Working on your elevator pitch can have it’s own issues. Years ago I was in a great creative stride, I was writing, teaching nutrition at the hospital here in San Diego. Just one gig at a time, but I will say it was a lot of momentum.
I had this still soft whisper in the late hours of the day. It started like an twitch when I put my girls to bed. I would be reading them a story or telling one from the starlit ceiling inside their room, Their lady bug starlite and this little soft world would come to me…as often inspiration will do.
Destiny covets the whisper. She leans in, every time.
The wild thing about this time was that I would often fall asleep around the time that this happened and I’d wake up briefly afterward, on the floor, in the middle of the room, deep sighs as they slept in the corners, all tucked in safely their beds. And I would feel put out. Frustrated with the timing that inspiration had called on me when I was tired. Thus far I’d spent every day with my kids as a stay-at-home parent for more than 5 years already. It felt like a really long trip at sea. But that’s when destiny whispered to me, and the things she said I don’t always feel like I can share, because you’d just have to be there. You’d have to feel the moment with me, we’d have to put this on a film in a way to try and capture her in the moment.
But in that still small breath she said…”rap your pitch.” This wasn’t a “clue” on strategy, now I realize, it was a layer. A peel of the onion of inspiration being revealed to me bit by bit.
My gut reaction was a huff of “yeah right, and a flabbergast of air leaving my response hanging in the dream loaded room. Zzzzz bouncing like letters from inside the starlit walls. The whisper continued “rap your pitch. Pitch your business.” In the past I’ve written poetry, I’ve written songs and enjoy taking words and writing new context, often with a scripted background. But this time it felt different. This was’t something I was familiar with. In fact, my first response was rejection. So I waited. I leaned in, I listened, and tried to make sense of this whisper.
Each night I put the kids to bed.
Each night the whisper returned. At the time it felt so wild and out of my comfort zone. So against the current momentum of what I was doing to try and carve a path for myself I resisted it, as one does. I don’t really know why, but now I have learned a little more about this process when I ended up riding in an elevator by chance with Marie Forleo a couple months later.
Let me give you some context; Marie Forleo is a former hip hop dance loving female entrepreneur business machine. At the time I was researching backend programs to work with and use for my latest project and company “Living Beyond the Box” and she was speaking at a weekend convention I attended to learn more about oving forward with digital automation. Think follow up emails and amazing follow up customer capture etc. And by chance she was on the roof at this social function and so I approached her and asked for her picture. She obliged and was kind and then we kind of turned around and just waited akwardly for the elevator for a moment. There wasn’t A LOT of time to spare, but as the doors opened and we -yes- we- Marie Forleo and her small entourage of people (I think she had an assistant and possibly another girlfriend with her, I don’t completely recall) and little ol’ me in this vintage, turn of the century elevator riding down in Santa Barbara California. Full stop. In this moment she was a “LIKE” business hero to me, she was funny, smart, pretty, and above that she had class. To me it doesn’t matter so much as WHAT you wear, but HOW you wear it. Marie Forleo has the
So we walked in. We waited. The elevator shifted and we descend. In that moment right there, it hits me “RAP YOUR PITCH.” And we rode in that little OTIS elevator in silence. No one spoke. No one looked at their palms. Our eyes met in a casual glance and that was it. I denied destiny a gift she’d tried to show me, and so ever since then I listen, or at least I try to.
Destiny had called ahead and inspired me and told me to prepare because something was coming, special delivery, out there from the Universe and I didn’t listen. I didn’t totally understand, but even in that moment I resisted the discomfort that presented itself and pulled back, I aborted that landing 100%. I retreated into myself and stayed the course doing what I was doing at the time, trying to write without being erased. Maybe I missed an opportunity of a lifetime, but really what I did there was make a deal. A final deal with myself, to never let an opportunity of “what if” get away. So I chase her…the “if” in my little creative world. I play that “what if” game with myself all the time. What if I don’t make the art, make the poem, drive the thought, create the feeling in my music? Where am I not curating my destiny? Because that’s where I work, in showing people where they can visit within themselves to find their own path, to create their own and go where no man has ever written; with “me.”
I will look for the picture I took, I don’t know if I still have it!