Don't Worry, Be Grumpy

A Boardroom Bully

Jane, a friend in Sydney, had started her own small business. A big company in the UK became interested in her products and entered negotiations toward a lucrative deal. Soon she received an email requesting her to come to London as soon as possible to sign the contract. This would be the big break for her business that she had dreamed of.

Jane had a cute little baby called Erica. Even though it was hard to leave her very young daughter for a few days, the deal was too important for her family’s future to let slip.

Jane booked the first available flight to London and, when she arrived, had only enough time to check in to her hotel, shower, and get changed before getting a taxi to the company’s head office. When she walked into the boardroom, the other directors were waiting but not the CEO.

“You have wasted your time,” one of the directors told Jane. “You may as well take the next plane back to Australia. Our CEO is in a filthy mood. No way is he going to approve your contract. Go home!”

Jane was not going to give in that easily, especially having traveled halfway around the world for this meeting. “If it is all the same to you,” Jane said defiantly, “I will wait to see the CEO myself.” Then Jane sat quietly on a chair in the corner of the boardroom.

Jane was a meditator. Her preferred method was meditation on loving-kindness. She was joyfully generating the emotion of compassion to all beings when the CEO burst into the room.

“Who the hell is that?!” screamed the CEO on seeing Jane sitting so still with her eyes closed. “What does she think she’s doing in my boardroom?!”

Meditation makes you so calm that even exploding CEOs do not rattle you. Jane calmly stood up, walked toward the volcanic alpha male with neither fear nor arrogance, and told him, “You have such beautiful blue eyes, just like my baby Erica back in Sydney.”

Jane told me that those words just came out of her mouth by themselves, with no prior thought at all. The effect was stunning. The CEO did not know what to make of this. His brain had blown a fuse. He stood there for over a minute drowning in complete confusion. The intense expression of anger melted in front of Jane’s eyes, and the CEO finally said, smiling, “Really?”

Jane’s contract was signed within the next five minutes, and the shell-shocked CEO left the room. Jane then went to leave the boardroom to take a well-earned sleep after such a long journey, but the other directors surrounded her.

“How on earth did you do that? We’ve never seen anything like that before. Before we let you go back to the hotel, you have to teach us what you did!”