Writing

When A Client Says No — Should You Do An Exit Interview?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A friend of mine is a successful independent business owner with high-end corporate clients. After a few deals didn’t close — and she didn’t feel badly about the deals not going through — she wondered:

Should I follow up and ask them for feedback about why they went with another service?

Small business reality: you’re always interviewing.

When you’re a small business owner, a consultant, or a freelancer in the service business, you’re often interviewing new clients on the regular. Part of your marketing and sales allocation (whether it’s in time or dollars) is in networking, outreach, and meeting new faces to add to your business.

It can be a numbers game: you interview a certain number of people, and some percentage of them say yes, and others end up not working with you.

The question is: do you ask every single person for feedback every single time you interview a new client?

In my opinion, I think not.

You don’t need feedback from everyone.

When you seek out everyone’s opinion, you water down the quality of the feedback you get back. The average of everyone’s thoughts will trend towards normal, or mediocre. You want to stand out, to cultivate a body of work, to own your own grounding in who you are.

In writing practice, you don’t ask everyone and anyone to give you feedback. I don’t want someone who has no sense of grammar, style, or punctuation to give me final copy-edit feedback on my book. I’m looking for one or two of the best copyeditors. When I’m working through the idea stage, I want the right subset of people who are interested in similar ideas, with a relevant background, or part of the type of audience I’m looking to connect with.

In your business, you might start by asking everyone for feedback all of the time. Every new client is an opportunity to learn! Yay!

As you grow, however, you’ll learn a lot about what clients want and don’t want, and you can start to hone in on who you ask for feedback.

As your best clients for feedback.

And when you miss closing a deal and you feel really bummed because you think that was a great opportunity for leveling up your business game, ask them how you could do better.

Focus on the areas you want to grow, and the people you want to work with, and collect feedback from these specific people.

In-depth feedback from very specific people who are tailored to your idea or business is better than cursory notes from a wide range of not-so-interested people.

 

When working on your business, remember you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. If it’s not a good fit, and you know that they aren’t your right client, learn from it — by focusing on the types of clients you want to attract, and spending your time and energy on them.

What do you think?

Where do you look for feedback? When do you decide not to get feedback? How do you decide what feedback to listen to, and what to ignore? Have you ever had a time when someone gave you feedback and you decided to do something differently?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Why Saying “No” Is A Kindness

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I invited two dear friends to join a book club with me. I think their reactions were remarkable.

The first said, “No thanks,” directly.

“Business books are so oversaturated in my life right now. I’m only reading fiction,” he said. “I can’t read another business book right now.”

Done. Clear. Easy.

Being direct is a kindness.

The second hesitated on the phone and then said, “I can’t say yes right now, because I haven’t read a book straight through in a while, and I have a ton of traveling to do over the next month.”

I wasn’t sure if he wanted in or not. He wasn’t sure either. He clarified:

“When I say yes, I want to really mean it — I lock it in, like a commitment. So I don’t say yes unless I mean it. That’s why I’m hesitant to say yes, unless I know I’ll actually be there and be able to show up.”

So grateful.

This makes it easier for me, the book club organizer, not to wonder if a bunch of people signed up, but won’t actually participate. If they’ll flake. Whether or not I’ll be chasing people around or engaging in meaningful conversation around a book (which, clearly, is what the goal is).

Saying no — clearly, firmly, when you know you can’t make the commitment or the time — is a kindness.

Saying “yes” when you really mean no is a burden on other people’s energy, time, and space.

Say yes — when you mean it.

Say no when you don’t want to.

It is the kindest thing.

Should You Call A Pregnant Woman Fat?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I snorted when a book I was reading admonished against telling a pregnant woman she was “fat.” Yes, of course. That’s probably a bad call. Instead, however, it recommended that rather than the word “fat,” you kindly refer to the additional weight gain as “Maternal Storage Tissue.”

Because yes, that’s what every woman wants to hear.

“Damn, your maternal storage tissue is looking finnnneee.”

No thank you.

My body is getting bigger, and I think it’s beautiful.

Women gain 25 to 35 pounds (according to American standards, and for many woman, it can vary even more) for each pregnancy. The weight is divided up into different places: our blood volume nearly doubles, we carry more fluid (both inside our uterus as amniotic fluid as well as throughout our bodies), we create an entirely new organ from scratch (the placenta), and we build a human being (who weighs roughly 7-8 pounds, again with variation depending on your kid).

