How to Teach a Pig to Sing

My father is a boisterous southern gentleman filled with funny truisms about the harsh realities life.  One of his favorites has always been “You can’t teach a pig to sing…you’ll only frustrate yourself and the pig.”   By this he means, of course, that you will never be able to communicate with certain types of people, no matter how hard you try.  They just won’t get it.   

Well, I’m here to tell you something.  Dad was wrong.   I’ve spent my entire life trying figuring out how to teach pigs to sing, and I’m getting pretty good at it now.  In fact I’ve now even written a systematic pig-teaching manual (”Igniting Inspiration: A Persuasion Manual For Visionaries”).   I can now tell you with absolute authority and conviction: Pigs love to sing–it is their very nature.

So would you like to know the big pig-teaching secret?  Here goes:

To teach a pig to sing, you must first learn to appreciate their current squeals and oinks.  In other words, you must realize that your pig is already singing, and you must be willing to join in the music, dancing barefoot amid all the slop and grime… then, once your pig is having a really good time, they’ll gladly let you lead the dance.  And they’ll probably even let you give them voice lessons.  

Have I lost you yet?  Ok then. Let me bring it back to the realm of homo sapiens again, lest you get sidetracked pondering a toe-squishing vision of  a passionate tango twist in pig excrement.

Here’s the moral of the story: Everyone can be communicated with, if you are willing to do the hard work of first understanding their perspective, and surrendering your judgements of them.  It’s called compassion, and it works wonders. The human spirit resides equally in all of us, and forever jumps at the opportunity to overcome the physical and cultural boundaries that keep it enslaved. Compassion destroys old boundaries and opens up new possibilites.  It is at the heart of all transformational leadership and communication.

And it is here that the border between art and commerce gets fuzzy.  It is here that the pragmatic world of interest rates and dental plans become perfumed with a sense of meaning beyond the ordinary. Great communication is like music–it calls for the listener to dispense with nattering criticism and absolutistic dogmas and simply dance.   It’s very simple, actually.  It’s a matter of  being present.

Would you like a good example?  Logon to to this website (www.thekingcenter.com)

In my opinion, the real challenge isn’t getting pigs to sing…it’s getting them to remember the tune later, when they’re hungry, and the farmer hasn’t cleaned their pen.