Feb
Are you hiding in the bathroom?
Laura: I spent a good part of my high school years in the restroom – the “girls room” as it said on the door. No – I didn’t have any intestinal issues or bladder problems. I was hiding. 
Picture it: Hummelstown PA, circa 1983 – a high school dance. Can you see the streamers? The punch bowl? The DJ spinning (yes kids – actual records back then!) “99 Luft Balloons?” The gregarious blonde bouncing around the dance floor in her plaid turtleneck and Kelly green with blue whales on them pants?
Now picture the lights dimming…the music changing to something along the lines of “I Go Crazy” by Paul Young or maybe “True” by Spandau Ballet. And the blonde girl, so happily dancing with friends moments ago, is GONE. She’s hiding in the bathroom.
Why?
Easy – I was afraid.
I was so afraid that no one would ask me to slow dance that I hid in the bathroom. For four years, I hid in the bathroom during slow songs at high school dances. Mathmatically speaking, assuming six dances per year, eight slow dances per dance at 3 minutes each, that’s 576 minutes of bathroom time – almost nine hours of being fearful.
Keep in mind that this was a constant in my life. I was working under the impression that no one would ask me to dance. I was so afraid of this possibility that I completely avoided the situation. For all I know, dozens of boys were looking for me during “Sometimes When We Touch” but couldn’t find me – as I was, you know, hiding.
I may well have missed out on some awesome dances. But I’ll never know. Because I hid.
What are you hiding from?
What is it you “don’t want to know?”
I once had a client tell me that they never looked at their website analytics because they were afraid the numbers weren’t good, and that once their boss knew it, they’d be “in trouble.”
I looked for her – the numbers were fine. Room for improvement, but generally good. But for a year she avoided looking at them, “just in case.”
A year of lost web traffic opportunities. A year of hiding.
When I first meet with a new client, I always ask for old data – previous measurements for everything from print ads to billboards to radio data.
A different client once told me that he “didn’t bother with any of that.” Why? Mostly because he was afraid that the data would demonstrate that his marketing strategy wasn’t working. In this case, he was right – it wasn’t. But he lost many months of re-strategizing and re-working tactics while he was hiding from this information.
By the time I got to college, I was out of the bathroom. In fact, I enjoyed deciding exactly who I wanted to dance with during the slow dances. And I asked them.
And sometimes they declined. But you know what?
Sometimes they said “yes.”
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