FORTHCOMING
The Rainmaker’s Laboratory
AMY LEAVITT
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Rainmaker’s Laboratory is a singular work drawn from five decades of experience in corporate boardrooms and conference rooms, theater rehearsal rooms and classrooms. It is unusual in that it does not offer expert advice and is not structured as a narrative. Instead, it digs into the intimacy and theatricality of little scenes of daily commerce. It digs into how we feel when we sell ourselves and our work, and how we labor to meet the next creative moment with ethics and imagination. It bridges poetry and money, corporation and conscience, doubt and action. The Rainmaker’s Laboratory brings Shakespeare, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Winnicott, Lispector, Thelonious Monk, Iain McGilchrist and others into conversation with the blues, beauty, failure, ambivalence, tricksters, language usage, and the gift economy, among other realms. It is composed of questions, anecdotes, fragments, transcripts, poems, analogies, exclamations, interruptions, examples, memories, aphorisms, introspective revelations, and snatches of songs.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
EXTRACTS
The Rainmaker's Laboratory is where I learn to manufacture, in sustainable quantities, the word yes.
Birth of The Rainmaker's Laboratory
Fear is tangible, like a block of wood, and I am a woodcarver.
Fear Étude
I can sell when I feel afraid, but not when I feel ambivalent, which is why ambivalence matters.
Ambivalence Étude
I believe, as the saints say, that it is not that one must know someone to love them, but that one must love them to know them — that truth flows from love.
Truth Étude
Meetings make cowards of us all.
Alchemical Meetings
An objection is a revelation. We reveal ourselves when we speak. What we object to is who we are.
Objections
To say that beauty moves us is to say that it initiates changes in behavior — we are moved to move differently through the world.
Beauty Étude
I have my own quiet, runic way of selling. I don't function dictatorially. I try to provoke the client to find the answer I want him to find. He's got to make it his own.
The Expert Trap Étude
When we sell, we violate Kant's injunction that we should never treat a living being as a means rather than an end. When we sell, the best we can do is both.
Dual Quest
Voices atrophy from lack of use. Salespeople seldom develop cobwebs on their voices; we use them as a cook uses her pepper mill.
Conversations Étude
My role is not to tell someone what to do, but to make them conscious of what they are doing.
Web of Coherence Étude
My colleagues and I share our sales scripts as if they were bootlegged recordings of our favorite musician.
Competition and Cooperation Étude
Numbers aren't substitutes for arguments.
Numbers Étude
I am too shy to market, but not too proud to beg.
Personal Introductions Étude
As visual information begins as reflected light, so words in conversation are refracted by voice.
Using Language Étude
Festina lente — hasten slowly: This is the tempo of my sales.
Rhythm Étude
Why wouldn't you use poetic language in service of a sale? It is designed to awaken ears, hint at something that matters, tap into deep human rhythms.
Poetic Voice Étude
To hedge is to gauge, to reckon. Its sound is hmm…
Risk and Leverage Étude
For Winnicott, the psyche is not inside us but between us. There is no Other. We are inextricable; there is only Relationship.
Relationship Étude
To fail differently is to make new mistakes. In truth, it is not easy to make new mistakes — we are so comfortable with our old friends. Try it: Make a new mistake!
Failure Étude
ABOUT AMY LEAVITT
Amy Leavitt has five decades of experience in private practice and in coaching colleagues for Fortune 250 Companies. She has co-created a virtual university and been admitted to two national Halls of Fame. She has served on corporate boards for thirty years, delivered multiple keynotes, and was named one of the ‘top ten’ financial advisors in the US, considered “an icon to her peers… a legend.”
Alongside the second half of her sales career, Amy took up the study of voice, teaching the craftwork that underpins a finely tuned instrument capable of conveying the intricacies of inner life. Her 2019 article published in Voice and Speech Review is the journal’s second most viewed article of all time. She has found that her work with the human voice places her in the same laboratory of puzzlement, conducting the same experiments, as her writing and rainmaking work — affirming Oliver and Young’s words: ‘Tain’t
What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).
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