Written By: Lauren Howard
He reached out to me and asked for help.
The AUDACITY.
He had turned me down for a job years prior and now he was asking ME for help?
Yeah, he was, but I wasn’t upset about it. We had kept in touch for a reason.
I licked my wounds when the initial rejection came through, and I let myself lay around for a day or two.
Then I realized something
I wanted the job because someone wanted me not because I actually wanted to do that job.
It was in growth, a space I hate to be in. I was so enraptured by the idea of someone thinking I could do something and wanting me for it, that I convinced myself that it was absolutely the right place for me.
In hindsight, I would have been miserable. Also in hindsight, the person who ended up getting that job has been replaced twice over.
So even though it hurt, that was a good no. It was a solid no. It wasn’t a “not yet.” It was a full no that was exactly the no that I needed.
We kept in touch a little bit over the next two or three years. Just enough to say hi and check in about how things were going. In the meantime, I built the companies that I had no idea were on the horizon. He moved onto other things too.
A mutual friend texted me a few weeks ago that he had referred me to the aforementioned leader for a new program that he was building.
He hadn’t just referred me though. My name was used as “the person to go to for this thing.” I was the owner of the provider group who could build the PC, set up the Medicare strategy, create the monitoring programs and run them, too. I was the one who knows the space inside and out. I was the one who could not only set up what they needed but staff it.
A few hours later, an introduction meeting request came through so I could help HIM figure out how to structure this new program. He wanted to pay ME for my expertise.
Expertise he had passed on a few years prior, albeit in a different capacity.
Expertise that was also WAY more expensive now than it was before, and he paid it without hesitation.
Keep good people in your universe and it will work out. It rarely happens the way you want it to, but it happens the way it’s supposed to. In the years prior, I had reached out without agenda. I had helped him with a tough situation when he needed to know what to do. I had been reliable. I had been compassionate. Oh, and he had done the same.
I expected nothing and ended up with a whole lot more than that.
Sometimes things don’t work out, but good people make their way back around when you give them a reason to.
Founder & CEO at elletwo
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