I needed to find myself an image today to show how beautiful it can be to reach for the sky. I found this Cosmos and thought the name and shape of this plant will do just nicely. I managed to get this ground level shot in a cheat way because I haven’t yet planted them out and so it’s in a pot balanced on a fence post meaning I didn’t have to wriggle around in the dirt to make the picture.

Why did I want an image about reaching for the sky?

Well, I’ve had a tough old time of it recently, emotionally and it’s been distracting me from the good things happening all around me. I just woke up to a few of them today and decided a celebration is in order.

David has been busy in the garden and the hens have been put firmly in their place (by DM shaking a broom at them, hee hee) – they take great pleasure in climbing into the raised border and scratching the soil all over the path below…they just don’t care about the roots of my precious plants or the fact that the path gets covered. He’s sorted it all out and the whole garden looks grand after our combined efforts (mine at the weekend and his today).

I’ve also had an extraordinary day at work today – two new client contracts came in and a couple of the projects I’d been working on last week bore fruit through clients contacting us and asking for us to go and see them. That doesn’t happen often, usually you do the promotional activity and then have to ask to go and see them as a follow-up. So, my concerns about a Library with fake books were not shared by the clients who came to our special day. Phew. Our head honcho said to me when I was in the USA ‘don’t get distracted from selling’ and I think I can demonstrate that I’ve been quite focused on that with recent events so that’s good for me.

I poked my head out of my office door today and a couple of our youngsters were working on a small campaign to promote one of our services. They were designing the promotional materials and giggling about the text and image. I made a few encouraging remarks and talked to them about the images they needed to use. We have a corporate policy of using photos not clip art and the photos must be ‘lateral not literal’. That’s quite a challenge really. Sometimes our marketing team go so far down the ‘lateral’ that I can’t see the relevance of what they’ve chosen.

We got onto the subject of ‘going for it’ in the sense of looking for sales opportunities and they had a good giggle when I told them my own personal motto ‘everything is an opportunity’. No matter how grim the situation appears I still look for the good and look for where the next good thing will come from. I’ve always applied that in my professional life.

Once, a few years ago, a ‘prospect’ (someone who you’d like to be a client but isn’t) was sending me briefs every month or so and when each one landed on my desk I worked really hard on a good proposal to entice the prospect to come to us rather than our competitors. We didn’t win a single project for eighteen months yet we were still getting briefs from them.

I’d got really fed-up with never being able to convert from a proposal to a commissioned project. Each time a brief came into my email box from this man, my heart would sink and I’d know there was a week of work with no reward at the end. I decided to phone him and have it out with him. I said ‘look, we never win any of these projects, are we just being asked to make up the numbers and you award to your preferred agency each time?’ – he was mortified and it turned out that many of the projects had been put on hold and no-one had won them. Within a month of me getting stroppy with him, he’d placed £0.5 million pounds of business with us and my faith in human nature had been restored. I always use this as an example of the reason to consider everything an opportunity when people say to me ‘why are we bothering with this?’

Today I’ve been thrilled to find some more of these ‘long-shots’ have paid off and once again my faith in human nature has been restored. So, I reflect on that Waterboys song – you take the risks and if you do they pay off. You can never feel the sky if you don’t reach out and grab it, just like that rainbow.