Buy Me, but Only If I'm the Right Person for You!

I should write a sales pitch, the five, ten or twenty-five reasons to hire me. The reasons that make me the best, or like in the post card I recently got. Just claiming yourself the most experienced, the best and the prettiest. This one even claimed that marketing piece, a post card, to be something extraordinary.

I could write a sales pitch requesting you to buy my services, but I won’t. Instead my wish is for you to know me. The person behind the postcard or the professional photos. I look good in my head-shots, I truly do, and that’s all thanks to the professional on the other side of the camera, my friend Amy Wimber, who managed to catch something beyond a fake smile into them. In my head-shots I have blond hair. Since then, I have had pink hair, gray hair, blue hair, brown hair, purple hair. But in the headshots, I look very traditional and some may even say classy. In real life, I’m all leggings, sneakers and pink hair, all the things not paired with classy and chic. And, this is when I’m trying to be at least somewhat professional and grown up. On Sunday mornings it’s all muddy boots and dirty sweat pants.

So, the woman behind that pretty image has rough edges. She does. She is also a wife, and a mother of three elementary aged kids. Like all mothers – I hope I’m not alone – her life tends to get messy and chaotic, and there are days when she just wants to quit, motherhood, not real estate. Motherhood is way harder, and many times way less fun. Who do you think patches the scratches, fights the bullies, fears and anxieties as she wipes the tears off their faces. That’s not fun. That’s scary. Scary is what mothers do. Mothers fight all the monsters in the world whether visible or invisible. She's the band aid person, she's the one dealing with the clogged toilet, the one wiping up puke in the middle of the night, and she's the one holding their hands at the dentist when all she really wants to do, is run away as her relationship with dental professionals begins in socialized healthcare in the 70’s. What she remembers is the unkind words, the pain and the smell of her dentist’s fingers but she is determined to change it for them. Yet, there is no quitting and then there is that smile or the hug that makes her day, her week, her world - no, strike that - her universe.

She makes pizza every Friday night. No, not kidding. She makes pizza every Friday night. She doesn’t order it online, but she makes the dough from scratch – flour, semolina, salt, yeast, olive oil and water. Every Friday.  She sits at coffee shops knitting with her friends being a bit too opinionated and loud. Later she wishes she would have just been quiet, and promises herself to do a better job the following week. Lately she’s been knitting socks, socks for a family that does not even wear socks. Socks because they are fun to make.

She loves the trails on weekend mornings, and does not mind the mud and the rain, she knows the plants and trees in the woods, and she points out what’s edible and what isn’t to her kids when they join her. It’s sort of her thing. A couple a weeks ago she met a coyote on the trails, usually it’s just great horned owls, woodpeckers and pine squirrels. She was not scared, she was fascinated by the creature. 

She’s human. She fails weekly with her laundry duty as the clean clothes pile up in the upstairs loft area. She leaves her papers scattered all around the house driving her husband crazy. She does not know how to clean, well she does, she just does not like cleaning. Luckily, she does not have to.

But she wants to be extraordinary at whatever she does, so she goes above and beyond. She does her job with compassion and integrity. She has your back. A week ago, she was volunteering in her daughter’s classroom. The teacher asked her to create dictionaries with the children in the back of their writing notebooks. It didn’t go well, and even though she had a model, and she tried explaining and showing and drawing pictures on how to do it, most of the kids had a hard time with the task. She had thought it to be easy and simple, but she learned it to be a challenging one for the children. At home she took one of her own notebooks and made a dictionary, just like the one she was supposed to make with the kids. She made it, to be able to better explain the task the following week in the class. Because, she felt like she could have done a better job.

Instead of sales pitch and nice catchy words on glossy paper. You get me. You get an introduction to who I am, to help you figure out whether I am the right broker for you.