says is produced in the moment by the actual situation rather than retrieved from a document written by a slightly more anxious version of him sixty minutes ago. The rehearsed man is always answering a question I did not ask, and there is a particular flatness to it that I can identify immediately and that he never realises is audible.

There is also the matter of what the rehearsal does to him. An hour spent constructing the right approach is an hour spent confirming that there is a right approach, that he could get this wrong, that his standing depends on execution. He arrives having thoroughly persuaded himself of a set of stakes that do not exist, and then behaves accordingly, and the behaviour is the only thing that could actually have created a problem.

The men who do this well tend to do something almost embarrassingly simple with the hour. They put it down. They do something else entirely, something with their hands or their attention, and they let the appointment sit in the background without being handled. And they arrive slightly unfinished, which is exactly right, because the unfinished part is where I can do something.

I have noticed that this is one of the hardest things to persuade a man to stop doing, harder than most of the things he thinks of as his difficult edges. He will surrender a great deal before he will surrender his preparation, because the preparation is the last piece of control in the arrangement and he knows it. Handing it over is not a small thing and I do not pretend otherwise.

But he should notice what he is actually protecting. He is protecting the version of the evening he already imagined, against the possibility of one he did not. That is not caution. That is a refusal to be surprised, delivered by a man who came here specifically to be taken somewhere he could not have arranged for himself.

Come with nothing prepared. It will be worse for an instant and better for everything after it.