I recorded a podcast with a colleague, at her invitation.
No rules were laid out. No advance advisory, no agenda on either part, and at the end of the recording, I thought it came out pretty well. It will be posted on her blog in a few weeks, she advised.
And then the waiting. No word.
I messaged her on LinkedIn a couple of times, inquiring politely, so I could pump it ahead, upon publication, and after too. Good for her and for me too, right?, since her connections and mine would be notified to watch or listen in.
A month after my second request, I ratcheted up the language of the third message,
“{Name}, 3rd query.”
Short messages usually work best when it’s nonconfrontational, but direct. After all, who likes to be asked a third time for something?
Then a reply (and I am paraphrasing):
I listened to our discussion and can’t release it because the episode ended up being mostly you promoting what you do but we didn’t get far enough into giving tips to our listeners. I think the time creeped up on both of us and that is my fault as the host.
Yes I was a bit stunned at first read, then I recalled that after the recording session we agreed to go deeper in another sitting. Perhaps she forgot she offered that. And it should have been clear about 5 minutes into the interview that I was indeed self-promoting and no more than she did but could be addressed by carefully asking the next question, clueing me into a shift in focus. But she didn’t.
And thank you for owning the issue ex post facto. But might you have offered to re-record with me? I wonder.
Time to pull out that often-used emotional intelligence card and play it on the card table of business life.
I started reflecting on all the podcasts I have been invited to, among the many only 2 others were host-related issues that led me as interviewee to be less-than-myself. I pulled on my “big boy interviewee pants” and ably filled the seat for those 2 hosts.
Then I started thinking of podcast interviews I had aced over the years and how they really resonated for the host and for me as the guest, and no one ever declined to publish one of my interviews for my being too “promotional.”
If I am asked to, and I do not promote myself, who will?
Hiccups, when they come unexpectedly, have to be relieved quickly, as I have learned in my 25 years as a solopreneur:
- A proposal that went swimmingly until the signer sunk it just before the signature date for no logical reason,
- Getting stood up for appointments, yes the ones I accepted at the other persons’ initial requests, email- and/or Calendly-confirmed (silence, ghosting, no email),
- An electrifying presentation pre-empted midstream by a building fire alarm,
- A tough phone call punctuated by barking dogs in the background that totally threw both our concentration off,
- An email misinterpreted for wrong intonation,
- An important zoom call that died midstream when the cable connection went out,
- And the most upsetting of all, getting rear-ended as my car signaled to pull into the company’s parking lot, seeing my car towed away nearly totaled, and in the period when I had no wheels, pulled myself together enough to lead the training session, to the amazement of the sponsor.
Annoying at different levels, all of them, lessons to be learned in retrospect, but why eat myself up for something I cannot control? Why get my blood pressure up when my contribution is not fully appreciated?
You may not always like the way I express my passion for what I do, you may not think it is a salient as I feel it is for your personal branding, you may not want or need a taste of my special sauce, you may not think I am always relatable to your audience.
I am what I am, to quote the La Cage aux Folles song (different context),
“Though it’s sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter
Face life with a little guts and lots of glitter.”
That’s OK. I am not taking this podcast rejection personally. I moved on many times before and in this instance, once again.
But I do reflect, no matter who drops the ball, how I can continue to learn and adapt from it.
Do you?
What lessons from being rebuffed have you learned along the way that you can relate to us in a story?
How do you handle professional rejection or disappointment?
We all experience it, and a shared story, after the fact, is that spoonful of sugar we all need to make the bitter elixir of business loss go down. Guts and glitter, right?