The first time I went to Disney World, I was skeptical before I got through the gate.
We had spent more money on that trip than I was comfortable spending. I was doing the math in my head as we walked in. Trying to decide if it was going to be worth it.
Within five minutes, a young woman dressed as a princess walked up to my family, knelt down in front of my seven-year-old daughter, took her hand, and said: “I’m so glad you came to visit us today.”
My daughter beamed.
I stopped thinking about the cost of the trip.
Two weeks later I was meeting with a client who had interned at Disney as a college student. I told him about the princess moment. He laughed out loud.
It was planned, he said. They watch the parking lot. They identify the skeptical parents. Then they dispatch a princess to give the family a moment that changes the mood before it has a chance to settle.
Scripted. Deliberate. Deployed from a parking lot observation post.
I had felt something genuine in that moment. The mechanism behind it didn’t change what actually happened. My daughter’s joy was real. My relief was real. The script created the conditions for a real feeling to emerge.
That distinction matters.
A script is not a substitute for feeling. It is preparation for a moment you cannot fully predict. The feeling belongs to the people in the room. The preparation belongs to the person who is there to help them.
When Jess died, I sat in the meeting where we planned her funeral. It was led by a funeral home owner who had once been a client of mine. Years earlier I had helped him develop a set of tools for exactly this kind of meeting. Not a sequence to follow. A collection of options, each built for a different kind of moment, designed to cover the range of things that room can become.
At a certain point, he asked everyone to describe Jess in one word.
Someone said fearless.
I recognized the move the instant it was made. I knew why he reached for it at that moment.
It still worked on me.
Not because I didn’t know it was prepared. Because it was the right thing, offered at the right moment, by someone who had spent years learning the difference.
The princess in the parking lot didn’t feel less real because it was planned. The one-word question didn’t feel less true because I had helped write it. What made both of them work was not spontaneity.
It was preparation meeting a moment.
That is what preparation is for.
Not to manufacture a feeling. Not to move people through a checklist. But to make sure that when the right moment arrives, someone in the room has something ready for it.
More soon,
John