Latest / Dits & Dahs / phoning it in to visualize success
Transcript
- Sue: Of all the objects in our lives that we use every day, the one that is most central to my business is the telephone I run. hasn't really changed much in how I work as a music publisher, for example. My point is here we are in an age where you can send somebody a text and a chat and an email communication, you can go through somebody's website. And in the end, most of us, and I do clarify that I'm sixty-four years old, so I have a generational view about the telephone, you recognize that when you connect another human voice to another, it's a very powerful connection. I talk about in other blog posts about the unique quality that recorded live performances have and that you can sense the energy of that moment over and over again. It's seemingly preserved in this media. It's that same energy that which I'm speaking today about. Having a phone conversation, just like a face-to-face conversation. And we know that when you have a phone conversation, you don't have the visual cues and any smells or anything that might influence directly that conversation, but you're building trust, you're building value by giving of yourself and reaping what you get from the other person on the conversation. And it fills in a void in that business relationship that once you do it once, you might not need to do it on a regular basis thereafter, but it gives you that foundation upon which your future business agreements are based. And I talk about it because it's important. And it's important enough that you can tell now with AI being what it is that it's easy enough to replicate what might be a real human connected to a voice on a phone conversation that you can be duped, can't you? And so ironically to me, the one thing that I feel is the validation point, the human voice, the response, the energy that I feel can be replicated to be fake. And that my point of validation being the phone call or an in-person meeting might not be. So how do I know? The value of understanding that if you're spending your work time or the time that you could bill a client, for example, on that phone call, you attach a financial value to it. And then all of a sudden you're you're keeping book on it. How long will it be before I recoup the expense of spiving that time on a phone call into the business that we're agreeing to do together? How long am I gonna wait for that money to come back into my account when at a time I don't have that money to spare? But yet I need to have that business connection. And we make these value disaggements based on our intuition. We make them based on our discernment. We make them based on our trust in ourselves. What I take from the phone call in particular this morning with a potential client is that over the course of two hours, I'm also having to assure that client that they're worth signing an agreement. I'm not trying to oversell myself, but what I d recognize is that I've been in the business over thirty years, which I think next year's my fortieth year, depending on when I consider my start in the business. I f my first three years working was at a band instrument company managing the shoot music department, so I was a vendor confirmation with a siren. I wasn't a publisher. So my point here is that Along the way you accumulate experiences which help nuance the deal or the conversation that you're having in the current day. And I don't y you all know that have listened to my blog post that a reason why I do this is to listen to my own voice. So I don't blather out about myself, but it happened that this morning's conversation with a c potential client hit upon some resonances of my career, 'cause I'm sure as you do as I do. You have a web browser open. If you're talking to somebody, you're gonna Google the name. If you're lucky, you're gonna find that that person has their own website and you're gonna silently be perusing the contents of that website to get a picture of who it is that you're is on the other end of the phone call, and now you can start to ask some very relevant questions. So now the phone call is much more about just reading another person's energy at the other end. It's all about the fact that you can now access information quickly to transform that phone call into something even more meaningful. For the sake that you've got two experiences being shared, under the subtext of just reading without speaking. And so it happens that in my case, in the course of the two hours that I was on the phone with this potential client, we covered a lot of territory because my experience in the music business is not unique, but it does cover some areas all in one person that not all musicians attain. It's not better then. It's just, you know, I had to feed myself and did a variety of jobs end to end to make that happen. I had an epiphany during this phone call that I was that person that I would call at the beginning of my career. I might have had a reason to ask them a research question, for example. And they were sight unseen to me, anybody that I should be paying attention to, but as soon as I asked them a question, I knew whether or not person was worth continuing the conversation. Did they have the information that I needed? Was it given to me quickly? Was there hesitancy, realizing that perhaps with the information that I've accumulated over my years, that the person to whom I was speaking to, the would-be client, considered me to be one of those wonderful happenstance experiences of, ⁓ my God, I didn't know there was more to know. Not because of their arrogance, just because the world, the universe is such a vast place that You don't know the questions that you should be asking until you meet somebody that's already answered those questions and then that opens your mind for inspiration creatively to ask the questions that are going to be relevant to you. But that you're having to process it very quickly because this isn't something you plan to do. You didn't expect to be on the receiving end of information. You expected to convey information, and now all of a sudden you find yourself in a place of, ⁓ there's more here than what originally met the eye. And it's being given freely, not out of you must have this information. No, you're getting this information as an equal exchange of fairness, of being open and authentic. And then I further recognize that during the reflection of myself throughout this phone call, of just how open and balanced and free an exchange of information that I am. And that's simply because at the time when I started my career, people weren't forthcoming. And there's also a little bit of shade that gets thrown to new employees in a situation of learning the ropes of how things go. And of course there's the ever present group of colleagues that may not be able to adequately express how the job is to get done. And so you're even amongst people that you respect and value, you're still figuring it out on your own. Confirmation with a siren. And to have confidence that you may feel as though you're blazing a trail, but nonetheless you're figuring it out in a way that works best for the company. So as I'm speaking to this potential client, I'm recognizing that they're gain gaining insight about the business through my filter of my experience and receiving it as valuable. My experience is it the same as everybody else's? No. It's just a opportunity for people to recognize that you have to visualize your success. Whatever form it takes and how you get there is going to be unique to you. And that you're gonna have many times when all of a sudden you're chatting with somebody for a completely different reason that has now changed a trajectory of how your life is going to go simply for the fact that they touched you. They might have opened up and freely shared information that is valuable to you but that you didn't originally seek, and that you know receiving this information as it was given to you was done so without ego, done so without any braggadocio. And if you're in an industry that requires people to use discretion, sharing information freely may seem out of the norm. But that in the context, sometimes, while everybody should be held to a standard of discretion, sometimes letting loose on that a bit allows the potential for more good things to come in, because you're not putting up that invisible barrier. You're subconsciously lowering the barriers, but yet still feeling protected because, you know, things that shouldn't be shared openly, you just keep them close to your vest. I can't help these days because of the time that I've spent on my career to reflect on these conversations with some sort of historical legacy. And I'm not saying it self importantly, I'm saying it in the fashion that we still live in a world, thankfully. Where the sharing of information human to human is essential to our feeling of self-confidence and trusting in ourselves. Everybody needs to feel validated. Because none of it's exclusive information. Everybody can do what they wish with it. But if you can't visualize your success based on the information that you've been received, then what you take away from that is that you have yet to learn how to ask great questions. And that's because you haven't raised your awareness to a level. that allows you to take all that subtext of information that's not spoken energetically. And evaluate it for the best decision that you need to make for yourself. Because no matter how unique our work is, we still have a framework of a tradition of business that gives us this insight. Because although we do business as we normally do and have done for hundreds of years in the music business, publishers and their composers, we now have different tools. Thank you for listening. I appreciate your time. Just know that the moral of today's little mundane rant, if there is one, is to have enough self-love within you to see success. Success, visualize it. Learn to ask great questions and you will receive your success.