Who do you help us to be?

Dan Gregory   @DanGregoryCo

Too often we spend our time focused on what we want people to do or how we would like them to behave.

We issue instructions to our staff, offer feedback to our teams and try to persuade our customers and clients using features and benefits - both logical and emotional.

The problem is, that’s not how most of us are filtering the world.

Every decision we make is to some extent determined by our sense of identity - who we think we are AND who we want to project to the world that we are.

This is an unconscious influence and bias in our lives that we are often scarcely aware of.

However, factors such as our gender, our nationality, the values we absorbed in childhood, the idiocincocies of our version of whatever language we speak, the uniform of our socio-economic status or the part of town we’re from, drive our decision making far more than any other factor.

The truth is, the sale is always in the prospect, not the product.

Influence and persuasion are always sitting on the other side of the table.

And if we want to engage our staff, our customers, our loved ones and our communities, we need to stop telling people what we want them to do or how great our product or service is and focus more on who we help them to be.

In other words, start with WHO.