The Good And Bad In "Bounce"

From Ron Sukenick

Close to thirty years of working as a business coach - I'll tell you, that experience has gone a long way in helping me discover more about myself and other people. Then, when I studied under Dr. Robert Rohm and incorporated the Ultimate Discovery System into my work, that really helped my understanding of how relationships can be nurtured.

It's funny - there are two things about relationships that I've always known, but now I understand them a lot better. In a way, each of these two things relates to the word "bounce".

A friend shared with me a saying her grandmother used to repeat to her: "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone." The first thing that came to my mind when I heard this saying was the four personality styles in the DISC personality profile (which so many corporations use to form effective teams). You see, even though each personality style has its strengths, and even though each person has value, it's a lot easier to do business with any person with an "upbeat" attitude. "Upbeat", you'd have to agree, always attracts more friends and more business than "downbeat"! Call it the "bounce factor". "Bounce" doesn't have to mean extroverted and life-of-the-party; in fact it can take the form of quiet optimism and openness to accept new ideas. Whatever form it takes, people like doing business with people who've got "bounce"!

Now that I've made reading and writing blogs a greater part of my business repertoire, I've become aware of a different meaning for the word "bounce". This meaning's more technical and not nearly so positive. When online searchers click onto a website or a blog post, but don't find the information they want, they leave quickly. A high "bounce rate" is not something you want for your blog or your website, because it means you've failed to engage readers' interest and attention.

When I started thinking about all this "bounce" stuff, I realized it all ties in with the concepts I teach about going beyond networking to NetBeing. When we're meeting another person, as I explained in "The Three Magic Words of Beyond Networking", too often we rush through the encounter. We're so intent on seeing if we can benefit, we take things too seriously and lose the upbeat "bounce" quality that would draw that person to us. Then, because we're too anxious to exhange information and leads, we forget to listen three times as much as we talk. That's why, I realize, traditional networking has such a high "bounce rate".

We really want more than this for ourselves, don't we? And we can have more, if we keep that positive "bounce" in our attitude, and take the time to connect and reduce our "bounce rate"!