Also, our breasts swell up quite a bit – they can double in size in the first part of pregnancy, and then double again once you deliver your baby and if you begin breastfeeding. I keep buying new undergarments online because I keep outgrowing them! (One downside is that no, retargeted advertising, I do not need to see pictures of underwear all over the place while I’m working during the day.)

In addition to this fluid and human gain, we also gain fat storage deposits. Beautiful, gorgeous, lovely lady lumps.

I weigh myself each week (top of the morning, after my morning pee), to get a reading on how my body is changing from a mass standpoint. What surprises me, however, is how everything is shifting and changing beyond just my belly and boobs (my “front bumps,” as I like to joke).

I pulled on an old pair of jeans to see how they would fare if I left the top unbuttoned — there’s a fancy pregnancy trick where you can loop the top button together with a hairband or rubber band to make your pants fit longer) — but surprisingly, it wasn’t my belly that caused them to feel tight. I got them up about mid-thigh, and my jeans said NOPE, not going to happen.

Apparently my thighs are building out some maternal storage tissue and my tush is also starting to gain a bit of weight.

Here we go, mama.

Another area that surprises me is the bottom of my bra line — where the bottom of a sports bra hits, or where the bra clasps together. I thought that my rib cage would stay fairly consistent in size, even if my belly and breasts swelled outwards. Apparently, however, as a baby grows inside of you, your stomach gets pushed upwards and your rib cage can expand outwards to accommodate the extra space. Bras that have a single-fasten strap or a fixed elastic band no longer fit, because I’m bigger around… everywhere.

When I’ve watched friends go through pregnancies in the past, I watch them in the year before the birth and in the year after. Everyone seems to swell beautifully throughout the year, rising in size and shape, putting it on in different places, each body accommodating the changes in their own ways.

These teachers also show me the rhythm of the slow decrescendo post-birth; bodies taking three, six, nine months to gradually come back to a form of strength and shape that is similar, but not necessarily exactly the same, as before. The plump middle is a gorgeous time of ripening, exactly as it’s meant to be.

What I was surprised to discover, is that the maternal storage tissue is not just for the pregnancy: it is our way to provide food for the baby after it’s born.

It’s not just the pregnancy part of childbirth that needs you to add weight to your body. It’s the need to provide food and fuel for a rapidly growing human that causes our bodies to pack on pounds like we’re about to hibernate for a year. We are the primary food and fuel resource for a brand-new infant, and we need to be prepared accordingly.

Why is a baby born at nine months? By most accounts, humans are born “too early,” to survive outside of the womb. Conventional wisdom (and science) holds that if babies stuck around inside for longer, they would get too big, and we wouldn’t be able to get them out through the narrow hips and size of the birth canal.

Yet more recent scientific theories speculate that the 9-month gestation period for human babies is cut short at nine months not because of the size of the head and the brain, but because of the metabolic needs of the fetus and the mother.

This theory suggests that hip width might not be the limiting factor. We might be giving birth to babies at this early stage because if the fetus stayed in the mother any longer, the mother would no longer be able to provide food/energy at a fast enough rate. That is, the metabolic function of the mom’s body reaches a peak point where she can no longer digest and provide enough nutrients for both her body and the fetus.

(Anecdotally, I know that I am already constantly hungry, and eat all the time. I wake up and eat in the middle of the night, I eat constantly throughout the day, and I still feel a sense of hunger even when I would normally be very full.)

Beyond the anecdote, however, this made me realize that much of the job of the mom in the first 3 months of an infant’s life (and really, the first 6 to 9 months, or whenever they start eating solid foods on their own) is to provide an unlimited source of fuel and energy for their offspring.

Unlimited source of fuel for a baby that’s going to grow rapidly.

Hence the packing on of pounds earlier on in pregnancy, before the baby gets bigger.

Maternal storage tissue.

It all makes sense.

(I got your back, kid.)

Life is Change

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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One detail of pregnancy that’s eye-opening is how fast everything changes. Week over week, there are new developments, changes, symptoms, changes, and side-effects. A few weeks ago, the little guy could hear us for the first time. There were kicks. There still are kicks (and punches!). His neuro-motor functioning is changing. He’s growing so fast inside of me, and I’m growing so fast on the outside. The scale doesn’t lie: every week I’m a new number. And it’s real: holding plank pose in yoga is much more challenging with added pounds in the middle!

Change is necessary, change is constant, and change is scary. Change is much like love.

