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| Bob Brody |
Failure, especially if it happens repeatedly, leaves a great deal to be desired. That's just a given.
In the case of a public relations professional, failure is a reporter you pitched telling you no, a client you presented with a new idea turning you down cold, a prospect hearing your presentation but taking a hard pass.
Let’s face it: PR is mostly failure.
You can take my word for it because I’m no stranger to failure in this profession. I started proposing ideas to media, clients and colleagues alike 34 years ago. I was failing regularly then, back in the 1990s, and – guess what? – I’m still failing regularly today.
It’s also called getting rejected. My pitches are rejected at least once or twice a week, probably amounting to 100 times a year. The number of rejections accumulated over the course of my career therefore runs into the thousands.
But here’s the good news: I’ve come to accept rejection. How have I done so? Stay tuned.
Meantime, here’s some context. By this stage in my PR career, someone at just about every kind of organization has given me a thumbs-down on something. Pharmaceutical firms, nonprofits, federal agencies, op-ed editors, TV producers, radio correspondents.
Early on, while in my late 30s, just starting my PR career, any and all rejections hurt. I took rejection hard all through my 40s and 50s, too. By then I had practically earned a Ph.D. in rejection.
Of course I was in excellent company as a PR pro repeatedly spurned. Everyone in PR confronts failure. So, for that matter, do lawyers litigating cases in court, physicians trying to save patients from disease and death, and pretty much every other professional on the planet. The consensus is that failure is nothing to be celebrated.
But as I entered my 60s and then my 70s, I came to accept rejection. I know: it sounds oxymoronic. It's also heresy to admit. But now I better understand why a reporter, client or prospect might say no to me.
The timing could be wrong. The budget might be an issue. The reasons could have nothing to do with you or your performance or your ideas. Anything can be rejected for any reason at any time. And there’s nothing you can do about that.
Let me take a minute here to correct the record in case I’ve given you the wrong impression about my career. It would be misleading of me to suggest I have nothing but failure to show for my 34 years in PR. I’ve scored major top-tier media hits, represented big clients well and even helped land important new accounts.
Still, I’ve come to accept failure as the price of admission. How have I managed this Olympian feat despite all these bitch-slaps and learned – more or less, mind you – to take setbacks in stride?
Here’s how. Acknowledge that sometimes it’s your fault. Maybe your PowerPoint theatrics was misbegotten and ill-conceived. Your pitch may have lacked the requisite relevance or resonance. The issue you struggled to frame might be inadequately articulated. And so on, ad infinitum.
In such instances, then, you might second-guess yourself, take a second look -- and, in so doing, give yourself a second chance. Do that. Revisit your pitch. Study it. Glean how you could have made it better. If you find it wanting, improve it for the next go-round.
If, on the other hand, you find your effort up to snuff, terrific. Try it on another reporter or prospect. Recycling your ideas keeps your hopes alive and prevents you from getting down in the dumps.
Failure can be instructive, but only if you pay attention to what it’s trying to teach you. Failure can stiffen your resolve, because the more you get knocked down, the more you might strive to get back up on your feet. Failure teaches you resilience, the ability to rebound from disappointment that’s regarded as an essential trait in an entrepreneurial mindset.
In the best of scenarios, failure inspires us to fly closer to the sun.
When you get right down to it, failure does us all a favor. It forces us to face objective reality because we discover that other opinions might carry as much weight as ours. The market has spoken, much as voters do in an election.
Granted, it’s easier for me to say all this, now that I’m 72, than it is for PR pros decades younger than I. My occasional successes have cushioned me against my frequent failures. I can afford to take a philosophical attitude about it all now.
If I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that PR is often a no. But it can also be a yes. And the sooner you learn to adapt to hearing no, the sooner you’ll win a yes.
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Bob Brody, a public relations consultant, served as a media strategist and editorial specialist at Weber Shandwick, Ogilvy Public Relations and Howard J. Rubenstein Associates. He is the author of the memoir "Playing Catch with Strangers: A Family Guy (Reluctantly) Comes of Age," and contributes essays to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, among many other publications.
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