They all stutter.
Stuttering is a speech disorder that affects about 1 percent of the population. Growing up, Dave
Walton was teased and ridiculed for stuttering. When he graduated from college, he applied for a
sales job, but was turned down. “The interviewer told him he would never make it in sales because
of his stutter,” his wife Mary says. When Dave decided to apply to law school, many of his friends
and family members raised their eyebrows, hoping he wouldn’t have to do any public speaking. In
law school, it seemed that their fears were prescient. Dave recalls that during his first mock court
argument, the judge started crying. “She felt bad for me.”
Most people see stuttering as a disability, and we marvel at people like Jack Welch and James
Earl Jones, whose confident demeanors typically bear little trace of their speech difficulties. But the
truth is far more interesting and complex. Many people who stutter end up becoming quite successful,
and it’s not always because they have conquered their stuttering. In the trade secrets trial, when Dave
stammered and tripped over a couple of arguments, something strange happened.
The jurors
liked
him.
At the end of the trial, several jurors approached him. “They told me that they really respected me
because they knew that I had a stutter,” Dave says. “They stressed that my stutter was minor but that
they noticed it and that they talked about it. The jurors said they admired my courage in being a trial
lawyer.”
Dave didn’t win the trial because of his stutter. But it may have created a stronger connection with
the jury, helping to tip the balance in his favor. When the jurors commended him, Dave was
“surprised and a little embarrassed . . . My first thought was, ‘I don’t remember stuttering that much.’
As the jurors walked away from me, I realized that I had something that was natural and genuine. It
was an epiphany—my stutter could be an advantage.”
In this chapter, I want to explore how Dave Walton’s experience reveals critical but
counterintuitive clues about influencing others—and how Dave exemplifies what givers do differently
when they seek influence. In
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