Coming home from my wife’s meetings today, I was thinking about opportunities I’d had to deploy the Four Interventions and grow in chutzpah.

It occurred to me that most of the time when I chanced on chutzpah opportunities (and most of them this week were in the Dare to Fawn department), a lot depended on the delivery.

Duh, I guess.  Probably obvious when you’re not in the midst of a situation.  In the midst of things, I see, if I’m lucky, an opportunity to manifest more chutzpah and then I have to do something then and there without having had any chance to think things over or rehearse alternatives, and, to be frank, I do lame stuff.

Lame fawning is painful to watch and painful to generate.  Maybe the most painful thing that happens is that I say things I don’t believe because I think they will impress the person I’m trying to fawn on.

Well, surprise, fawning that smacks of inauthenticity is just as painful to receive as it is to give.  People can’t always tell when someone is sincere, but most of us can tell really easily when someone is insincere.  It’s obvious.

So, looks like there’s some measure of preparation that has to take place here.  It’s like improvising music.  You practice common melodies and licks and chops, and then when you are solo-ing you pick from your library but remain spontaneous.

I need to build up a library of fawning.