At the same moment that Jackson Hill set his phone down, Gillian Waters was knocking on the door of a little two-story house on a street downtown the locals called the Row.
The homes-turned-offices on the Row housed art studios, independent recording studios, small publishing houses, even a pottery studio. Down the block there was some sort of vegetarian café and juice bar. Not exactly a neighborhood where Gillian would have expected to find a “high-level executive coach.”
On a wild goose chase, Jill? she thought. Or are you the goose?
Oh, well. Bo wouldn’t be back from her father’s until late tomorrow. There were only so many weight-machine reps you could do in a day. Might as well go chase a goose.
The door swung open at her knock. “Gillian Waters! Come in, kid—great to see you!”
The Coach stood a head shorter than Gillian, built like a fireplug. Close-cropped white hair, short-sleeve shirt, well-worn khakis, tennis shoes. His nose had the look of one that had been broken and reset more than once. More than twice.
“Come in!” he repeated as he wheeled around and started walking away.
She took a step in, closed the door, then had to half run to keep up. She was still confused by that greeting—like he’d just reconnected with a long-lost friend.
“Have we met?” she said to his retreating form.
“Of course,” he said over his shoulder. “Just now.” He abruptly stopped, turned, and faced her. “Wait. You are Gillian Waters, right?”
She nodded.
“Okay, then. I’m George. The Coach.” He reached out, enveloped her right hand in his, and gave it one solid shake. “Good to meet you!”
He turned back and took off again. She followed him through what looked like an entirely normal (if tiny) residential living room and into what would probably have been called a den, now refitted as a cozy office.
George—the Coach—slipped behind his desk, a huge mahogany-and-leather battleship of a thing that took up half the room, and gestured toward a comfy-looking mahogany-and-leather armchair. As she took her seat, she looked around the room.
The wall was peppered with photos, all different sizes and at different heights, giving the impression that a madman had burst in with an oversize machine gun loaded with framed pictures and randomly sprayed the place. Some were of various sports greats (Gillian didn’t follow sports as much as Bo did, but even she recognized some of these faces) and business icons (these she knew well, and they impressed her greatly), every one of them posing along with a beaming Coach. There were a few shots she recognized with some of the city’s biggest philanthropists. These impressed her most of all.
“Welcome to the dugout,” said the Coach.
Several small shelves built into the wall sported trophies, one of which consisted of a gleaming pair of boxing gloves clasped together. Were they gold-plated?
The Coach noticed the direction of her gaze. “I started out as a fighter, and a pretty good one. Though,” here he pointed to his own nose, “not always good enough. As you noticed from my busted schnozz.”
Gillian blushed. Had she been that obvious?
“Those were my hard-driving days,” he continued. “Raised a lot of hell, won a lot of rounds. Went pro for a while, too. Eventually got civilized, ended up working as a high school coach. Boxing, wrestling, football, baseball, soccer, you name it. But you didn’t come for my résumé. You said you wanted to talk about the Winning Strategy. Good. Did you say you were a journalist? No, wait—” he continued before she could reply. “No, you’re in business. An executive at . . . that big pet place? Smith and Banks.”
“Yes,” said Gillian. “I’m a buyer there.”
“And, don’t tell me: you want to buy something, and you’ve hit a snag?”
He sure didn’t waste any time getting down to it, did he. She liked that. “That about sums it up, yes.”
“Okay, then.” He settled back in his chair, so she did likewise—and immediately thought, Wow. That was one seriously comfortable chair!
“I know, right?” he said. “Orthopedic. Or something. Amazing, right? Had it made special. I want my visitors to feel well taken care of.” He took a gold-plated pen from its holder and began fiddling with it, as if to keep up with his thoughts. Gillian couldn’t help noticing his hands. They looked like a pair of catcher’s mitts.
“That’s just shorthand, you know. Winning Strategy. The full term is, The Winning Strategy for Getting Your Life on Track.”
“No offense,” said Gillian, “but I don’t really need a strategy for putting my life on track. I just need to get this contract I’m trying to land. That will put my life on track.”
He smiled and nodded. “I see. Okay.” He glanced at the watch on his wrist. “I have to be somewhere in about ten minutes. That gives us five. So, let me sketch out the big picture, then you can see if you want to know more. Good?”
Gillian tilted her head in a slight nod. “Sure.”
“Right. So, the strategy boils down to two words. Positive. Persuasion.”
Gillian blinked. Aha. So I’ve found the goose, she thought. At least he wasn’t an ax murderer. “Okayyy . . . ,” she began.
“Just how is positive persuasion a winning strategy?” he asked. “Good question. In sports, winning is about competition, right? In business, winning is about collaboration.”
Gillian was not so sure that was true, but she held her tongue.
“So, then,” he continued, “what’s the key to effective collaboration?”
That one was easy. “Compromise,” she said.
He smiled and nodded again. “Smart kid.” Shook his head. “Not so sure about that one, though. Here’s what I learned in school: compromise comes from a Latin word meaning ‘Everybody ends up with something someone else thought would be a good idea, and nobody ends up with what they really wanted.’”
Okay, that definitely did not sound right. “Which school was that?” The words escaped her lips before she’d thought about it, and she hoped they didn’t come off sounding too rude.
He leaned forward and intoned, “The University of Obdurate Adversities.” He noted her puzzled look with satisfaction and nodded. “Ha. Aka, School of Hard Knocks. There’s no such Latin word, of course, I made that up. But it’s pretty much the truth.”
Gillian laughed despite herself. She had to admit, it was a pretty good definition. When she and Bo’s father split up, the lawyers had talked on and on about the need to “come to a reasonable compromise”—and the Coach’s definition did in fact accurately describe what they both ended up with.
