There’s an exception to every rule, a caveat to every piece of advice.
For years I’ve been mentioning how people die standing still; that when you don’t try is when you fail; that not choosing is still choosing and it’s doing so poorly.
Alas, the long awaited exception to standing is if you’re empathizing.
It’s harder to empathize when you’re moving forward. To have complete empathy, you have to stop, see the world through someone else’s eyes and smell the roses the way they smell them.
Our minds love to ideate the new and cool, imagine the unimaginable, and stretch tactics into new ways that reach our target or sell a product.
Much like writing, the real struggle comes with editing.
Editing the ideas down to what’s truly going to impact the business goals, what aligns with the strategic ways you plan to communicate with your customer and what the available funds allow.
It can suck to kill a good idea, but if it doesn’t align with the structure that will generate revenue and generosity with customers, then it’s not on point.
Stay Positive & One Reason Having Many Ideas Is Better Than A Few
One form of hiding is tucking yourself away from the hard work of emotional labor. We hide ourselves from risk and run away from things that spark fear in us as we try to make progress.
Another form of hiding, and an equally scary one, is the hiding we do of our struggles.
The path to our own desired goals and achievements is riddled with struggle and hardship and disappointment of the worst kind – disappointment in ourselves.
And we hide it. We keep the struggles secret. We let on to others that we’re fine, not drowning.
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I was once told that if I and everyone around me threw our work in a pile, we would go back in and take our own out.
Imagine what we would do if we threw our struggles into a pile.
Take others for them? Take our own and give others the benefit of the doubt? Take any because we’re all struggling with the same problems?
Who knows, but it’s comforting to think about.
Stay Positive & Chances Are You’re Not The Only One
It might take awhile to get your story nailed down.
It’ll take some rehearsing, some feedback from people you trust and criticism from people you don’t to get the story to a place that resonates.
It will definitely take some time and revisions and fluidity to have your story resonate for different groups of people (your family, your employees, your fans, your non-fans, etc.).
All of this considered, not taking control of your story by telling it is the worst form of hiding.
Anyway, if you don’t tell your story, someone else will, and it’s harder to get back control of your story once someone else has hold of it.
Stay Positive & Start Making It Your Own (By Telling It)
When you ask someone what they love about a venue, it’s quiet rare for them to offer a laundry list of attributes. There’s almost always a hook. That one thing the place does remarkably well and that gets someone to come back again and again (and bring their friends).
The trouble I see many businesses get in is that they optimize their space for the wrong things.
Instead of listening to what people want and go there for, they spend their time and money improving things they, the owners, want or think is best.
Either that, or they focus on becoming average by making sure nothing sucks, but nothing’s out-of-this-world, either.
Better businesses – the one’s we remark to others – listen and then invest accordingly.
And if it’s not a straight investment, they’re okay sacrificing one attribute to excel at another. Many times that produces an even greater stamp of approval from fans.
“Their seating arrangement is pretty uncomfortable, but the food is so, so worth it.”
For most businesses, it makes sense to focus on a hook, to give fans something specific to talk about. Just be sure it’s what people are coming for and not what you wish they would come for.
There’s a waiter who doesn’t smile, doesn’t nod to a good day, who merely wants to get by below expectations. That’s a waiter who isn’t just having a bad day. It’s a sign of a poor work culture.
Culture is powerful. As Seth Godin describes it, “People like us do things like this.” Culture is energy and in the service industry, it’s essential to build, refine, nurture and leverage.
But in the face of bad service, we can’t let a personality guise what’s really at fault.
We all have a story that we’ve been telling ourselves over and over again, for better or for worse.
We haven’t rehearsed it, necessarily, but we continue to tweak it based on reactions we get.
My story has always been about sternly deciding. Even as a kid, once I made a decision, I stuck to it, I elevated it, I worked on it. In the bike of life, I never had pedals that could move me backward.
That wasn’t always a story of mine, though. I had others about my misfortunes, about everything being a game, about no one caring what I wanted and about everyone caring.
And that’s the beauty of the story we’re telling ourselves.
If it’s not helping you, change your story.
Stay Positive & And Then Use It Until It Doesn’t Help You Anymore
