169: Love Your Audience, Clients, and Prospects More Than You Fear Them

//What fears can get in the way of your business success, and what role does love play in overcoming them? Building on last week’s conversation with Finka Jerkovic, Andrea discusses three core fears that are common obstacles when you’re selling your idea, getting others onboard, or marketing a product or service, and how each fear can be overcome by love.

 

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Transcript

Hey there! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. So, the last couple of weeks, we’ve been talking about selling – in particular, selling from love – being willing to put ourselves out there, and taking risks, and doing it in service of others.

Last week, we talked with Finka Jerkovic about her book, Sell From Love, and it was a lovely conversation. I hope you enjoyed that. This week, today, we’re going to cover three core fears that I certainly have experienced and that my clients certainly experience, and what we can do to overcome them with love. So, we’re just going to get right down to it.

All right, here we go. Fear number one: the Fear of Incompetence. The fear that… really, it’s this fear that, “I don’t have what it takes.” Finka addressed this in her book, and then we talked about it in the episode with her, and I loved her perspective on this. And I want to keep this in front of me all the time because there have been a lot of times throughout my own personal journey where I feel like, “Well, I’ve never done that before. How will I do it?” “I’ve never written a book before.” “I’ve never started a business before.” “I’ve never sold something to corporate before.” “I’ve never done a podcast episode before.” When you haven’t done something before, it’s easy to feel like there’s no way that you can possibly figure it out. It’s easy to feel like, “Well, that’s just not even on my radar because I haven’t done it before.”

I think that one of the most important things for us to do is if we have a very clear purpose – we talked about this a couple of weeks ago – when you have that clear purpose, when you know what your mission is, you can move forward. And when you keep that in front of you all the time, it makes it easier for you to take risks. It makes it… maybe not easier, but you feel more convicted that you’re going to do it, “I’m going to take this risk at the risk of my ego,” or whatever. So, anyway, having a purpose is super important.

And when you have that purpose, then all you need is the confidence, not in your ability to do the thing but in your ability to figure out how to do the thing. Marie Forleo… So if you don’t know Marie Forleo, she works with entrepreneurs and has this school called B-School, which is an online program. There are lots of things that she does. And one of the things that she talks about – and her book has even titled this – is that Everything is Figureoutable. Just because you haven’t done it, just because you don’t know the answer doesn’t mean you can’t find it.

And if you go through life believing that you can figure it out, believing that, “Even though I don’t know how to do this, I’m not going to let that get in the way of me actually going for it.” So, if we don’t have that confidence in our competence, we can still have confidence in our ability to – what Finka said – to be curious, creative, and resourceful. If you know that you can do those things, then your Fear of Incompetence, it can subside. You can conquer that fear with the love that you have because you know that you can figure it out.

So, one of the things that you could try for this would be to remember all of the times that you have figured something out and made it work. What are your wins? If you want to make a list, you can make a list. But if you’re a visual person, you could make a “win wall” and keep that in front of you at all times. Take a picture, use pictures from the past, use… I don’t know, it could be like a vision wall, but it’s something that you’ve already accomplished. And remember all of those things that you have figured out. It doesn’t mean you’ve figured them out on your own, but you figured out where to go look for the answers.

And keep that “win wall” in front of you at all times, but especially when you’re just trying to decide, you know, “Do I have what it takes to do this?” whatever this thing is that’s in front of you – to get that message out there, to convince somebody, to draw somebody into your message, that sort of thing. So, first of all is that Fear of Incompetence. That’s the first fear, and we can conquer that by believing that we can figure it out.

Okay, fear number two: the Fear of Confusion. This is something that I certainly have had a lot of issues with because years ago, I really struggled with this. But I’ve always had a really hard time because… I don’t know, like intuition is a big thing for me, and making connections, and all that sort of thing. I have a lot of ideas, and a lot of things, and a lot of connections. And those can get really muddled in my brain, and it can be difficult for me to turn them out into a product, into something that will actually be useful to somebody else. And I got really frustrated about this at one point, where I felt like, “I am stuck in my own head.” And there’s all this confusion inside of me about what I’m doing, what I should say, how I should say it, what I should even offer.

