Practicing Seeing "No" As A Success

 

I have been doing a good amount of virtual volunteering with nonprofits this year. The site I use has two main types of opportunities:

• 1 hour phone calls where a nonprofit gets to pick my brain 
• Long term projects that vary in length and last from weeks to months depending on the project

I have been doing a bunch of the phone calls around how to work with social media. 

• What a good post looks like
• Helping brainstorm content
• Basic strategy (getting them to think about what they hope to achieve using social media etc.)

Today I had another call but clearly they were looking for something beyond the scope of an hour call. While they posted asking for help with "standard steps/recipe for how, in a very basic approach, to be more strategic and thoughtful about our approach to social media." 

• They already had content
• They knew their audience
• They knew what they wanted to use social media for
• They already were using a social media calendar 
• They already had social media strategy
• They wanted to go even deeper over 3-4 meetings over the next month. 

I talked with them, explained how what they wanted was outside the scope of the one hour calls and outside my specialty and that they should post again under long term projects and how to tweak their ask so they match with a better fit. 

The person said they were happy I was upfront and said this was not a good fit BUT I still found myself feeling like a failure because I had to say No. It took some consideration before I decided that even though I had to say No, I did prep for and complete the call so I am counting it as a call I have done this year. 

And while how successful the call was depends on how you look at it in the end I did point them in the direction they would need to go in order to get the volunteer help they want. But this highlighted how much I have to practice seeing saying no as a success. I find it way to easy to fall into the pattern where saying no means I failed.