Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes can be life changing.
But what if the shoe doesn’t fit? Or rather, you just don’t want to wear them because you have a well enough idea about their life that you know you would rather keep your shoes on. It’s like the saying that if everyone threw their problems in a pile to exchange for someone else’s, you would grab your own back after seeing the problems everyone else has.
Fortunately, you don’t need to wear anyone else’s shoes – whether they fit or not. The significance of shoes is that you can judge a man by the bottom of his shoes, you do not need to wear them.
“If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?” – Gloria Steinem
No Gloria, despite the pressure to do so, you can learn more from looking at the bottom of the shoe than putting it on or changing your life so that the shoe fits. Meaning, you can see where the owner of the shoes has stepped. It is a waste and can often not be a pleasurable experience to live someone else’s life, but there is a significance to knowing where they have stepped rather than living their life. By seeing where they have stepped, you can discover either what got them into such a sour spot or such a sweet spot. Their history is written on the bottom of their shoes. Their legacy just so happens to be the piece of chewed gum that they stepped on.You don’t need to gain an understanding of where they are, you only need to know how they got there and wearing the shoes does not tell you that.
Stay Positive & Follow The Footsteps Of The Shoes That Stepped In Success
When you play a sport for the first time, you get sore, but through the soreness your muscles and body improve and grow in order for you to play the sport better. After a good few months of playing and practicing, your body no longer gets sore. Then what? The average activist would go on playing the sport only to find that they are making little improvement in their physique and skills. The intelligent activist would switch up the training routine whether it is by doing a different kind of sport (preferred) or merely working directly on separate strengths necessary for the sport. If you are not feeling the soreness, something is wrong. That means you are in your comfort zone, that you have plateaued and will develop very small improvements, if any.
In businesses, the soreness is called failure, often created from mistakes which were made because you are training and practicing. If you are not feeling any businesses soreness, then you are either not training hard enough or you need to change your routine to succeed any further. Don’t let your body or your business plateau, avoid habitual “sport” strategies.
In the Business Sport of Soreness competitors die standing still.
An alarm, if unique enough, can wake up any person every single day. But very few alarms are capable of that. After using the same alarm over and over the person will begin sleeping through it. The alarms that work wake a person instantly causing them to be mentally alert. The first thought they have is why the alarm went off.
This is your best window of opportunity as a Marker to communicate to your client. The content you deliver will be the decision maker whether the alarm get’s snoozed or even worse, unplugged. Look at it this way, if you knew that you were going to Paris tomorrow, you’re not going to hit the snooze button because you are too far excited. As a Marketer, your product or service you signify has to have the same effect.
Now, it is not so much what you have to give, it is what your prospects get to do, get to have, and get to feel. Those three variables are what your alarm has to communicate. They don’t care what you are offering, they care about the by-products they receive in addition to their package. The only people who I know that wake up simply to get what people have to give are ebayers, and what you are offering better not be applicable to ebay. If you don’t have a good enough reason for waking them up, it’s back to sleep for the prospect and back where you started for you.
Alarms are risky, but if you don’t take the risk of the prospect hitting the snooze button then you don’t “risk” them not hitting it either. This generation is all about quickness, impulse, convenience and accessibility. That means the alarm needs to be instant, jolting, and precise. There is no time for a 2 minute elevator speech or a half-page bio of your service/product. If you can’t pass the alarm test and gain enough interest for them to wake up and act, change the ringer.
If you can’t connect with your prospect even with a change of alarm then use a back up plan and issue an alarm with the first thing most people do in your niche audience. Is the first thing they do after waking up is check their email? Do they go to Starbucks? Do they read a specific blog or online content in the morning? Get in those places and insert the alarm. Be the first thing that makes their day full of excitement and worth it.
Alarm Marketing is a new outlook at the fast-paced lifestyle of the current and future prospects. It limits the time frame that advertising and PR needs to be invested and applies the 80/20 rule more so than is advised. It implies that you, as a Marketer, have about a 4 hour time bracket each day to be the answer of a prospects problem and be the reason why waking up was easy. It also incorporates the frequent change of tactics to keep prospects appealed and coming back.
Don’t Think The Prospects Alarm Is The Only One
You know what rhymes with the “ring” of an alarm, the “cha-ching” of money being handed over to you. As @ClemensRettich puts it “Biz needs to hear the ring of the cash register as an alarm: time to wake up and follow through”. The alarm of the “cash register” means your work has just begun. You have to follow-up and give even more than what was expected. Their purchase and investment is your alarm and there is no snooze button on it. Either you act immediately or you lose your prospects future business. Clemens continues to add that “Biz fall asleep after the cash register rings. Too bad, because retention and referrals are where the value is”. With that, I will add that you can’t run a successful business if you are solely based on getting new customers because you didn’t wake up to your alarm. Business advancement as well as monetary accumulation is the sole result of recurring, reliable and committed prospects.
Stay Positive & I Resisted All This Time But… “You Snooze, You Lose”
Doctors, fitness trainers, entrepreneurs, marketers, writers, you name it, they all have a similar problem when they become experts on their muse. The problem is that the more you know, the more exposed you are to the harms, negatives and possible downfalls of the topic. This happens as a result of learning all you can about your muse in combination with that fact that in order to be successful in any work place, you need to know as many failures as possible and how to solve them. I am going to give you a few examples of what happens when these muse workers don’t maintain this one quality they need and see if you can guess what the quality is.
