Life Lesson

I hear from businesses all too often that they want their guests and customers and suppliers to see their effort, their quality control, their determination to make the best product or remarkable service.

They want them to see because anyone who has seen becomes a loyalist.

When you see the effort that a craftsman puts into a product for you, that product becomes more than a product in your eyes. Same goes for any service, too.

And yet…

They don’t shoot and share behind the scenes video. They don’t make it a recurring initiative to include potential guests within the process (whether as a spectator or hands-on participant). They don’t take and share photos of them doing the work.

This is really just a PSA.

If you want them to see, you have to show them.

Stay Positive & Show More And Show More Often

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Assumptions are meant to help us, not harm us.

One of the ways it can help us is if we go into any interaction assuming the other person is struggling with something in their life. (Because reality is, they are.)

Knowing there’s a struggle, you’re immediately more empathetic, more emotionally invested, more caring.

By no means does it become your responsibility to probe for the struggle and help–that’s not the point.

The point is to have the other person feel seen.

And maybe, if we do it enough, others will do the same and we’ll feel seen, too.

Stay Positive & Feeling Seen Feels Good

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There are a lot of reasons to not explore new territory.

The path you’re on doesn’t lead you there.

The habits you’ve formed are easier to maintain.

There are visible roadblocks.

And so on.

But I bet, if you chose to, you could give many more reasons to explore the new territory.

Stay Positive & Which List Are You Reading From?

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There’s a food brand that says their audience is anyone with a mouth.

That wide of a net is a marketer’s worst nightmare.

The reality, though, is that anyone with a mouth is their competition.

A broad set of competitors to push a brand to be the best it could be? That’s a marketer’s greatest challenge.

Your competition (also known as audience) has more marketing power than an endless budget can compete with. They can talk themselves up and their status by playing with a brand. (What’s up influencers?) They’ll be at the forefront of trends and social apps and flavors before you.

Competition is everywhere, and thus, inspiration is, too.

Stay Positive & Go On, Spit It Out

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The solution you’re after might not be found by moving places, but it sure works against mitigating frustration, alienating conflict and breaking a trend of a creative block while you explore or work toward a solution.

It can be as simple as finding a new room in the house, going for a walk around the block – changing your environment in one way or another.

Stay Positive & Change Your Place To Increase Your Pace

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There are the expected competitors; the three you mention all the time and try to be better than. You might even copy their ideas.

Then there’s the more obscure competitors; not directly in your category, but certainly influences it. These are the folks doing actually risky things.

The third set of competitors are the most often forgotten but ever growing and ever more important – people, also known as brands, also known as influencers.

Stay Positive & No Stone Unturned

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Moshpits are amazing. The community is great. Every one I’ve been in, the moshpit has stopped if someone falls. People all around them help the fallen get back up. Shoes and hats and phones that fall get returned. People who don’t feel like moshing get protected by those who can see they don’t want to mosh. It’s really magic.

But a moshpit might not be the way you want your audience to be acting.

When I was at a Bayside concert, people were moshing. If you don’t know Bayside, they are not a moshpit kind of band. Lead singer Anthony Raneri could have carried on performing and letting people mosh, but instead he stopped in the middle of the song and told people to stop. He did so with humility by pointing out how people were scaring him given that he is only 5 foot something.

People laughed and the mosh pit audience turned back to the audience that has been known to be the Bayside audience.

Bayside is really not just a band, it’s a brand. And as any brand does, they pick their audience and then that audience is the brand’s responsibility.

That day, perhaps there were a few people in the moshpit that turned into haters of Bayside. Certainly not enough to counter how much more support and loyalty every other fan felt for the band when it made it clear how their audience was to behave.

Stay Positive & To Mosh Or Not To Mosh (You Decide)

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