So, that Fear of Confusion – how to conquer that with love. Again, you have to weigh the cost with the outcome. Is it worth it to invest – invest time, invest energy, or invest money – in figuring out how you’re going to say things, what you’re going to say, clearing up that confusion? So, if you do have a big fear and that fear is confusion, then you do the work of clarifying. You spend the time that it takes to refine. You put your message, your product, your service, your ideas out there, and then you listen to what people say and how they respond. And instead of getting offended by how they respond or being frustrated every time that things don’t go your way, instead take that as feedback, make adjustments, get it out into the market again, get it out in front of your team again. Make the adjustments, keep going, keep figuring it out.

So, this Fear of Confusion, if we wanted to have an action step for this, our action step is very clear. It is to work with me one-on-one. The reason for that is that this is exactly what I do.
There’s three different parts to this program, and it’s on our “Programs” page on our website, so voiceofinfluence.net/programs. There are three basic steps to this program. There’s one at the top, you could do your own self study with the Fascinate Assessment. And we do have an availability for you just taking a course and doing this on your own, and it is less expensive, for sure, than working with me one-on-one.

But the first real step in Clarifying Your Voice that I think would be the most helpful for you – and I say this out of love, I do, because I actually think it would be helpful – is to work with me one-on-one over a week. So, this is where you take the Fascinate Assessment, you have Your Fascinating Voice self study program that I just mentioned, and then you gain customized insights into how to leverage your strengths toward your specific goals and the hurdles that are getting in your way. You also fine-tune and activate your own mission statement based on what you learn about your voice and the kind of difference that you want to make in the world, and you determine a clear next step for your journey.

So, this is over the course of one week. So, you do a little bit of work, I do a little bit of work, and then we come together for a meeting where it’s a strategy session. It’s an hour and a half strategy session.

And then the second step in this is to Design Your Influence – this is working with me over the course of about five weeks. So, the idea behind this is to get a crystal clear picture of how others see you and your voice and your influence with not only what we had just talked about, Clarifying Your Voice, but also with our Voice of Influence 360. It’s our custom 360 assessment where we send it to people that are close to you who can give you really helpful feedback, and we do a deep-dive session on that, and then discover and plan for your personal momentum builders and points of friction.

So, we figure out what’s going to build momentum. We figure out what is causing friction. We try to relieve that. Sometimes friction’s a good thing, so it’s not all bad, but these are things that are helping you get more aware. And then we take a specific focus on one of three areas over the course of the next few weeks that we get together. We either focus on your Performance and Productivity, your Personal Brand and your Platform or your Leadership Development.

Performance and Productivity is sometimes what leaders choose to focus on. “How can I become more productive because this is a big issue for me? I’m overwhelmed and bogged down. I want to do better.” Sometimes this is for a team member who has a very important role that they play, but their performance is lagging and you’re not quite sure why or you want to help them. This is a great program for them. The Personal Brand and Platform option – this one is more for somebody who’s wanting to speak and write, and how to do that even more clearly, more powerfully. You want to take that next step.

The other option for this Design Your Influence portion of the program is Leadership Development. So, with Leadership Development – we’re focusing more on how you’re leading your team, how you’re getting their buy-in, how you’re communicating with them, how they’re communicating with one another, that sort of thing. And then we create a six to nine month strategic action plan for your next steps. So, everything that we do when I’m working one-on-one with people is we are focusing on that next step; “Okay, let’s get this thing under our belt, and then what’s the next step?”

So, the third part of this program… if you choose to do all three. Sometimes people just stop at the first one, sometimes people stop after the second one, sometimes people take it all the way through Activate Your Voice of Influence. So, again, it is Clarify Your Voice, Design Your Influence, and then Activate Your Voice of Influence. This is where we take everything that you did in the work that we’ve done prior to this, and we put it towards an actual project that you want to accomplish.

So, different things that our clients have done with the Activate Your Voice of Influence portion of working one-on-one with me. They’ve made a strategic shift in their team’s approach to sales and business development. Over the course of six to nine months, revamping your onboarding processes and onboarding communications. Develop, create, and market an online course. Outline and write the first draft of your book – which, let me tell you, it’s really hard to do that. In six to nine months, I will say that that is a very difficult task to accomplish. Collaborate with your team to create a Team Anthem – like their values and the team “DNA” and that sort of thing – and implement it into the fabric of your team’s processes and communications.