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As C.S. Lewis writes:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”  ― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

I find myself leaning on writing, reading, and hearing other people’s stories to understand everything that seems, at times, to be a whirlwind around me.

I take photographs to document change, to witness what’s going on inside of me. I asked Alex to take some photos of me (here at 24 weeks) as my body shifts shape and sizes, expanding to accommodate a new person joining out lives:

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And don’t let these photographs fool you too much — it’s easy to see a simple story in the image. It’s all of it: the highs, the lows, the confusion, the ambling, the laughter, the tears. I am grateful for people who share their stories with me about how hard it can be, how confusing, and how up-ending. There isn’t a perfect story that we’re searching for, a moment that captures effortless bliss. This is the journey, all of it. As Gilda Radner writes:

“Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” ― Gilda Radner

Every day is a new day.

Every day is different.

Little Online Moments

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

It was her first post on Medium.

She wrote about her beautiful son. And the hardest thing that she had been through — heart-wrenching. I read the first essay from her husband, bookmarked it, held her and her family in my hearts. I’ve never met her, but I cried for her family nonetheless.

A year went by, and she wrote again. She started her first Medium blog. I found it one day in my dive into the tags ‘parenting‘ and ‘pregnancy‘ that help organize the site and deliver essays for you to read. I clicked through. I noticed this was her first post on Medium. 11 recommends. 12, with mine. I rooted for her essay.

I followed her. I want to tell her how much I want to read more of her writing.

We had many friends in common. I did that thing that I don’t often do: I found her on Facebook and friended her. I felt a pull, a joy, a feeling —

I wanted to say hello in that strange internet way of no words. A click, a follow, a friend.

A few hours later,

She followed me back on Medium,

Accepted the friend on Facebook,

Recommended an essay of mine.

and I smiled, delighted. Hi there.

Across the continent, never meeting, both likely reading and pouring over internet pages in our own coffee-and-pajama world, we knew of each other. We both absorbed the other.

We spoke no words, we did nothing more than click a button to say hello to each other.

In a world of noisy likes and follows, a chatter of surplus click-bait information, sometimes a tiny nod in your direction is plenty to make you smile.

This has happened before. I have found new friends on the internet, people I’ve never met, people I have come to adore. We speak through shared essays, we write notes to each other, we join in the conversation on Facebook. I still have yet to speak or hug Christina Rasmussen in person, and I think of her dearly. (I can’t wait until we do.) I met Emma Sedlak through our shared love of teaching, reading, and writing — and she joined me as an assistant in teaching my Writer’s Workshop. We ended up chatting on the phone nearly every month, even as she went off to Australia and our phone calls became 6AM her time.

In the online world, we can find each other’s voices and dig in. Listen in. Reach out, write to each other, find new people that say yes to the world in the same way that we say yes.

There is a piece of the online world that accepts friendships in a new way. A digital moment, an internet glance.

And for my new friend, the new mama starting a writing journey, an aspiring writer:

I’m here, listening. I like your writing. Your voice is clear.

Thanks for showing up, mama. you’ve been through a lot. I appreciate you.

The Power of Silence: In Conversation, In Contemplation, In Being

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I sometimes think that when I get sick, it’s because I’ve forgotten to listen. I’ve forgotten to listen internally, to my body. I’ve let it get too noisy and not gotten still enough to hear what’s going on. After a cold sets in, I realize that the chatter in my brain has gotten to excessively noisy levels, and my “push” meter is much higher than my “pull back, rest up a bit,” meter. Inside of all of this is a desire for silence: to quiet the noisy chatter, to steady the mind, to harness the body, to pause and take stock of what’s happening.

Sleep is a period of silence for us each day. With friends, the beauty inside of a conversation is in the stillness of the pauses. Silence is a period of reflection and contemplation. It is a place for depth.

And so today, in the thickness of my morning slumber, I begged for silence, and stumbled across this beautiful poem by Gunilla Norris (found via the On Being column by Parker Palmer). As Palmer so eloquently captures, “I find it compelling because it names the importance of both personal and shared silence.” I agree.

Within each of us there is a silence
—a silence as vast as a universe.
We are afraid of it…and we long for it.

When we experience that silence, we remember
who we are: creatures of the stars, created
from the cooling of this planet, created
from dust and gas, created
from the elements, created
from time and space…created
from silence.

In our present culture,
silence is something like an endangered species…
an endangered fundamental.

The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.

Sharing silence is, in fact, a political act.
When we can stand aside from the usual and
perceive the fundamental, change begins to happen.
Our lives align with deeper values
and the lives of others are touched and influenced.