“So, persuasion,” she said. “How so?”
“Persuasion,” he said, “is the substance of collaboration.
“You take two people, any number, really, but for now we’ll just say two, who are not entirely in the same place. Okay? So, for them to come together, at least one is going to have to do some persuading to get the other side to shift their position. At least one, and probably both, if you want to know the truth.”
“Forgive me,” said Gillian, “but how is that different from outright manipulation?”
He pointed at her with his pen and nodded. “That’s an excellent point. How, indeed. They’re cousins, in a way. Only they’re opposite cousins. Similar on the surface, opposite at their core. Manipulation is about getting someone to do what you want them to. For your reasons. Persuasion is getting someone to do what they want to do, for their reasons.
“Take coaching. I meet for twelve weeks with a team of fourteen-year-old boys on the baseball field. Most of what I do, frankly, is persuasion. These kids want to play ball. They want to play a good game, a great game. They want to improve, to excel, to become their best selves. Right? They want all that. But it doesn’t happen, not unless I’m there. Why not? Because there’s a lot of stuff that gets in the way.
“Most of coaching is just removing the stuff that gets in the way, and reminding them of what they wanted to do in the first place.”
Gillian thought about her work with Katie. Was that what Katie did? Just remove stuff in the way—like her excuses?
“Excuses, for example,” said the Coach. (Scary, how the guy could read your mind.) “Lack of esteem. Bad habits. Less-than-ideal health. Good old-fashioned laziness. Distractions. Temper. Worrying. All that stuff gets in the way.” He shrugged. “I take it out. Coaching. Persuasion.
“Now if I were trying to get these kids to become child soldiers, take up weapons, and go wipe out the city, I think we’d probably agree that that would qualify as manipulation. But that’s not what they signed up for. I help them to do what they signed up for.
“A manipulator can have employees, but never a team. Customers, but seldom loyal or long-lasting ones. Friends and family, but rarely relationships that are genuinely happy and fulfilling, because those who manipulate are, whether by nature or simply by habit, guarded, suspicious, filled with resentment, and how can you be happy when that’s your constant state?”
Wow, thought Gillian. Did he just describe Craig to a T, or what?
“Persuaders and manipulators are both skillful at reading other people, and they both use that skill to influence others. The difference is, manipulators seek to influence for their own gain only, while a positive persuader uses it to the other person’s gain, too, and not just their own.”
“How do you know the difference?”
He nodded. “Right. So, there’s something a manipulator will do that a positive persuader will never do. A manipulator will play on your negative emotions in order to elicit your compliance. If you don’t play ball, they’ll try to make you feel silly, or foolish, or guilty, naïve, selfish, or whatever other negative emotion will work in the situation. They’ll push whatever buttons they can find that will make you squirm and want to cry uncle.”
Gillian cringed inwardly. Push whatever buttons they can find to make you cry uncle. She hadn’t felt great about making Jackson Hill wait an extra eleven minutes for their meeting. And then, using that “Mr. Hall” ploy to keep him on the defensive? That felt downright creepy—but she’d needed to make the meeting work, right?
Maybe it wasn’t only Craig whom the Coach was describing.
The Coach spoke this next so softly that it almost felt as if he were just thinking the words to her.
“This is not necessarily malicious,” he said. “People often do this with the best of intentions. Trying to get you to do something they genuinely think you ought to do—that you’ll appreciate doing. That will benefit you. They’re just resorting to manipulation because they don’t know any other way.”
Gillian was looking down at her hands. “But it works,” she said quietly.
“Yes?” he said. “Yes. Sometimes. In the moment. Even for a time. But not in the long run. Never in the long run.
“Manipulation might sometimes win the game, but it never wins the game.”
She looked up, directly into his unblinking eyes. “I’m sorry, but I have absolutely no idea what that means.”
Although she felt that she did know, too, in a way she most definitely could not have explained.
The Coach looked at her for a moment, then reached out one of his baseball-mitt hands and placed it palm down on the desk between them. The gesture oddly moved her, though she did not know why. It was a gesture that seemed to say, Here, I’m meeting you halfway; I’m willing to offer my help, but only if you want it. And I am safe.
Definitely not an ax murderer, Gillian thought.
The Coach glanced again at his watch and stood up. “Gotta go.” He looked at her. “So?”
Then you can see if you want to know more, he’d said. Time for her answer.
She nodded, uncertainly. “I have to admit, you’ve got my curiosity going. But, executive coaching . . .”
He held both hands up, palms facing her in a Hold it right there gesture. “Not actual coaching. For now, just a quick map of the territory. First thing Monday?”
Gillian’s heart sank as reality seeped back in with the word Monday. “I’m—I’m sorry, I have such a totally full day, I don’t see—”
“What if you swing by early, on your way to work. Eight, maybe? We’ll meet at the juice bar down the block. Last building on the Row.”
Gillian shrugged. “Sure, I mean, I guess . . .” There was no way she could afford to be late for work Monday, but how could she refuse his generous offer?
“You won’t be late,” said the Coach. “Five minutes. Five minutes and a delicious glass of fresh-squeezed juice. Best deal ever. You’re buying, I’m talking.”
She laughed. “You’re very persuasive, George.” What she was thinking was, Five minutes? What can we possibly accomplish in five minutes?
He smiled. “I can count everything I know about winning in business on the fingers of one hand. And yes, I can share that with you in five minutes.” He held up his right index finger. “Or at least a finger’s worth.”
Scary, she thought, how the guy really could read your mind.
“The thing is,” added the Coach, “once you learn about the Winning Strategy, you won’t be able to unlearn it. And it’ll change how you think. Do you want that?”
“Of course,” replied Gillian, though as she thanked him and exited the little building, she wondered: Did she?