I recently received my first piece of hate-mail. It was actually pretty cool. I’ve been kind of down about my recent television interview. It was very short, and nothing came of it. No excited phone calls from prospective clients, no offers to appear on Oprah, so getting hate-mail made me feel kinda…famous.
I really shouldn’t call it hate-mail. It wasn’t “hateful” really, and it was an email, not the type of letter you think of when you think of hate-mail: cut-out letters from magazines pasted onto a piece of paper. It’s also pretty difficult to get offended by someone who can’t put together a well-constructed sentence. But ever since receiving it Val and I have been affectionately calling it the “hate-mail.”
Basically the writer expressed amazement that someone would be so “simplistic” to “try and reduce human non-verbal behavior to that of a cat or dog.” He or she (there wasn’t a signature) is referencing -I can only guess- my recent interview with Willamette Week, in which I discuss the cats and dogs analogy I use in my work.
Receiving the email made me realize two things: 1) what I’m doing is getting attention, and that’s cool no matter how you slice it, and 2) what I do is not easily explained in a one-page article or even a three-minute television interview.
I’m still trying to find a way to talk about what I do in a way that makes sense to people. Just this morning the receptionist at my chiropractor’s office asked what I did. I said I was a nonverbal communications consultant which resulted in a blank stare, and the more I tried to explain, the more confused she became.
Yesterday I presented an all-day workshop in which at least a half-dozen participants said, “I was not looking forward to coming to this workshop, but I’m so glad I came. It wasn’t what I expected at all.” This isn’t unusual. And although I am delighted that people find my work useful and practical, there has to be a better way of explaining it.
For now I’ll just keep plugging along knowing that the media attention is nice but I can’t expect it to sell my services. All of my work up until this point has come from word of mouth. We’ve never purchased advertising and I don’t have a publicist. People who attend workshops tell other people and that’s why Nonverbal Solutions is here and thriving, even after a recession.
So to my clients and supporters out there, thank you. And to my anonymous email writer: thank you as well. You can’t know how fun it was to feel famous.
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