The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 45 Degrees
Years ago, when I was just getting started as a copywriter, I managed to make a $9,000 blunder with a client.
There was, shall we say, a miscommunication… and I ended up taking a project in a different direction than the client wanted.
I didn’t know at the time that “reading a client’s mind” was something you had to do. I didn’t ask enough questions about the right things to truly understand what was going on inside my client’s head.
I can still remember how hot my body got when I found out I had screwed up. The bottom drops out of your stomach, you start to shake a little bit, and you get really hot for some reason.
In that moment, I reacted. I picked-up the phone and called the client right away. It felt like my life was going to end.
I reacted many, many times after that. All of this activity built my “need to please muscle” up until it was just about the largest muscle in my body.
It was a sad, sad state of affairs.
And then, one day, I picked up a book by Michael Brown called, “The Presence Process.”
Talk about serendipity–the book actually fell off the shelf onto my wife’s head.
Easy book to read, difficult book to live. But it helped me along a journey that continues even now.
The book talks about the difference between reacting and responding.
Reacting is weak. Responding is strong.
Reacting makes you a puppet, pulled along by a life that is out of your control.
Responding makes you powerful. A conscious action taker where a life “out of your control” is not a problem.
During the early years of my business, I reacted. The fuel powering those reactions was my need to please others.
When I felt like something was wrong, my need to please kicked in. I did something to try to fix it and take that feeling away. That only fed the muscle more.
The way you starve that muscle is to stop feeding it completely. You make a conscious choice to stop reacting and to start responding.
The longer you do that, the smaller your “need to please” muscle gets. After a while, it doesn’t even register on your radar.
And that’s when you can get about the business you are here to do.