A recurring thing that I've been thinking about this week, both with my coaching clients and also with this war going on here in Israel, is the idea of control over a situation and a feeling of safety in that control. One of the things that I most deal with and see with the executives that I coach, and this includes leaders of legitimately a billion dollar hedge funds, is that they need to have every single scenario planned out and prepared for before they even begin to feel comfortable in a situation.
It's especially ironic when we talk about people who deal with markets because markets are inherently chaotic and uncontrollable. And when you talk to them about this, they understand that in the context of markets, and they understand that they are constantly iterating and that actually any idea of control is illusory. And in fact, when you think you have control and you think you know something, that it actually leads to far worse performance because you're not able to be nimble and curious. But then when you talk to them about the places where they feel like they need control, so in their private lives or in meetings or presentations, they don't make that connection that actually having control leads to far worse outcomes. Or the illusion of control leads to far worse outcomes.
One of the worst things that you can do when you're giving a presentation or public speaking is come in with a set script and read that script, come hell or high water. The real secret to great public speaking is connecting with the audience, is reacting to them, is tailoring your message, which you can prepare, but tailoring your message and your delivery to the people who are in front of you. And one of the worst things you can do is come in and just sort of deliver the speech that you are going to deliver without any connection to the people that are in the room. And again, that comes from the ability to be nimble or to relinquish a certain amount of control because you'll never know what you're going to need to do until you get into the situation itself.
And so a far more robust solution and one that I try to work on with my clients is having the ability to trust in yourself, having the confidence to trust in yourself and know that you'll be able to respond to a dynamic situation.
So instead of understanding that you have control and you've prepared, the preparation is in the atomic skills that you need to respond in any given moment. One of the analogies that I give is that any language is made out of actually a small amount of atomic rules. You have 26 letters in the alphabet, for example, a finite amount of rules for a grammar. And then what we do is we take these small atomic bits and we create an enormous amount of words, an infinite amount of sentences.
So in this renewed model, control is not about knowing and preparing for every outcome. It's about understanding that the ability to respond to any situation lies within you. It's about trusting in your competence as opposed to trusting in your preplanned response. And in fact, actually having a preplanned response that you have to execute indicates a lack of trust in yourself and a lack of confidence in your ability to execute. Whereas when you sort of say to yourself, "look, I can handle anything that comes my way because I have the requisite skills and I trust myself," that actually produces robust control as opposed to fragile control.