Silence brings us back to basics, to our senses,
to our selves. It locates us. Without that return
we can go so far away from our true natures
that we end up, quite literally, beside ourselves.

We live blindly and act thoughtlessly.
We endanger the delicate balance which sustains
our lives, our communities, and our planet.

Each of us can make a difference.
Politicians and visionaries will not return us
to the sacredness of life.

That will be done by ordinary men and women
who together or alone can say,
“Remember to breathe, remember to feel,
remember to care,
let us do this for our children and ourselves
and our children’s children.
Let us practice for life’s sake.”

I look to the space in between the words to define the words. I long for shared community gatherings that embrace not just conversation, but connection — and stillness — as modes of being. I cherish the lulls in between songs when sitting outside by a campfire in a circle as the night grows darker. I want to plan more periods of stillness and reflection amidst an organization’s crazy quest for more meetings. Silence gives us enough space to hear what’s actually happening, and act — not react — accordingly.

Beating Procrastination: 14 Days In, Missed My First Deadline

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I missed my deadline this morning — I usually like to have something scheduled to publish for 6 AM each day.

What I’ve been doing is writing during the day and scheduling the post for the following day so I don’t stress on any single day.

But, like promised, I missed a day. Caught a cold on Tuesday night and was in bed most of Wednesday, and today, Thursday… there’s no essay. Nothing pushed out at 6 AM. The only thing that happened this morning was a lot of sneezing and nose-blowing. 

It’s strange, I can feel the stereotypical methods of procrastination sinking in, even while sick. It’s like a sly troll, cuddling in bed with me, green slithery arms wrapping themselves up in my bed sheets. “You already missed your deadline, what does it matter now?” and “It’s 9 AM? You can wait until 10 or 11 AM. There’s no urgency anymore.”

“I mean, you already missed your deadline. Who’s waiting up on you?” 

Then, even more dangerous thoughts: “Well what would happen if you just missed a day? It’s not like it really matters to anyone if you keep up this schedule. You’re just doing this for yourself. It’s an arbitrary deadline.”

Yes, it’s an arbitrary deadline. Yes, it’s “just” a small goal I have for myself, to practice writing every day. And yes, it would be okay — the world would get on, I would get on — if I missed a day.

And if I were so sick I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think, I couldn’t do anything — sure, I could take a break.

But I just spent an hour scrolling on Facebook, another hour staring at a wall, and I answered a few work emails. Bed is doing me good, and I’m getting plenty of rest — but am I really “too sick” to write? 

Wait, would you look at that.

I just wrote something.

I Can’t Sit Still, But When I Write,—

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I can’t sit still, but when I write,

When I write,

I lose track of time, and space. The numbers on the clock rotate and I fall out of the month, outside of the place, out the person.

Sometimes I lose an entire day, lost in ten thousand words of a story, one word at a time, an idea so mundane, a sentence of an idea, a piece of a frame. I go through the computer screen like the back of the closet in the escape to Narnia, setting off into the world of my writing, into worlds and patterns and daydreams, teasing and tickling small thoughts to take shape and formation.

My mind moves at a different pace. Sometimes when I write, I get so lost, I forget who I am, or where I am, my leg, numbing itself to sleep, tingling me back to the present, nudging me that I’m here. I’m not really here. Sometimes when I write, I write myself into an hour of tears, of crying, crying over people who I’ve lost, people who I’ve forgotten, people who are unfairly treated.

I’ve written so many unfinished essays on racism, and cried over them all. They are broken thoughts, fragmented essays, stuttering starts of inadequate “I’m sorry’s,” and “why am I apologizing,” and “what the hell do I do?”. I’m so sorry. My friends. My community. We need to talk. We need so much more than talking

I’ve been trying to write about how friendships end, and how new friendships are formed, and why acquaintances aren’t enough, why we need people, why we need each other, what community builds, for us all. I’m trying to grasp, handle, tell what I’m feeling, share what I’m seeing, unpack the wires in my brain, I’ve been trying to articulate

I’m here,

writing.

Have A Point of View

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

In our fear of being wrong, or looking stupid, or losing out on opportunities — we waffle. We waver. We fail to make decisions.

We try to make decisions that leave all the options open. We’ll try it all, rather than pick a single dish. We’ll date as many people as possible, rather than cultivate deeper relationships. We’ll rack up followers and acquaintances and friends, rather than spend time with one person through the difficult and exciting times.

