How a little NO turned into a BIG YES!

Read a great story courtesy of Bill & Steve Harrison's Reporter Connection. It is a story about a man named Joel Schwartzberg. Joel is the author of The 40-Year-Old Version, a memoir of divorce and parenting his young son. Here is Joel's "Go for No" story as I read it in Steve & Bill's Reporter Connection email:

"Joel wrote an essay and pitched it to the editor of Newsweek's "My Turn" section. The editor said "no" to the essay, but she liked one specific paragraph. Joel took that paragraph and wrote a new essay around it. The subject: post-partum depression in men. The new essay ran in Newsweek. Two years later, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a report about that subject. Looking for commentary, producers Googled "post-partum depression in men," and Joel's Newsweek piece came up in every search. As a result, Joel got booked on Good Morning America, CNN and NPR. And it's all because he turned a "no" into a Newsweek piece."

I appreciate Carol, an editor at Reporter Connection allowing us to re- tell this. There will always be failures and rejections and you just never know what "no" will bring your way!

Perspective of Failure

Our mantras; things like, "fail your way to success" and "go for no!" require us to re frame our perspective. It's one of the core concepts we talk about in our go for no "sales training program" and in Rich's "go for no" seminars.

Example: when you walk into a room with stuff scattered around... you make a judgement about the state of the room based on your perspective. Maybe to you, it's a total mess. But someone else may see it as almost clean based on their perspective.

So you've called on ten prospects and gotten ten no's. Some see this as a failure, a disaster. We choose to see it as making progress - the stepping stone on the way to success. How you choose to frame the word "no" will dictate how well you can learn to harness the power of no to your benefit!