If you are a lobbyist you need passion, perseverance, and grit.
These are key skills that you can pick up. You can learn them.
Steven Kotler’s course at MindValley, ‘The Habit of Ferocity’, is not a course explicitly designed for lobbyists, but it may as well have been.
Kotler goes through the skills you need, how to get there, and how to stay there.
I took advantage of lockdown and invested in the course. I’ve been a fan of his books and ideas, and this course is as close to face to face coaching I am going to have for some time.
What do you need
You need passion. If you are looking for an easy life, you better leave now. Done well, good lobbying and campaigning is hard work. You’ll need passion to work on the most challenging public policy and political problems and bring about change.
You’ll need perseverance. There are no quick fixes to bring about real public policy or political change. Getting a law tabled, adopted, and implemented on the ground (or at sea) takes about 10 years. Few people don’t have the stomach to grind it out. Most want quick corn syrup solutions to their challenges. It hardly ever works.
You’ll need grit. Canvassing at election time teaches you that you need to deliver leaflets and ask for votes in all weathers and at all hours. You’ll need to deal with the rejection. Voters will slam doors shut on you and swear at you. As a lobbyist, politicians and officials will put the phone down on and you’ll be laughed at. Every time you are knocked back, you’ll dust yourself off, and move on to the next action.
At the height of many campaigns, you can find yourself in the zone. You’ll find the days go by in the flash. You can get a sort of runner’s high. I’ve worked on campaigns and legislation that felt like several months passed by in days. At the end, when the law is passed, and victory secure, you can get ‘post-legislative depression’ (PLD).
Steven Kotler’s Recommendations
If you are serious about lobbying, you’ll need these skills. You can pick these skills up by working for the best in your field. It’s a long apprenticeship. It’s what I did. I worked for some great campaigners, political fixers, and officials who’d mastered the machinery of campaigning, lawmaking, and getting policies adopted and implemented.
You can take a shorter path and less than 10,000 hours.
If you are interested in the study of excellence you’ve read ‘Peak‘ by Anders Ericcson and Steven Kotler’s books.
The upside of COVID, is the commute to work is now a few steps up to the home office. This frees up time to learn something new.
I’ve enjoyed learning new skills. For the time being, on-line coaching and courses are a great way to go. Steven’s course is over 35 days and is chunked down into clear sections. It costs 340 EURO.
Steven Kotler shows you how you wake up and perform at your best even when you feel at your worst. And, unsurprisingly, the skills you need to succeed in lobbying and campaigning are the same as you need to succeed elsewhere.
If you want to be an excellent lobbyist or campaigner, or excellent at anything, it is not easy. If you have worked with anyone at the top of the field, you’ll realise the higher you go, the work becomes harder and harder. That is the price you need to pay for having the chance to perform meaningful work and bring about powerful change.
Most people won’t do this. People and organisations don’t like change. Most want stasis, stability, and no change. It is natural. Change involves pain. If you want to grow muscle, you need to rip your muscles so they can grow. There is pain and discomfort from this. The pain is not that much, but growing and changing is not easy.
There is a challenge if you want to do great work. We like to take the path of least resistance and short term solutions. If you want to bring about policy or political change this is self-sabotaging. If you choose the easy fixes, the road of least resistance, you are self-sabotaging your goals.
Key Lessons
There are many key lessons I could draw from the course, I’ll highlight 10.
- You use the same amount of energy to do something mediocre or amazing
You are going to use more or the less same amount of energy to do something amazing or do something ordinary. You’ll use the same amount of time and energy spending a day in internal calls and meetings as you’d use in face-to-face meetings persuading key decision-makers and influencers. It takes a similar amount of time preparing a minute of meeting as it does to prepare a powerful briefing note to advance your case.
2. Avoid Flight or Fight
If you are going to something you may as well do something amazing. You can go through the motions, do what’s been done before, do just enough to keep your hierarchy happy enough. Or you can take action to solve the problem, win the issue, and change the decision.
The reason most prefer the first option is that you face something challenging, your flight or fight instincts kick in. You can choose to fight, flee, or freeze. Most freeze in inertia. All those reactions block creativity.
Doing something that solves the problem or basically freezing in internal dialogue and self-talk takes the same amount of time. The first path solves the problem.
3. Don’t take the easy path
Our default habit is to take things easy. We choose not to speak to officials and politicians because we fear that they may not agree with us. We don’t like to deal with people who don’t agree with us. We prefer not to speak with them. We freeze them out. The hard point is that they, not you, make the decision.
Some react by being rude, offensive, and fighting back in unconstructive and unpersuasive ways. Many flee and hide away hoping the issue will just blow over. It hardly ever does. All these natural reactions are forces that constrict and restrict solutions.
Some prefer not to ask the get the answers to the hard questions that key decision-makers and influencers will raise. If you don’t find out the answers to those questions, you’ll be caught out at the very worst time.
4. Set high and hard goals.
You need to set high and hard goals. Just getting an amendment tabled is not enough. Getting a political ally to table an amendment may make you feel good. It’s a quick shot of some happiness. You need the amendment tabled and implemented in practice. Nothing else really matters.
5. Don’t get diverted
You need to avoid getting distracted. There is one thing that unites every high achiever I know – they avoid social media. The greatest curse for any campaign, legislative or political, is to get distracted and focus on the unimportant, at the expense of moving the high and hard goals. They are not easy. They are not meant to be. They are the ones that make a difference.
You need to set clear goals. And make sure everything you do works to delivering those clear goals.
6. Develop mastery
If you want to become good at what you do you need to develop mastery in your field. You’ll need to spend an hour a day, on your own time, to develop mastery. If you are practicing the art of lobbying as a well-meaning amateur, you’ll be caught out.
7. Grit
You’ll need grit. You are going to get knocked back, lose votes, and be let down by friends and allies. You need to dust yourself off and persevere. It is going to happen, so get used to it.
If you can’t deal with losing votes, you are in the wrong line of work.
8. Don’t burn yourself out
Don’t burn yourself out. Find ways to recharge your body and soul. Don’t resort to booze. Find a time in the day when you can think quietly. Your work is moving forward a few centimeters, day by day, week by week. You need perseverance and tenacity. Bringing about change takes time.
9. Close down the inner demons
Most lobbying campaigns fail not because the other side is better, or the is case weak, but because of your inner demons. They are the most destructive threat to winning. They are usually loudest just before the victory.
You need grit to control your inner dialogue. It seems that as a species we are doomed to highlight the negative at the expense of the positive. We highlight the negative 6 times more than the positive.
Too many highlight the negative element of a proposal or final law at the expense of the major wins they have secured. This is important because the chance that you’ll get everything you want from a proposal or the final text is nil. If you highlight what you did not get and ignore the many wins, you’ll downplay your achievements. You need to control your inner demons. Celebrate the victories and be grateful.
10. You can learn what you need to learn
Steven Kotller provides a pile of proven techniques to help any lobbyist. The solutions are doable. It will involve changing for the better. You’ll ditch thinking and actions that have let you down.
Try it, you have little to lose, and you are likely to win a lot more.