Maintaining Your Sanity
It’s easy to lose perspective when you’re a solo practitioner, especially if you’ve listened to some poor advice along the way. Here are some suggestions for gaining and preserving perspective, and not losing your mind.
• Don’t mindlessly send out mass emails. Scraping up every name in your address book to advise everyone on something that may be of zero relevance is not the way to win friends and influence people.
• Think about the people with whom you’re interacting and don’t assume they’re damaged or simply not as bright as you are. It’s silly and annoying when you try to teach how to handle floods to Noah or the vagaries of whale hunting to Ahab.
• When someone unsubscribes from your newsletters or mailings, don’t take it personally. The most immature reaction I’ve ever seen is the knee-jerk tendency to write back, offended, and promise to unsubscribe reciprocally in retaliation.
• There are a lot of good ways to do things. You do not have the only key to the secret safe with the only map.
• If you’re trying to sell to corporate buyers, you can fool around on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook all you like, so long as you remember that it’s recreation and not remotely connected to effective corporate marketing (referrals, commercial books, speaking, etc.). SEO stands for “seeking egos online.”
• There’s always an exception. They’re called exceptions because they are not the rule and, therefore, not likely to produce consistent results. We all know someone who claims they made a sale on an airplane. We know of millions who haven’t.
• If your feelings get hurt easily, and you take every piece of resistance and pushback as a personal attack, then you’re in the wrong business, and you should get a job as a helper in a dog daycare center. But only for very small dogs.
© Alan Weiss 2013
