A few weeks ago, I got a shocking email: a friend’s young son was diagnosed with leukemia. He now needs a bone marrow transplant. The odds of a match are 1 out of 30 000. The donor can’t be anyone (I really thought hard about doing it myself!). It has to be someone from the same geographic ethnicity (which is tricky since the family has emigrated to Toronto) and be of 17-35 years of age. Is this breaking your heart yet? There’s more…
The Odds
My marketing mind went immediately to work on the solution. I thought, if my target market is a certain geographic ethnicity, why don’t we campaign for a donor in that very country itself? After all, there are millions of potential donors there vs. here. Go to where your ideal clients hang out, I always say. That turned out to be easier said than done. The country in question has no donation infrastructure and no funds for processing potential donors through the simple cheek swab match test. In fact, it costs $1000 per person to process this test.
Solutions
Then my brilliant marketing mind came up with the idea of running a dual campaign in the said country. One for marrow donors and the other for financial donors to fund the cheek swab. I would run the financial one through something like Kickstarter where we could take multinational donations from anywhere in the world!
Where History Meets Destiny
When presented with my idea, my dear friend who truly must be beside herself with worry for her son said these words that I’ve been thinking about for the past few weeks “Chala, I simply can’t and won’t ask people I know for money”. Now I know this woman is an intelligent, caring and loving mother. Yet that’s what she felt.
Sleepless Night
I lay awake all last night thinking about what caused my friend to reject my solution of fundraising money to possibly save her son’s life. And unfortunately the answer is that when someone in our childhood (our history) teaches us that it’s wrong to ask for money, we can’t even ask it to save our (our kids’) lives, let alone our businesses. Our history ends up determining our future (our destiny).
Your Insidious Mind
When your conditioned mind (your subconscious mind) detects a change is coming (i.e. you have to ask for money from your friends or even strangers which it was conditioned never to do since it said something bad about you), your mind responds in one of 3 ways: 1. avoidance 2. resistance and 3. defensiveness. The insidiousness of your subconscious is that it actually comes out as thoughts that make perfect sense to you, such as ‘it’ll never work’ or ‘nobody will give us any money’ or ‘I don’t think it’s the right way to do this’.
The next time you are feeling any of these emotions, beware. Take a pause and maybe ask yourself why you’re feeling the way you’re feeling and be honest with yourself. You might be surprised by how your history is shaping your destiny too…
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