The Things That Never Got Said

I remember the first time someone sneered at my poetry.
A financial planner… sneered.

You see, I decided, for 12 months to write most of my blogs in poetic form.

I’d been inspired by experiences on a Writer’s Retreat in Tuscany… where I felt like my soul was on fire as I wrote.

Applying that to the world of business leadership was hard, mentally taxing work.

And I loved it.
I mean, who doesn’t want to feel on fire on a Monday morning?

I loved it…
until that financial adviser let me know what he thought of my efforts.

“A Load of Tosh!” he called it.
“Please Unsubscribe Me!” he demanded.

And it hurt.

It hurt… then.
But not anymore.

Because I now see how often unusual ideas are sneered at…
long before we’ve discovered whether they just might be extraordinarily good.

We humans don’t like to see… to hear… to consider or to be asked to do things that aren’t, well…
Normal.

You know… “Serious”
Properly, sort of… “Professional”.
How Business is Supposed to Look.

Which begs this question…

How many wondrous things have never been born…
because somebody (perhaps me) sneered too early?

I remember the first time I started using cashflow forecasting software for my business owner clients.

February 1991.

Admittedly it was clunky.
Long tables printed out; needing a little translation.
The pretty graphs came later.

A high-profile Adviser at the time told me…
“Best to improve your sales skills, David.
That stuff you’re printing out will make your clients’ eyes cross trying to read it!”

Somewhere, closer to you than is comfortable, someone is wondering whether to open their mouth.

And, perhaps without realising it…
you are part of their decision.

That someone is scared.

Scared that the idea bouncing around their head will be dismissed.
Because it feels too strange… too risky… too unlike the way things have always been done here.

They’re thinking that wearing a red nose into a client meeting on Red Nose Day might be a really good thing to do.

“We keep telling ourselves we’re human-centred… but everything about our communication says ‘Financial Institution’.”

Then they look at you…
wondering if you’ll sneer.