Mountains of Arizona
Sunny 57 Degrees
6:24 a.m.
It can be a pretty hard road in business when you try to help people in certain ways. That good intention can sometimes lead you directly to the worst of results.
Let’s say you’re an expert in a rather technical field. You want to help people. You want them to hire you. You want them to perceive you as the expert.
What’s the appropriate course of action?
Well, the common course of action is to start teaching the world about what you do.
“Oh, you don’t want to do it that way, you want to do it THIS way… [teach them how to do it better]”
“Oh, I’m not sure where you heard about doing that, but I’d probably do this instead. Here’s how it works.”
It took me quite a few years to experience just how de-motivating this approach is to a buyer. Who knows why, all I know is that it’s darn near universal.
If you want to take a direct route to working hard and ending up with little to show for it, just start teaching people about what you do.
You WILL attract people who find you “interesting” with that, but you won’t attract the people who truly want your help, have the resources to pay for that help and are up to something WORTHY of you dedicating a portion of your life to it.
Teaching is not enough. Selling isn’t going to cut it either. Not if you want to remain as a trusted advisor for someone’s entire journey.
Leading, empowering, motivating, clarifying. Those are more in the direction of what we’re looking for.
So let’s take one of the statements from earlier and redo it so it doesn’t make us look like a no name, no face, tech geek, shall we?
Instead of saying THIS: “Oh, you don’t want to do it that way, you want to do it THIS way… [teach them how to do it better]”
We’re going to say THIS: Oh, based on what we’ve discussed about your goals, you probably don’t want to go in that direction. If you do, here’s what is most likely going to happen: bad thing #1, bad thing #2, bad thing #3. The challenges that this path will create are challenge #1, challenge #2, challenge #3. All of those things are going to take you FURTHER away from what you are trying to achieve.”
So what’s the difference?
The first one is an introduction to a big old teaching lesson.
The second one builds trust, credibility and attraction WITHOUT actually relieving any of the prospect’s pain. You give them clarity and direction but you don’t try to make them an expert. You’re the expert remember? That’s why they hire you. If they wanted to know how to do it, they’d have learned already.
As an Incomparable Expert, you are here to make nothing less than MAGIC in someone’s life.
But you can’t do that if they never hire you. And “deconstructing” your magic, which is what teaching usually does, is one of the most powerful ways to destroy attraction that I’ve ever seen.