photo credit: RodneyRamsey

This weekend I learned something very important about myself. Although I’m a tough broad, when I get discouraged, I back away from things that I can’t figure out. No doubt my friends and family could already tell you that, but I FINALLY got it this weekend. It came in the form of working on “the business.”

Having officially launched our blog, Ellie and I now have to find ways to get lots more people to come read it. Because the internet is world wide – as in World Wide Web (www) – there is the potential to reach out to people throughout the English speaking world. Every time someone searches they get page after page of stuff, so the challenge is figuring out how to help people find us more easily. We’re still learning about how to reach the people who will care about what we have to say.

This is a very old marketing problem, probably as old as the first farmer trying to find someone to barter his vegetables with for a little fish. The key is that the people who would like BouncebackCafe.com are out there SOMEWHERE, but the question is WHERE???

Before the WWW and “don’t call” lists, telemarketing, catalogs and what we call junk mail – ads, postcards, letters – were a large part of any consumer based marketing strategy. The bigger guys would advertise on radio and the REALLY BIG guys were on TV. The problem was that although, for a local business, these were the only game in town, none of those forms of marketing were terribly efficient. Measuring effectiveness was very difficult. Based on what could be measured, a good return was 1-3%.

So Ellie and I have been learning as we go. We’ve been learning from the “experts.” In particular, I’d been making my way through a PDF from a man who has been doing this for a long time – relatively speaking. His advice seems sound, but I’ve been struggling with how to implement it. I’d spent some time last week working on it and had walked away because I couldn’t figure out how to apply it in our situation. On Sunday, I was considering what I should do and I realized that I had real resistance to going back to the PDF. Once I realized that, I knew I’d been here before – and chosen to avoid working through the process that comes with applying something new to a different environment. AHA! And I say again, AHA!!! THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Ok, now don’t be giving me a whole bunch of credit for figuring this out. It’s taken me a whole lot of years for this blinding glimpse of the obvious to get through to me. I’ve probably peeked at this problem lots of times over the last few years, but never really saw it. Who knows how many times I almost saw it? Probably only God and my guardian angel – and they aren’t telling. (Can you tell I was raised Catholic?)

This flash of insight presents me with two challenges. First, there is the still looming challenge of how to get past the little difficulty of not knowing how to apply expert advice in our situation. Second, there is the very real temptation to beat oneself up for not having realized this before.

Let’s address the second problem, first. I can try to tell myself that it really doesn’t matter. I know now. Just move forward. Maybe that works for you, not for me. I think I must be a little like Bubbles, the Boxer in our Dog Park pack, who likes to take one of the tug toys and shake it around so violently that she literally is beating herself around the head and shoulders.

Sometimes, I’m like that. I take an idea that I missed and I have a “pity party.” (How could I have missed it? How dumb am I? Etc. – you get the idea.) There’s probably some validity in the idea of grieving the lost opportunities in the past. We don’t want to dwell on it very long, but IF we try to ignore negative emotions, those emotions G R O W! We need to take some time to feel bad about the loss, then move on. One great idea I got from Zig Ziglar was to say “Yeah, I feel crummy right now, but at 2:00 I’ll be great!” By feeding your unconscious the idea that it’s OK to be a little yucky now but you’ll be better later, you’re telling it to move along and get to the better place on time — BOUNCE BACK!

For me, the still looming challenge of getting past this difficulty is actually easier. If what I’m doing isn’t working, I’ll just have to try something else. In this case, the problem I was having was I couldn’t find what I thought I needed based on the expert’s advice. It may not exist. So now I need to brainstorm ideas and try them out. The encouraging part that I keep telling everyone around me is – if other people can figure this out, so can I. I’m of at least average intelligence. This isn’t rocket science. Intelligent persistence is key.

I hope I haven’t shocked you with this tale of the blinding glimpse of the obvious. I think we all have these blind spots that when we become aware of them, we smack our foreheads and say, “OF COURSE, how could I have missed it?” The real key is to gradually, over time, eliminate our blind spots and get smarter and smarter. Your forehead will thank you.

Are you smarter today? Have you had any blinding glimpses of the obvious? What were they?