The Sophists

Alas, you can’t be prepared for everything. A few years ago, a succession of both major and minor traumas hit me. Double bereavement. Serious health scares involving people close to me. A change in direction at The School of Life, which meant I could no longer work there. I had no contract with a newspaper, nor anybody else giving me regular work.

Each one of these might have been manageable on its own, but together they hurt me. And for reasons I didn’t understand, they brought back memories of difficult times from long ago.

[ This is an extract from my 2021 book. I’ll refer to it in a forthcoming blog post. ]

I became depressed.

But I didn’t tell anybody. And as my confidence declined, I got less work, causing me to worry about money, which in turn affected my work.

Someone asked me to give a talk to his business network in Oxford. I agreed, partly because he was a friend, but also because even the small fee he offered was better than nothing.

At his request, I wrote something to drum up interest and sent it off. Then I heard nothing, but that was quite normal – everyone is busy.

As the date of my talk approached, I chased up to see if there was more I could do. No reply.

But I booked a train ticket, and let him know I was looking forward to it. Still I heard nothing. Two days beforehand, I got a message saying that only one person had booked, and the talk was cancelled. I have no idea how much activity went into promoting it. But I was left with the lingering, nagging feeling that people stayed away because it was me.

Again, I didn’t say this to anyone. Probably a big mistake.

As Brené Brown had already told me, shame thrives on secrecy – and could probably have been dispelled quickly if I had told someone.

Determined that what had (not) happened in Oxford should never (not) happen again, I looked online for help – clearly, I had to up my game – and soon fell prey to the modern counterparts of the Sophists, those Greeks who taught rhetoric to anyone who could afford their fees.

Being desperate, I was a perfect target for the self-styled “gurus of online marketing”. I started watching the free videos in which they explained some of their techniques. The first video always contained surprising ideas and tantalising promises, making it very easy to watch the second. In the second video, they provided still more entertainment and real, useful, practical tips, with the promise of even more wonderful things in the third video – and a cautionary aside to the effect that nothing I had learned so far would work properly unless I kept watching all the way to the end. So I watched the third video, and at the end of that my new virtual friend and mentor made me an offer: if I paid a certain amount – much less than the normal price, he assured me, and it was always a he – I could become a true master, and move my business onto a sound financial foundation.

The first few times, of course, I didn’t pay. Instead, I abandoned that particular guru and started looking for a new one, who might let slip the Big Secret. Each one was able to reveal the tremendous effect of their guidance on clients who had become very rich and successful after following their advice. And they were delightfully open about how the techniques they were using on me – such as withholding key bits of information till the end and only sharing it with paying customers – would in turn help me to do that to my own customers, causing me too to become very rich and successful.

Suddenly, I was paying hundreds of pounds online to someone I’d never heard of a day earlier. Later, seeking more and more of this wisdom, I would pay thousands of pounds. And the fact that I had paid so much, so quickly, was wonderful: this man could help me get money out of my own clients because – behold! – he had got money out of me. He knew what he was talking about. I was myself living proof. Sure, his manner was a bit full-on, a bit hard-sell, but I put that down to him being American. That’s probably normal, where he’s from. And perhaps it should be normal where I’m from. It’s probably where I’ve been going wrong. I should be more full-on and hard-sell myself. But how?

I had so much to learn.

As I tried to put the gurus’ lessons into practice, I abandoned my instincts, my ideas, my way of expressing myself, in an effort to be somebody else – somebody better. I didn’t do anything absolutely demonic, but it wasn’t right. One day, I sent an email to a group of people and one of them sent a gentle reply asking if I had really meant to send it to her.

Another day, responding to something else, another woman asked if I was feeling OK.