Quiet by Susan Cain Page B

year. Now he seems to be trying, with all the force of his mighty personality, to impart his salesman’s touch. He wants us not only to feel great but to radiate waves of energy, not just to be liked, but to be
well
liked; he wants us to know how to sell ourselves. I’ve already been advised by the Anthony Robbins Companies, via a personalized forty-five-page report generated by an online personality test that I took in preparation for this weekend, that “Susan” should work on her tendency to tell, not sell, her ideas. (The report was written in the third person, as if it was to be reviewed by some imaginary manager evaluating my people skills.)
    The audience divides into pairs again, enthusiastically introducing themselves and pumping their partners’ hands. When we’re finished, the questions repeat.
    â€œDid that feel better, yes or no?”
    â€œYES!”
    â€œDid you use your body differently, yes or no?”
    â€œYES!”
    â€œDid you use more muscles in your face, yes or no?”
    â€œYES!”
    â€œDid you move straight toward them, yes or no?”
    â€œYES!”
    This exercise seems designed to show how our physiological state influences our behavior and emotions, but it also suggests that salesmanship governs even the most neutral interactions. It implies that every encounter is a high-stakes game in which we win or lose the other person’s favor. It urges us to meet social fear in as extroverted a manner as possible. We must be vibrant and confident, we must not seem hesitant, we must smile so that our interlocutors will smile upon us. Taking these steps will make us feel good—and the better we feel, the better we can sell ourselves.
    Tony seems the perfect person to demonstrate such skills. He strikes me as having a “hyperthymic” temperament—a kind of extroversion-on-steroids characterized, in the words of one psychiatrist, by “exuberant, upbeat, overenergetic, and overconfident lifelong traits” that have been recognized as an asset in business, especially sales. People with these traits often make wonderful company, as Tony does onstage.
    But what if you admire the hyperthymic among us, but also like your calm and thoughtful self? What if you love knowledge for its own sake, not necessarily as a blueprint to action? What if you wish there were more, not fewer, reflective types in the world?
    Tony seems to have anticipated such questions. “But I’m not an extrovert, you say!” he told us at the start of the seminar. “So? You don’t have to be an extrovert to feel alive!”
    True enough. But it seems, according to Tony, that you’d better act like one if you don’t want to flub the sales call and watch your family die like pigs in hell.

    The evening culminates with the Firewalk, one of the flagship moments of the UPW seminar, in which we’re challenged to walk across a ten-foot bed of coals without burning our feet. Many people attend UPW because they’ve heard about the Firewalk and want to try it themselves. The idea is to propel yourself into such a fearless state of mind that you can withstand even 1,200-degree heat.
    Leading up to that moment, we spend hours practicing Tony’s techniques—exercises, dance moves, visualizations. I notice that people in the audience are starting to mimic Tony’s every movement and facial expression, including his signature gesture of pumping his arm as if he were pitching a baseball. The evening crescendoes until finally, just before midnight, we march to the parking lot in a torchlit procession, nearly four thousand strong, chanting YES! YES! YES! to the thump of a tribal beat. This seems to electrify my fellow UPWers, but to me this drum-accompanied chant—YES! Ba-da-da-da, YES! Dum-dum-dum-DUM, YES! Ba-da-da
-da
—sounds like the sort of thing a Roman general would stage to announce his arrival in the city he’s about to sack.