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This article is about how you need to change so your business can be more successful in this new economy, this new business climate.
I am muddling through to see what what I saw this past Thursday will mean to me… what new actions, what new thinking, what new everything it might mean.
Why? What happened on Thursday?
As you know, I am in a coaching program with some 80 other people who have a business or want to have a business…
It’s not cheap. It has sessions with different coaches every weekday. I attend two of those… the rest, if I am interested, I watch the replay.
It seems, from the questions, that one of the issues every business deals with, or should, is this….
….the business scene has been rapidly and fundamentally changing. As one of my coaches said: ‘we are not in Kansas any more’
For the past year and a half, the six foot rule, the no gathering rule, the mask mandate, has changed us and changed what we crave, It has also changed what we buy, how we buy, why we buy and why we don’t buy.
So yeah, times are changing.
I first heard of the internet back in 1995. Someone contacted me and shared that he created a page and put it online and it got five thousand hits a day… I was hooked. I wanted it… Just a page and voila, you post it and people are coming…
Even ten years ago: my first posts on this site got thousands and thousands of hits. Today the average post read is around 45. Total.
Today everyone and their sister is an author, a guru, an expert. Everyone is a coach, Everyone is an Amazon seller. Everyone is thinking of selling online.
I remember when I first heard this whole idea that you needed to know what ‘economy’ we are having, i.e. what is most important when you communicated with the people you wanted to sell your wares, or your services.
At the time we were in ‘attention economy‘, meaning that the shortage was attention. (Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. According to Matthew Crawford, “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.)
I am sure there are buzzwords like that in every age… but unfortunately I haven’t paid much attention, until just now…
…and if my observation and experience is accurate, we are in an implementation economy… people don’t implement, don’t use, don’t learn to use what they buy.
Or maybe we are in the midst of relationship economy…
Relationship beyond the slogan: people buy from people who they like and trust.
I think we are beyond that. People want to buy from comrades… people who are on the same side of the divide we are experiencing, not just in the United States, but everywhere. We love to hate the same people… the same ideas… the same things… and that makes us brothers.
So if that is true, that is a blow to many people: because like me, to become an entrepreneur you need to put all your energies into that, into what divides us, instead of real relationships.
I prefer doing and caring only about what is mine to do… but it seems, judging from the number of glib hating posts, that people love to hate… ugh.
I am not a very social person. I care about my clients and students, and honestly want to help them.
Yeah yeah… everybody can say that…
I know. But when I listen to my ‘classmates’ in the coaching program, I don’t hear them saying that a lot.
One of the coaches in the program is Tom Beal. I really like Tom. I use everything he teaches… as if it were a lifesaver. When he talks I listen. And I ask questions. I make the process co-creative.
Tom’s sessions are on Thursdays. This past Thursday he presented a new thing: Empathy Map. When I googled it, I found that it IS a thing… The map inquires into, looks into what your potential customers are thinking and feeling, what they are hearing, what they are seeing, what they are saying, what questions they are asking, and what language they use when they have questions, complaints, or praise.
Unfortunately unless you map these out, unless you are interested and curious, unless you listen, unless you actually interview people, your message will not convey that you are the one for them… No relationship.
If we are really in a relationship economy… then you are going to lose them to someone who is interested in them, someone who is willing to speak their language… someone who is willing to be in relationship with them.
Another coach had a talk this week about buyer profiles. I can see that the more you know about your ‘crowd’ the more relationship you can have, the more you can relate to them and to where they are at.
Not all buyers are created equal. It is not the same thing that makes someone whip out their credit card… people can be in different places with regards to buying your stuff.
- There are your fans… they buy what you have because they like you and they get good results.
- Then there are your hyper buyers who buy everything you offer but don’t use anything they buy.
- There are also the non-buyers:
- the jaded ones, who have been disappointed because what they had bought before they met you, either didn’t work, or they weren’t taken care of.
- There are also the lurkers who are just there… probably will never buy.
- There are also the skeptical ones that haven’t bought because you forgot to answer some question they never asked…
- And then there are the many who don’t trust themselves to get the results, to do the work, to make it worth their while.
Unless you know who you are talking to, who are visiting your site, your business will die slowly.
I have been writing to my hyperbuyers who won’t do anything with what they buy. Why? I am not sure… I guess I thought if I could make them use what they bought, I would be happy… Now I see that I was stupid.
