Juicy topic today: Ghosting.
I know I’ve spent a ton of time and energy analyzing why some person or another didn’t respond to me or stopped communicating.
And I had several clients this week worrying over why a prospect didn’t get back to them and jumping to all sorts of conclusions about the reasons why.
This kind of analysis can consume our lives.
An incident from my personal life about 10 years ago gave me the hugest “aha” about why analyzing ghosting is pointless.
A guy I’d been dating had gradually started communicating less and less until the communication finally stopped completely. And, like so many of us do, I tortured myself about all of the possible reasons why.
About a year later, I happened to run into him and had an opportunity to ask him what his reason had been.
He gave me what sounded like a sincere answer:
“I… don’t know.
“I guess I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I’m sorry. I don’t even understand it myself.”
That was truly a groundbreaking moment in my life as I realized that some people don’t even know their own reasons for ghosting.
Similar exchanges have reinforced this point in business when I used to press prospects about why they stopped responding to me or whether they were still interested.
(What can I say? It took me a while to really learn the lesson.)
I once followed up with a prospect I hadn’t heard back from in about two weeks and asked for an answer as to why she had disappeared. I did this purely because I was so maddeningly curious, not because I expected/wanted to change her mind. I thought our sales call had gone perfectly and she hadn’t given any objections and had said she would pay right after she moved the funds which would take a day or two. (People had said that to me before and then they almost always followed through, so I didn’t think it was an excuse.)
She, just like my ex, sounded like she was really grasping to find a reason:
“I’m thinking about it and I’m really not sure. It really does sound like a great program. I guess the price was a bit high.”
So what did younger-and-less-wise Eleanore do? Lowered the price. 🤦♀️
And guess what?
The prospect still didn’t buy!
She stopped responding AGAIN. And this time she was gone for good.
About a month later, a different prospect came along and paid the original (not lowered) price with no objections.
Older-and-wiser Eleanore now looks back at those two prospects and sees a world of difference between them.
The one who ghosted actually was not a great candidate to get results from the type of help I offer. But I didn’t see that at the time.
She was someone who had not worked with any clients in her niche yet, and my gifts and process are a much better fit to help people who have had at least a few ideal clients already. But, back then, I didn’t realize that was a distinction that I needed to make about my ideal client.
The prospect probably could never in a million years have articulated that distinction either, no matter how much I might have pressed her. Sometimes people just say a price sounds high because they’re not really convinced that the offer will help them.
(And – to be clear – they may not even have thought carefully enough to realize that’s the reason why the price sounds high to them. For them, “it’s just too much money” is the real and true reason.)
There are a several more examples of this phenomenon from my life and business, but before this post gets to be even longer, I think I can just share the unifying theme: the person felt “meh” about me (basically, it was less than a “hell yes”) and they couldn’t really put their finger on the reason why.
The fact that they feel “meh” is really important to realize here. Because it’s NOT the same as “hell no.”
So, when we wonder, “Why couldn’t they just tell me ‘no’ so at least I’d have closure about it?” …it’s because their answer was NOT a hard “no.” They were unsure and feeling less than “hell yes” about it. So they didn’t know what to do.
So they did nothing, probably telling themselves that they’d decide eventually. But, after enough time had gone by and they had taken no action, a non-decision just became a decision by default.
And they then assumed you had probably moved on from them too because it had been so long and you didn’t reach out either.
While thinking about writing this post, I shocked myself by realizing that I may have ghosted someone a while back. I had never thought of it that way. But the people on the other end probably did.
I had been playing a regular piano gig and, while I enjoyed the people in the group, I had a growing discomfort with the way one of them interacted with me. I couldn’t put my finger on what bothered me about him. But, trying to manage my feelings was becoming exhausting, and life was getting really busy on top of it all, and I felt like I needed a break to assess whether I still wanted to continue with it.
I told them that I wouldn’t be available for the next month (although there were only two weeks of the month when I truly wouldn’t be available – the rest was because of my tiredness of the situation).
After the month was up, one of them emailed me to see what my availability was for the NEXT month.
Just seeing the name in my inbox paralyzed me, as I thought about how uncomfortable I still was.
I let several days go by debating how to respond.
Then another email came basically accusing me of ghosting (although it didn’t use that word) and asking what was behind my slow response.
I felt “put on the spot,” and truly didn’t have the words to explain (even to myself) why the gig was making me uncomfortable.
So I just said something vague about how I was getting too busy for the gig and it would be hard for me to find the time anymore and maybe they should find someone else.
Which, in my mind at that moment, was absolutely true. Pretty much anything would sound like “too much time” if we were feeling less than “hell yes” about it, right?
Just like any amount of money sounds like too much if you’re feeling “meh” about the product/service.
I do want to say that I think there are other reasons for ghosting besides feeling “meh” and being unable to explain why.
Sometimes a person truly gets super unexpectedly busy or has an emergency or life-altering event and has little or no opportunity to contact you.
And I do think that sometimes a person truly does know their reason, but doesn’t want to say it for fear of offending you.
But I think that’s less common. I think people are more likely to lie than to ghost if they know their reason and are a firm “no” rather than a “meh.”
That’s why you sometimes get “I just don’t have the money” right on the spot rather than having someone ghost and then having to press them in follow-up to give you a reason. They know immediately that they’re a “no” because your offer sounds so unclear/confusing or so unlike what they think they need, but they don’t want to tell you those reasons. So they make one up.
Anyway, what I want to leave you with is this:
You will almost never find out the true reason why someone ghosted you because they almost certainly don’t know the reason themselves.
And, if you want to reduce other people’s wishy-washiness towards you (knowing that you can never totally eliminate it), the best solution is to become clearer about who you are and what you stand for.
That’s in your personal life.
If you’re “meh” about yourself, then others will mirror that back to you.
And in business, you’ll want to become clearer about what you do, how you do it, and for whom you do it.
That will make it a lot easier for people to separate themselves into the “hell yes” and “hell no” camps, and leaves less room for “meh”s.
Being clear means learning how to state – in 500 words or less – who you help, what Point A they need to be starting at, what Point B you’ll take them to, how you’ll do it (conceptually), how you’ll do it (logistically), how long you’ll take to do it, and what kind of person they need to be to get to Point B easily and quickly.
And a side benefit of being so clear is that you’ll get so many leads that you’ll barely notice who ghosts and who doesn’t. 😉
That’s exactly what has happened for me as I’ve gotten so many interested people (an average of one per day), and so many “yes”es (an average of 1-2 per week), that ghosting is no longer something I worry about or even notice in my business.
If you want tons of examples of this clarity, I suggest heading over to my FB group Organic High Ticket Sales for Coaches & Experts where lots of my clients and followers are posting their own awesome super-clear offers. (The Eleanore-approved ones are tagged with the hashtag “offers_approved_by_eleanore” – which you can find under the “Topics” menu.)
And, as always, DM me on Facebook if you need help. Clarifying and pitching your offer are two of the main things we work on in my 1:1 30-day private intensive for experienced coaches and consultants.
Also DM me on Facebook if you’re interested in teaching my methods to your own clients – I have a certification program.