Written by Jason Montoya. Posted in Leadership.

Pitching: Why We Ought To Leave It In The Dust

Lets-leave-pitching-behind

Pitching. It's the idea of doing something for someone without their involvement and then hoping it works out. It comes from a belief that our value, as a person, comes from proving ourselves through excellent performance.

An example would be a situation where someone tasks us to create something. We go with little direction and our assumptions to create what, we believe, the person will hopefully like the most. We come back to the person with our 'presentation' or 'performance' hoping the 'pitch' will place us in good standing with them.

Pitching tends to end with the surprise of rejection. We pitch because we fear conflict, facing reality or being open. This drives us to work in isolation from whom the work is meant for.

In business, pitching may look like our company being asked to build a project for another. We are asked to put together a proposal and presentation that will show them we can build a project that will meet their goal.

By the way, we likely won't get paid for our time, and they will have several others competing for the business. Over the next week we compete to win the work with no commitment from the business.

It's a connection on our part without a commitment on their part.

We hope to get the work, but often we will be discarded for not meeting expectations which may have never been communicated. At this point, we have a tendency to become resentful. We did hard work, and it seemed as if they took our ideas and hired someone else.

For the times we win the business, we set a precedence our ideas and contributions are of little or no value. From this point on in our engagement, we are more of a commodity, easily discarded when we are no longer of use.

Win or lose, It hurts. We feel used and abused.

With God, many of us have pitched. We may live our lives as good people creating the best life we can. Our expectation is, once we die we can go before God with a case of how 'good' we think we were. We hope this will get us into heaven only to realize, performance does not dictate our acceptance by Him.

We seek acceptance, so we believe performance is our way to get it. What we learn is, this route leads to rejection. It takes us towards the opposite result we truly want.

What are our alternatives to pitching? Relationship. Open Dialog. Vulnerability. Working together as we discover.

The alternatives are hard, but well worth it.

Where are you pitching?