“The very thing that slows you down—having multiple options that are very close in quality—is actually a signal that you can go fast, because this tells you that whichever option you choose, you can’t possibly be that wrong, since both options have similar upside and downside potential.”
— Annie Duke, How to Decide
How do you know when your client isn’t ready to make progress?
I bet you’ve got a few tells you’ve discovered over the years. Something in the questions they ask, or the way they ask them, that tells you they’re not going to take the advice. They’re not going to work the plan.
They’re going to stay stuck or stalled instead of applying your recommendations.
For me, a classic sign is when someone tells me they have “a bunch of ideas for content.”
Just last week, two different consultants told me that, somewhat proudly, and I did my best to feign excitement before offering a suggestion.
Because it worried me. The ideas are the easy part, and, to a great extent, the irrelevant part.
The part that matters is publishing the ideas and seeing if anyone notices or cares.
But when a consultant or advisor gets fixated on coming up with ideas, when they get stuck on making sure their ideas are perfect before they publish them, they end up paralyzed by indecision.
Because now they’ve just got another question, another roadblock ahead of them: Which ideas to work on, polish, and publish.
So, they stay stalled.
“One can’t learn without making mistakes, telling the truth about them, and moving on. Learning means exploring a new path with vigor and courage, being open to other people’s explorations of other paths, and being willing to switch paths if one is found that leads more directly to the goal.”
— Donella Meadows, Limits to Growth
One of those consultants told me he’s stuck because he knows too much about his subject area, which has just revealed how much he doesn’t know. And, consequently, he isn’t sure how to talk about his ideas when they don’t apply to everyone.
How can he account for every caveat, or parse every particular nuance?
He can’t, certainly. And so no content gets created.
And I bet it feels like caution, I bet it feels like carefulness.
But it’s actually a form of procrastination.
It’s avoiding the hard part in service of spinning around in a circle of ideas, of potentials, of things that may work if only they were attempted.
Or may not work, and that’s where the fear begins to form and fester.
Because it’s not actually about being wrong. You know your work actually works, you know you know what you’re doing.
The fear is that someone out there in the market might object, or question, or critique what you have to say because it’s incomplete. Because it doesn’t cover every circumstance or context.
And so nothing is said because nothing is safe.
So I’ll tell you what I told him and what I tell myself every single time I write one of these:
Your job is to be valuable to the people who already need you, not to convince the people who don’t that you are.
No text is ever completely comprehensive, no piece of marketing can hold within it every possible variation.
But it can contain value. And it won’t if we fixate on covering every base or communicating to everyone.
Those caveats, those concerns, they aren’t real. They’re what we imagine someone saying, when chances are no one will say anything at all.
Perfectionism is a type of concealment, a way to avoid being wrong by avoiding being right.
“Failures, when properly analyzed, are sources of new understanding about the goal.”
— Gary Klein, Sources of Power
We need to give ourselves the chance to get it right, by getting it right for someone in particular. Because, yes, we can’t be right about everything for everyone.
Just like we can’t be the right business for everything, for everyone.
Right? Right?
Once we accept that truth, we have the capacity and confidence to tell our own truths to the people who are most likely to accept, believe, and act on them.
Which means we must accept being wrong about some things, for some people. We need to be capable of being corrected when we market, by the market.
“Since we can’t see the whole of a complex system at once, trial and error is how we probe them to find out what works. The key quality of experiments is that we don’t know what will happen. So they both spring from uncertainty and ambiguity and are a creative response to both.”
— Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted
When we hide behind a list of content ideas, we create a wall between us and our audience. And we think that if we build it high enough, no feedback or criticism will ever surmount it.
But marketing is a type of performance, one that takes a “finger-tip feel” for what our audience cares about.
And performance only comes from practice. No one ever learned to play a musical instrument by coming up with a bunch of songs they would play if they ever tried.
And no one can describe to you how to play an instrument so completely that you could pick it up and play based only on what you’ve been told.
We must take risks, and be willing to make small mistakes, over and over again, until we hit upon what works for the market and works for us. We must lower our wall of ideas and be open to our audience’s feedback.
Which means accepting that some of our marketing will not work at all, but that is itself a lesson to learn from.
When we accept and even expect failure as the cost of success, we prime our minds to learn from it. But when we avoid it we neither succeed nor learn.
“Identifying bad outcomes in advance can reduce the emotional impact those outcomes will have on your decision-making when they do occur. It changes your frame from ‘I can’t believe this happened to me’ to ‘This happened but I knew it was a possibility.’ When you can reach the latter state in the wake of a bad outcome, you’re less likely to go on tilt.”
— Annie Duke, How to Decide
When something we publish is met with silence or even critical questions or comments, we can learn to focus on what it says about our attempt, not ourselves or our expertise or value.
It tells us something about how our value is perceived, and how or whether it is understood.
And it shows us what to do differently next time, along our journey of discovering what can work, not just what will work.
My guitar teacher would often gently but firmly scold me when I’d mess up a chord and throw my hands up in frustration.
“Just keep going,” he’d say, “and fix it next time.”
When we stop, we throw away our opportunity to learn and improve. But when we push through the feedback, like the sound of a missed string or wrong note or a LinkedIn post no one Liked, we give ourselves the opportunity to do it better next time.
Instead of starting over from scratch.
“The knowledge required to ride a bicycle can’t be fully captured in words and conveyed to others. We need ‘tacit knowledge,’ the sort we only get from bruising experience. To learn to ride a bicycle, we must try to ride one. It goes badly at first. You fall to one side, you fall to the other. But keep at it and with practice it becomes effortless.”
— Philip Tetlock, Superforecasting
I know you know your business, I know you know your work.
But I also know that you don’t fully understand your value until others express it to you. Until others pay attention and you pay attention to what they’re noticing.
And there’s simply no better way, and potentially no other way, to get that feedback than by putting your ideas into the market.
That’s the tacit knowledge that gets built through performance, through practice, through putting yourself out there and seeing what comes back to you.
Value is in the eye of the beholder, the buyer, and it’s up to us to give them opportunities to tell us what they see. What they behold and desire.
So when I ask you what you’re planning to publish, the content you’re going to produce, I don’t want to hear your list of ideas.
I want to hear your action plan for putting them out there. For publishing, monitoring, and improving them.
Don’t tell me what you want to say. Tell me where you’ve said it.
And how you’ll know if anyone else sees its value.
Kelford Inc. are content marketers for expert advisors. If you’re struggling with what to say and where to say it to attract your ideal clients, we’ll show you the way.