I am told that instead I should write to the skeptics… the ones that have unasked and unanswered questions… Why? Because if and when I answer the question they don’t ask in a way that satisfies them, they will buy. Duh… I do feel like a dork.
I also had another insight… That if I want people with different interests to visit my site, I should start writing for those people… write about what they are interested in… Another duh… I now clearly see why my parents thought I was stupid… lol.
It’s taken me how long? 33 years? lol… I am slow… What can you do.
But better late than never.
But you see, times are changing faster than we can easily keep up with the changes.
We and what we do and how we do it need to change with the times.
And for that we ourselves need to change. We need to change how we look at things, how and in what order we value things, how we deal with things…
And that is not easy. If you continue doing things the same way, relate the same way as you always have, you, like myself, will be very frustrated. You’ll blame the times… and won’t even look at yourself. You’ll blame people, customers, and won’t even look at yourself.
I have been doing that… and I am just waking up that maybe it is really me who needs to change.
It is important for me to remember, that the trigger to change is always in the ‘what you see’
.
That is the hardest to change… but once you manage to see things, people, yourself differently, the changes are almost automatic.
My main strength is teaching, causing, facilitating this change… the what you see… but I am, it seems, a prime example of the shoemaker who walks barefoot… Or at least have been.
It is easier to see differently for other people than for yourself… but it’s possible. And when you manage, then the world can become your oyster…
The place where most people are stuck is their self-image… I can do this, I can’t do that, I am good at this, I am not good at that… I know this and I don’t know that.
One of the requirements, it seems, for one to be able to change, to accommodate and succeed in changing circumstances is measured in the Starting Point Measurements.
Once you know what is in your way, you can consciously change certain attitudes that are holding you back.
Here are the most crucially important measures:
- Lack of humility (expressed primarily in the about-me score),
- high desire-low ambition generating greed,
- unwillingness to let go of self-concern, self-delusion, entitlement… and not accidentally,
- your rigidity.
Interestingly all these are dependent on a decision you made as a child. And as long as that linchpin decision is in place, nothing much can change.
And it seems that the most important virtue you need to develop to be able to be prosperous or become prosperous in these changing times is flexibility. Flexibility as in being able to turn on a dime.
So what do I recommend that you do if that linchpin decision has been keeping you hostage?
That linchpin decision is your business’s and your life’s seed level… and your life, your business, the tree, cannot bear fruit inconsistent with the seed level.
If you want different fruits, you need to change the seed level… Change how you see yourself, how you see others, how you see business, how you see the world.
It is not easy to get to the seed level, and it often requires digging…
What is the seed level?
The seed level is not what you know. It is not what you think. It is not what you want. It is not what you were taught.
It is pure and simple: it is what you see or feel.
- You may know you are safe… but you don’t see it/feel it.
- You may know you are loved… but you don’t see it/feel it
- You believe you can do it… but you don’t see that you can, don’t feel that you can
So it’s not an intellectual thing, and not a mind thing.
Back in 2007 I did a program with Pam Ragland who claimed that she could shift your mind. Your thoughts. And maybe she did. Energetically.
What she didn’t do, she didn’t change/couldn’t change what participants saw, what participants felt about themselves.
If she did anything, and I have my doubts, she did it in the area of thoughts… and not where it would have mattered: seeing.
When I look at this recent breakthrough of mine, seeing that I need to talk to the conversation in people’s mind, I need to write for people I want to do business with, not just anybody with a problem, not the hyper buyers who do nothing with what they buy, but the people who need exactly what only I can teach them…
Seeing.
I have already known that. For more than 10 years. Market to message match… blah blah blah.
I knew it but I didn’t see it. And what informed my actions is what I saw, not what I knew.
What informs my actions is what I see, not what I know
Everybody, most everybody talks to your knowledge… very few people can make you look and see.
In the upcoming Saturday mini workshop (August 7) we’ll poke around what it is that you see, even when you know otherwise… when you know better.
It is underneath your failures, it is underneath your hesitation, it is underneath your procrastination.
Really.
The course is beginner-friendly.
I am not a business coach, I am a business mindset coach, if there is such a thing.
My job is to help you change what you see, so you can take the actions that will produce what you want.
Let’s change what you seeSo there you go, again, about the price… for $40 you can’t get more than 10 minutes of my time… and in this class you have a chance for 30 minutes or more… just for your issue.
So if you have been disappointing yourself because you don’t, you can’t, you won’t… this is your chance.
