Reflection and Perspective

The holidays are always a terrific time for me to stop (or at least try to), reflect on what has happened and what might be coming.  I am not one for New Year’s Resolutions and love Howard Givner’s thoughts on why he does not make them.  They just seem, well, too resolute for me.  I would rather give myself the freedom to be dead wrong.

The insights I glean when I am away are almost always cliché’s but resonate nonetheless.  Some of my favorites: If you never fail, you will never know that you can get back up.  If you see the world only through your eyes, you might as well be color blind.  Your best is relative to circumstance.  The best imitation is just that.  If it is not fun, why do it? And, flying high is great, but you have to land the plane.

Failing does not mean watching your business go under, it means not recognizing what you bring to the party to make the failure a reality.  If you do not embrace your role, you might never understand that you, not your business, has fallen down.  It will make it that much harder to get back up.  Oh, the economy.  On the flip side, financial success is no measure of success, especially if won on the backs of others.  Strange as it may sound when there is financial success, it is actually the other side of the refusing to recognize your part in a failure.  Make no doubt, you will fail (we all do) and will have an equally hard time getting back up.  Having all the money in the world does not mean you are not bankrupt.

Similarly, if you spend all your time trying to craft your image, to make sure people see you (or your creative business) as you would want them to as opposed to how you (and it) actually are, you are missing the beauty and value of your own reality.  Let people see you as you are and celebrate it everywhere.  You might have started as a duck, but now that you have morphed into a goose quit trying to swim in the duck pond.  Not only are there a lot of ducks in that pond, they are probably better at being a duck than you are.  Even if you were once a duck.

You never have to apologize for joy.  And doubly so for creative businesses since the whole point of their very existence is to create joy.  You need to make a profit, yes, but never at the expense of joy.  Better to get a day job first.

So, to land the plane, a client of mine lost a potential project because when a prospect asked about how she worked, she got flustered, gave a price and then got push back from the prospect (you are too expensive).  She happens to be one of the very best in her industry, so much so that she teaches the subject at a major university.  A few minutes later the prospect mentioned how much they were spending on an element of the project and my client got angry.  If you are spending this much on the element, how can you balk at my fee?  The element was clearly important to the prospect and my client could have run with it to show her expertise.  It could have been a terrific place to show how much she heard them and why she was worth what and how she charged.  She said that it sounded like a lot for the element.

My client is a goose.  The prospect was comparing her to ducks.  She could have said, no no I am a goose and you want a goose.  Let me show you.  Instead, she said I am better than all the other ducks.

She did not get the job.