So, this is one way that you can hit the Fear of Confusion. You’re not sure what to say or how to say it? Oh, come knock on my door. I would be so happy to help you figure that out and help you get your expertise into the hands of the people that need it.

All right, so we’ve talked about the Fear of Incompetence and being able to figure things out, the Fear of Confusion and your ability to get clear. You have what it takes to get clear. You just need to decide if it’s worth investing your time, energy, and money in.

And then the Fear of Rejection – this is the fear that, “If I put myself out there, I might get hurt.” And it is a universal fear. So many of us hate rejection. “If I put myself out there, if I offer this to the world, how is the world going to respond, and what does that say about my own identity, about my own value?” “If people reject me, if they reject my offer, are they rejecting me?”
“If people reject my offer or don’t even listen to it, is it worth me being here?” Existential questions that are really, really hard to grapple with and very scary, quite frankly. But you can choose to love your clients, your prospects, your audience. You can choose to love them more than you fear their opinions of you. You can choose that.

The first time that this really hit me was one of the first times I was speaking in front of over a hundred people in an audience, and I was so nervous. I was so nervous, but I remember looking at them before it all started, and I thought, “These people here, I’m doing them a disservice if I come in here and worrying about what they think of me. This is not about me. This can’t be about me. This has to be about them. This has to be about whatever I can offer them, and if it’s not perfect, if I don’t come out looking like a champ, that doesn’t matter as much as how people are changed. Does this actually make a difference for somebody? It doesn’t matter if I come out looking like a hero because I’m not the hero. They’re the hero – the person in my audience, the person on my team, the person who’s listening to what I have to say, who needs what I have to say. They’re the hero in their own story. I am not the person that comes in and saves the day and looks like the hero.”
So it doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter how I come across. When it comes to this Fear of Rejection and how we handle that fear with love, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how other people see us. We need to come to that point of offering with love in our hearts for them, with a desire to be for them. And at that point then, we can do the work of understanding their perspective and help them take whatever next step it is that would help them on their journey.

So, as somebody who is “the guide and not the hero” as Donald Miller would say, as someone who is the guide, we can be that person who sees a bigger perspective but not just the bigger perspective. We’re not just seeing it from the lens of our own solution. We have to get into their perspective and consider what they’re going through, consider the amount of time and energy that they’re putting into something that’s not working, to consider, “What does it feel like for them where they’re at right now? What do they need to take that next step toward their goals? Is that something that I can help with?” And I’m not just talking about being a coach, but everybody’s kind of a coach in this scenario. Because if you’re somebody with expertise, you have a vision for where people can get, where they can go. Therefore, you have the opportunity to give people the next thing that they can do to help them get there.

So, when it comes to selling your idea, to getting people to get on board, to sharing something, to actually selling something; there are three core fears. They’re not the only core fears, but they are three core fears. The Fear of Incompetence – that “I don’t have what it takes.” How do we combat that? We combat that with love, where we say, “You know what, I may not know how to do this, but I can figure it out;” that confidence in your own resourcefulness.

The Fear of Confusion, or feeling like, “I don’t know what to say or how to say it.” We meet that with love by first having a vision for where we could be, what we’re trying to accomplish, and then being willing to invest in the outcome, being willing to invest in that goal that you have; whether that be an investment of time, energy, finances, people resources, whatever it might be.

And then the Fear of Rejection – this is where you feel like, “If I put myself out there, I might get hurt.” How do we combat that with love? We do that by caring more about the people that are sitting there in front of us than we do our own ego, than we do what they think of us. We care about them more than we fear what they think of us. And how do we show that? We show that by taking their perspective, by really having empathy, getting into their shoes, understanding where they’re at, and figuring out, “What is that next thing that I can provide that would help them along their journey?”

So, if you ever encounter these fears, know that you can get out of them with love. You can overcome them with love. And if you need any help with that, you know where I am. I’m at voiceofinfluence.net. We would love to talk to you about working with you one-on-one or working with your team. But whatever you do, know this. Your voice matters, and you can make it matter more!

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