Shortly after starting my own firm fifteen years ago and desperate for work, I followed an old client to his new firm.  He took me down the hall to the department that could hire me and introduced me to its head, a man named Joe, said a few kind words about me and left.  At the end of our meeting, Joe asked for a proposal, which I had delivered by courier within twenty-four hours.

And then, everything went dead.  He neither acknowledged getting my proposal, nor returned my calls.  I tried a number of standard techniques, like leaving a message that I was going to be in his area and would like to stop by.  No response. 

I knew in my heart that there was no life in this opportunity.  Joe had asked for the proposal as a courtesy to the man who had introduced us, but had no intention of hiring me.  He didn’t like having me imposed on him from above.  I would never hear from him again.  And it made me feel ashamed, like a beggar asking for dimes.

I needed the work so badly, I was prepared to go back to my former client, if need be.  I knew that was likely to terminate any chance I had, so I made one final attempt to get to Joe, calling his secretary to get advice.  “Joe is in the hospital,” she informed me, saying with a chilling finality that he was unlikely to be back.  It was cancer. 

And that’s when I got it.  I wasn’t about me.  I had been a self-absorbed fool.  I wasn’t that important.   Joe, poor man, had much more important things to think about than me and my proposal—and so did everyone else!  For the most part, we all have but walk-on roles in the movies of other people’s lives.
The secretary referred me to someone else and I got the assignment.

It’s not about me.  This lesson freed me from a minor paranoia that, I know, many people have, believing that they and their calls are an annoyance.  They stop calling, and so give up.  This lesson has freed me to call, write and visit prospective clients with fiendish tenacity.  Without that lesson, I doubt I could have succeeded, as I have.  Thank you, Joe.

Whenever we see ourselves as the cause of a prospective client’s lack of response, it is worth reviewing the evidence.  There are thousands of reasons why someone may fail to reply to our calls and emails.  When one thinks about it, to attribute a lack of response to bad feelings about us in the absence of any supporting evidence is likely to be a mistake. 

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