Action and decision-making requires having an opinion.

When you have an opinion, you say, “I believe THIS about the world,” and “I think that it works better when we do it like THIS.”

This requires you to take a stand, to think about the consequences of a decision, and make a choice even when all the information isn’t present.

Decision making isn’t easy to do, but waffling isn’t necessarily an easier answer. It may feel cozy for a while, until you realize that not making a decision costs you as well:

When you don’t make a decision to date one person, you date nobody.
When you don’t pick what food to eat, you end up without dinner.
When you try to give your customers everything you want, you fail to differentiate yourself as a business. 
When you don’t decide what to focus on, you’re 55 and still don’t know what to do with your life. 

Decision-making seems like it will hurt. But not making a decision doesn’t actually lessen the pain.

What’s your point of view? What do you think is important?

Record It While It’s Happening: Rachel Cusk on Emotions, Mamahood, and Becoming a Parent

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

Even though dragging myself out of bed and dealing with morning sickness does not make it fun to keep up with my writing habit, I also know that these feelings are fleeting. They won’t last forever, and I want to capture them while they’re here, so I can remember what it’s like.

I have no idea how many kids we’ll end up having. Alex and I have ideas for what we think we want, but then there’s what happens in reality. Knowing that the future is always uncertain makes me recognize that despite our best plans — there’s a possibility this may be the only time I’m ever pregnant. For whatever reason, I may only have this one time. I use this realization to remember to cherish right now, however many extra hormones it includes.

It seems like time is moving so slowly, like I’m muddling through a vague fog of fatigue and barfing, and yet everything is moving so quickly. I’ll be a hormonal messy pregnant mama-to-be for about four more months, and then… I’ll be a mama. And I will have crossed the threshold from independent lady to parent and the rest of my life will be different. Time moves forward.

As Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work, a documentation of the gravity of pregnancy and becoming a mother, these thoughts and feelings around pregnancy only last for a brief moment, and then they disappear.

“My desire to express myself on the subject of motherhood was from the beginning strong, [but]… a few months after the birth of my daughter Albertine, it vanished entirely,” she explained, and while she had the urge to write this book, she lost it after she gave birth for the first time. And so, “I wrote this book during the pregnancy and early months of my second daughter, Jessye, before it could get away again.”

She writes in a manner I find refreshing and real. I tend to prefer books that are honest about depression, loneliness, philosophy, and struggle — a book that says pregnancy and motherhood are miracles and the best thing on the planet would be chucked out the window as fast as I could waddle over to the window to throw it.

In her cataloging of the process, she talks about the dark side of pregnancy and how having children affects your identity, your ability to work, and your relationships with people around you. As a novelist, she confesses that this type of open disclosure is often too much for her: “I have merely written down what I thought of the experience of having a child in a way that I hope other people can identify with. As a novelist, I admit that I find this candid type of writing slightly alarming.”

The book is not a tribute to the glory days of motherhood, but a frank assessment of what might be to come.

“I am certain my own reaction, three years ago, to the book I have now written would have been to wonder why the author had bothered to have children in the first place if she thought it was so awful,” she confides, and I find myself feeling a wash of relief to hear that someone else has catalogued and documented the array of complexity around how it feels to enter into parenthood.

For parenting and motherhood is not always easy. And the burden is largely on women, despite how much our society is changing, we will still hold the biological accountability for bearing and bringing to life new human beings.

“Women must and do live with the prospect of childbirth: some dread it, some long for it, and some manage it so successfully as to give other people the impression that they never even think about it. My own strategy was to deny it, and so I arrived at the fact of motherhood shocked and unprepared, ignorant of what the consequences of this arrival would be, and with the unfounded but distinct impression that my journey there had been at once so random and so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all.”

Across the experience, as my life shifts, I am reminded from Cusk to write, write, write.

Don’t stop writing. Document what I’m feeling and thinking, and explore inside of the feelings that shift and grow across my time becoming a parent. Watch as this landscape of emotions shifts and moves month over month, minute over minute. Capture the range of expressions and they come and go. Explore what it means to be this person, in this moment, right now.

To write about what is happening is to validate your own thoughts and emotions. I attempt not to layer judgment on top of it all, but rather, to examine what arises. What fears do I have about what’s to come? What societal rules and norms do I feel guilty about breaking? What decisions am I making and how are we embracing (and deciding) who we want to become next? What is it like to be this person, in this time, in this body, right now?