A Psychiatrist Performed a Public Intervention on Me That Backfired

“Acting confident” doesn’t always work

True confidence is responsive rather than fixed

There can be tremendous value in “pretending” to be confident in a situation where you feel paralyzed or stuck and need to take some action. But there’s a fine line between using the “act confident” mantra to get moving, and on the other hand, using it to mask our fears and doubts — both with others and with ourselves.

Unfortunately, this is often displayed by people who feel fundamentally unprepared for a leadership position. And that’s usually because they don’t know that a true leader is the most responsive person in the room, not the most decisive or certain person in the room.

This was unfortunately the case with the psychiatrist I encountered and I’ll tell you his story in a minute.

How I almost got placed in a headlock

I’m a professional speaker who starts off dressed identically to the serving staff at an event and pretends to be a waiter.

Over the course of the meal I get more and more odd, eccentric and inept. Because the guests don’t yet know that I’m their future keynote speaker, they fall into whispered conversation regarding what to do about their terrible waiter.

This surprise improvisational theater sets the stage for my keynote where I talk about what we do when our agenda and expectations are not met in life and things don’t go as planned.

The range of responses I’ve seen from meeting guests is everything from pity to wanting to have me fired. But one of the most notable interactions I’ve ever had with a guest illustrates the limitations of “acting confident”.

I had been hired by an association in the Pacific Northwest to perform my routine for three hundred professionals in the field of mental health.

Psychiatrists.

By the end of the meal, most of the assembled guests had formed a clinical diagnosis for me as their troubled waiter. They weren’t saying it out loud, but you could practically see the professional report they were mentally preparing to explain my overfilling of water glasses, reaching over their food to clear silverware, and getting down on my hands and knees under the table to retrieve crumbs.

Toward the end of the meal I intentionally tripped over a stack of metal plate warmers, the covers that get used to keep meals warm in a banquet hall until they’re served.

I was making a production of getting myself off the ground and collecting the metal covers, making lots of racket as I scooped up the lids.

A confident intervention

One of the psychiatrists, who had been watching me carefully throughout the evening from a nearby table, leapt out of his seat, came to where I was sprawled on the floor, and picked me up. I noticed right away that he had a very tight grip on my arm.

He swung me around to face him and made very deliberate eye contact with me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

It was a moment frozen in time.

Everything had come to a complete halt in the ballroom, and the rest of the guests had gone silent while watching us.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” I responded quietly.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “That was a pretty bad fall. Maybe you should sit down for a minute.”

The words themselves seemed kind, courteous, and considerate, but the underlying manner made it clear that he was taking me on as a patient in need of authoritative care. His tone communicated his assessment that I was a couplet short of a sonnet. He had exactly the look of someone who was confused and rattled, but who had decided to “confidently” intervene.

This was somewhat alarming to me so I tried to counter the conclusions he was jumping to by looking at him with a very level expression, hoping that his professional discrimination would allow him to see how lucid I actually was.

I repeated, “Really, I’m okay.”

I thought he had understood until he said more forcefully, “Well, you may feel okay, but I think it might be a good idea if you and I went for a little walk.”

Fearing that I was about to be placed in a headlock, I dropped my character completely and decided to just tell him the truth without subtlety. I could sense that I had only a small window of opportunity left to convince this man of the reality of the situation. Hoping no one else in the room would hear as they looked on, I spoke to him in a sincere and straightforward way.

“I’m a performer,” I admitted. “I’ve been hired by your association management to do a comedy show. I’m about to go onstage and start a juggling routine.”

There was a long pause as my words hung between us.

I waited for this new information to sink. Surely, he would then release his tight grip on my arm.

Instead, he looked even more deeply into my eyes, further tightening his vice grip on my arm and said, “I understand. Come with me.”

Yikes.

Fortunately, the woman who had booked me through the association’s administrative department was realizing that something was up. She left her seat and approached us giggling, trying to suppress what would have been outright laughter.

She walked up to the doctor who she obviously knew, placed a hand on his shoulder and quietly said, “Frank, I hired this man. He’s our entertainer.”

I finally felt the doctor’s grip begin to release, like a blood pressure cuff that finally allows circulation to resume in one’s arm.

He lowered his hands to his side, but he seemed to be in a form of perceptual shock. He was looking at me with an expression that would have been appropriate to having been told that he had been adopted rather than the natural-born son of his parents. He could not reconcile the truth of the circumstance with his conviction that acting with confident authority was going to handle this situation.

He stared at his shoes for a few moments, turned away, and then walked out of the ballroom, not to return for the remainder of the event.

Confidence is humble

While “acting confident” we can sometimes try to force a premature resolution onto a situation that is unknown or uncertain. But if we don’t humble ourselves when we’re faced with a mystery, admit what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, and show that we’re willing to proceed on that basis, our “confidence” can backfire.

In this circumstance, I’d been hired by a group whose professional focus involves the defining of “normal” behavior. My would-be helper’s actions are quite standard for our culture. We confidently try to eliminate differences in others and bring them into line when they’re doing things their own way, as though something is wrong with them. It’s an unconscious superior stance that isn’t really based on confidence at all, but on the fear that if we don’t get things to go our way, or people to follow the norms, we’ll find ourselves lost and disoriented.

True confidence protects the playing field of possibilities. It’s inclusive of people, situations and perspectives that are usually dismissed. It opens up more possibilities than it closes.

Instead of acting confident we can act with curiosity.

Indeed, had the intervening psychiatrist asked me a few more questions and had he been willing to listen to the answers I was giving him, he would have been able to join in on the fun.