Remember who it's all for

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Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom: your weekly dose of useful insight.

I remember planning a wedding, ten years ago, and stressing about the table decorations. I didn’t want them to look like everyone else’s table decorations, or for people to think I was blindly follow wedding trends.

Here’s why that’s stupid: the only people who know about current wedding trends are other people who are planning weddings. Most of those people were on Pinterest… not at my wedding.

Yesterday, I was chatting to a Consultants of Choice member, who was telling me about the new certifications she needs, so that her consulting practice will look more legitimate.

As gently as possible, I let her know: most of the customers who need her help have no idea what those mean. The only people who would know are her competition, and they’re the wrong people to be focusing on. Her customers aren’t searching for certification, they’re googling how to solve their problems.

Who and what are you doing it for?

This is a useful frame for lots of the choices we make in our day:

When you get dressed for the day - who’s perspective are you thinking about?
When you make home decorating decisions, what is it for? Are you designing it to look good for a theoretical, infrequent visitor, or to be a functional space you can relax and do your favourite activities in?
When you decide what kind of career you should have - who’s lens are you looking at it through? Your parents, your peer group, or yourself?
When you write your LinkedIn profile or website copy - what do you want people to think, feel and do? Is that obvious?

Do you want a life that looks good on social media to an invisible following, or do you want a life that feels good on the daily to wake up to?

How to talk so the right people listen

You might want to take this approach when choosing how you describe things, too - especially at work. Corporate documents are the worst - do you want to prove your organisational change is a good idea, or do you want people to give a shit and get on board? Choose your focus accordingly.

I spend a bit of time scrolling through the websites and LinkedIn profiles of consultants and public speakers. Sometimes I’ll read their whole homepage, or profile, and have literally no idea what they do, who they help, or what they’re on about.

Here’s what I think happens:

They’re describing themselves in a way that other people like them will understand
They’re trying to stay ‘catch-all’ for fear of scaring off a potential customer type