A doctor begins seeing a small rash on his arm and diagnosis it as skin cancer.
A personal trainer assesses her leg soreness and comes to the conclusion that she has severe shin splints.
An entrepreneur knows the expected outcome of a plan so she doesn’t follow through.
The trend with these examples – and you can find the same trend in any expert field – is that they let their knowledge, fears and expectations combine to assume a terrible outcome. A regular person, having little knowledge about playing doctor just thinks they have a rash that will go away in a few days if they take care of it. It does. A person going to the gym for the first time and upon exiting, realizes that their legs are sore. They will shrug, call it a good workout and go ice them without the thought of any terrible condition. It never turns out to be. An entrepreneur upon his first time creating a business, follows through with the plan and the outcome turned out successful, against what other “experts” thought.
The fact is that as you gain knowledge about your muse, you gain power over the outcome and in order to have a positive outcome, you have to maintain a positive attitude. The one quality you need to be a successful expert is to Stay Positive (sound familiar?). You can’t let what you now know, limit yourself. The rules, the outcomes, the results are all based on your attitude.
Basically the same game as Kickball, only with huge mats as bases. It was in 8th grade that whichever team I was on became unbeatable. Not because I was a great kicker (I did happen to hit someone in the groin because they thought I was going to just tip the ball and run. I sure showed them!). The fact my team was undefeated was from my talent in getting the other players out. It seems logically fun that I would get them out by hitting them with the ball before they reached the base.
The trick to my success was that I did not throw the ball normally. Most people would aim, step and throw directly a the opponents chest. No, I couldn’t be normal, average or expected. Once a teammate would toss the ball into my hands I would step, spin to gain momentum and catapult the ball towards the direction I thought the opponent would be. The aiming was done at the last split second before release.
That reason the spin-and-throw move became my strategy was that the first time I did it, I was successful in getting the opponent out, which happened to be the last out we needed. I’ll admit, everyone did look at me weirdly after that, but they continued to cheer and thought “Hey, if it works.” Now it wasn’t necessarily talent that made me successful, or the fact I may have enjoyed hitting people with the ball more than I should have. No, really I was successful with it because I had support, approval and people cheering me on to use my signature move.
Let’s back step. I used to throw the ball normally but I would often miss, decreasing my confidence and my teammates expectations. Since my success rate was less than 90% it seemed right to switch it up. Adding my twist and launch, having been successful the first time, rebooted the confidence. I started at 100% again with the excitement of the other 15 teammates and the awe of the 16 opponents.
The purpose of this story: When success rates go below 90%, change something, do something differently, throw the ball uniquely, because when you do and it works the first time, you start at 100% again. From then on, the confidence and the assurance by all of your teammates that you will be successful gives you the talent you need to continue throwing the ball in a way that defies adversity.
Had I played long enough to experience my success rate drop below 90%, you would have seen another new enticing move that allowed me to strike the opponents out. Change, continuous change, that is key. Those who suggest that by doing the same thing you get the same results are either joking or don’t understand that by doing the same thing, the results weaken and expectations from your peers shorten. But when you switch it up, do something unexpected and do it successfully the first time, not only do you win, but your team does too.
It also distinguishes who your teammates are and who are your opponents.
Except, there are no trophies or awards for killing a bird with one stone. It’s expected, if you don’t then you starve. Killing one bird with one stone is survival, it’s both work and life survival. If you can’t do it, someone else will, leaving you with just the stone. That’s not much of a keepsake.
There are however, small benefits to killing two birds with one stone. Often it gives you a slight advantage by freeing up your time or saving some other resource. There is no need to search around for two stones. For some reason though, in the real world, exchanging a stone for two birds will give you a bit more to eat at dinner but it doesn’t qualify you as a successful hunter.
So I ask, why kill two birds when you can get an entire flock with one stone? The stone throwers who take down an entire flock are the people who can take the 20 tasks of the week and finish them in one day. These people can go to a board meeting and instead of making the boss happy, can make every attendee and the company as a whole happy with the progress and achievement that they bring to the table. Getting an entire flock with one stone is possible and only the most successful do it.
That one stone you hold – ONE stone – can either land you searching for food or provide you with enough food while you take your time and enjoy your flock before you get another stone.
Stay Positive & Avoid Throwing At The “V” Formations, Those Are The Hardest
You know that feeling you get when you really have something on your chest? That weight you have held on to for too long by not doing or saying something. And of course, you know that the longer you hold it in, the stronger the pressure on your chest gets. That terrible feeling that continues to build until you can no longer bear it and you choose to finally get whatever it is off your chest.
So you do it. You get it off your chest.
Finally! Now the great sense of relief sets in and you feel free again. You enjoy a huge breathe of air and breathe out all that troubled you. By far it is one of the greatest feelings in the world to get something off your chest.
Well…
Deciding to start doing what you love and acting on your passion is a lot like getting something off your chest except that it is the greatest feeling in the world.
In addition to the feeling of relief, you feel excitement, joyousness, accomplishment, positive stimulation, and success among other phenomenally enlightening feelings.
Stay Positive & What Do You Need To Get Off Your Chest And Out To The World?
