I’ll bet you still think Trump is “thin-skinned,” primarily because Clinton’s team has done a great job of branding him that way. The label sticks because Trump has a pattern of going on offense whenever he is attacked. But let me give you another framework to see this same set of facts. Specifically, I’m going to tell you how Master Persuaders convert embarrassment into energy. It’s a learned skill.
I often talk about the benefits I got from taking the Dale Carnegie course. One of the skills you learn in that class is how to convert your anxiousness about public speaking into excitement and positive energy. I personally observed the Dale Carnegie course turning a few dozen introverts into people who were enthusiastic about speaking in front of a crowd. It was astonishing.
Part of the Dale Carnegie process involved each student doing something embarrassing in front of the class just to get used to the feeling, and to know you could survive it. It is one of the best skills you can learn because our egos tend to hold us back. We fear embarrassment so we don’t risk it. That limits our potential.
Now think back to 2011, at the Correspondent’s Dinner, in which President Obama mocked Donald Trump in front of the world – while Trump sat in the audience, stone-faced. The popular reporting was that Trump was humiliated by the event. But Master Persuaders don’t process humiliation the same way as others. They convert it to energy, the same way Dale Carnegie students learn to convert anxiousness to excitement. It’s a learned skill. And it is literally the opposite of having a thin skin. It only looks the same because of confirmation bias.
How do I know Trump has mastered the skill of converting humiliation into energy? The signs are all there. For example…
Trump has entered one high-risk business after another, guaranteeing that he would experience a large number of setbacks, failures, and humiliations. People don’t run toward humiliation unless they know they can convert that negative energy to fuel. When you see someone succeed across multiple unrelated fields, that’s often a sign of a Master Persuader who feeds on both success and failure. You are watching Trump do exactly that, right in front of your eyes. He has converted every “gaffe” into news coverage. He eats bad news and converts it into fuel.
Many of you have watched me do the same thing. You’ve watched as I jumped fields from corporate America to cartooning. Then I became an author of business-related books. I opened two restaurants that didn’t work out. I tried lots of stuff that failed miserably. Now I’m talking about the presidential election. What do all of those things have in common?
I risked public humiliation in each case.
And in each case, lots of people told me “Keep your day job.” On a typical day, dozens of strangers insult my body, my personality, my brain, my integrity, and lots more. Like Trump, I consume it as fuel. And it is a learned skill.
You might have noticed that both Trump and I are quick to attack anyone who attacks us. Observers tell me I shouldn’t do that, because it makes me appear thin-skinned. Observers tell Trump the same thing. But observers are missing one important thing: We use the critics to refuel
If you were an alien from another planet, and you observed a lion killing a gazelle, you might think that lion was angry at its prey. You might think the lion was insulted that the gazelle was using its watering hole. What did the gazelle do to deserve that treatment? Is the lion being thin-skinned?
Trust me when I tell you that sometimes the lion is just eating.