Let’s talk about ego, and what that has to do with your selling process…
We all wear masks. As marketers, our goal is to sell to the mask, as well as the person hiding behind it.
I’ll explain.
You, me, and everybody else has a practically unlimited number of identities.
You have the identity you take on in a family setting. And separate identities you use when one-on-one with each family member.
You have identities representing who you are with your friends. One for every group, and one for each individual.
You have work identities. Identities you take on when interacting with peers, colleagues, and coworkers, as well as identities you take on for your boss or clients.
These identities are your masks. They’re roles you play, created for the different “scenes” of your life.
And for most of us, these identities are fake.
Sure, they have elements of the truth to them. But they’re never THE TRUTH. They’re always only the parts of the truth that we’re comfortable revealing, in that situation. Mixed in with enough misdirection so we won’t be embarrassed.
Most of us, in most situations, work really hard to appear better than we really believe ourselves to be.
Better-skilled.
Better-prepared.
Better-informed.
Better at anything and everything.
Inside, we still feel like children…
We feel like we’re completely unprepared. We’re not ready to face the next challenge. We’re not even ready to face the day.
We have demons.
We have darkness — shadow.
Fear. Insecurity. Doubt. A million vicious voices screaming:
“You can’t.”
“You’re not good enough.”
“You’re worthless.”
When we were teenagers, we couldn’t hide this insecurity and angst.
Teenagers get a bad rap. All these feelings are simply swelling up to the surface, and they don’t yet have the experience in suppressing them.
When you reach adulthood and become a “well-adjusted” adult, it doesn’t mean these feelings go away. At least not for most of us. Rather, we just get really good at hiding them, shoving them down.
(This isn’t healthy by the way. Healthy is dealing with them. But most people — including you and me — still have a ton of these feelings that we’ve dealt with by holding them deep inside, rather than actually getting real with them. And since that’s what most people do, that’s who we are speaking to in our marketing and selling.)
In reality, we’re all just insecure, angst-ridden adolescents, waiting to finally grow up.
All the way up to religious figures, political leaders, CEOs, and high-performers in any field… (Heck, becoming a celebrity of any type is a MULTIPLIER of all this junk.)
If you imagine them as a helpless, confused kid trapped in an adult body and trying to pull it off, you’re about right…
If you want to move someone, you have to speak to the masks they wear, AND the child inside…
I use this language knowing there’s likely to be some confusion around “inner child.” That’s not exactly what I’m talking about. Although it may speak to the same reality.
Any time you’re trying to lead anyone, whether it’s through your marketing, through your content, through your business leadership, or elsewhere…
Remember that deep inside, they see themselves as that little kid who is really still trying to figure the world out…
Surrounded by a bunch of adults who seem to have their acts together…
And so they’re sitting there, trying to pretend like they know things, too, to avoid anyone figuring out what they really are — a fraud, a fake, someone who is playing too big for who they are.
Speaking to this awkward, insecure child is precarious.
They feel like everything is their fault. They feel like they’re the victim. They feel like they are in over their head, and totally unprepared for whatever comes next.
They also have a glimmer of innocent hope, that they’re on the cusp of figuring everything out. That they’re about to arrive. That they’re going to cross whatever threshold can suddenly makes them a real adult, like everyone they see around them.
They are in the constant process of becoming, and that is your entry point.
Wherever you want to lead them to, if you are helping them become what they are meant to be, what they see as their destiny, you will get them excited.
And yet, you can’t make them feel like a fool who hasn’t figured it out yet.
That’s where the mask comes in. The mask they wear in relationships thinks they’ve got relationships all figured out. The mask they wear in their career thinks they’ve got all the skills they need. The mask they wear in health and fitness says they’ve already been doing all the right things.
The challenge is bridging that gap.
Here’s one incredibly powerful technique you can use…
The key is to shift the blame away from the child inside, and away from the mask. Break either, and you’re busted. Speak to both in a way they don’t feel broken, and you can really communicate with them, to move them.
It can be through a common enemy, a conspiracy, or some external force outside of their control.
Something or someone has held them back, or prevented them from getting what they need to finally become who they are meant to be, for real.
Better if it’s a nameless, faceless “thing” or public figure at an arm’s length, than someone close to them.
Example…
Americans have horrible health. (And it’s not just Americans.)
A huge part of that is tied to our diet.
If you’re overweight, have diabetes, have heart problems, or have any of a huge number of ailments, it might be tied to what you’re eating…
EVEN, if you think you eat healthy.
Why? Because for decades, what we’ve been taught is a “healthy” diet is. We were taught that fat was the enemy.
So we got loaded up on foods full of added sugar and salt.
Why? Because a few decades back, the sugar industry paid off some Harvard “researchers” to significantly inflate the dangers of a high-fat diet.
The media and our culture bought it hook, line, and sinker. Sugar is okay. Fat is bad. Follow that and you’ll be happy and healthy.
You were lied to.
It’s not your fault.
But now that you know, you better flip your diet. You better stop eating those sugar- and salt-loaded foods.
You don’t have to cut out sugars completely. Our bodies are made to process natural sugars.
What you need is a diet that’s a lot closer to what we had long before processed food and grocery stores. Whole foods. Natural amounts of fat, sugar, and other nutrients.
Your body is made to stay healthy with that diet.
Not this high-sugar junk we’ve been fed now for decades — that’s carried us to a health crisis of epic proportions.
Zooming out…
See what I did there? If you bought the low-fat myth because that’s what you were taught, I gave you an out.
Your inner child who is waiting to discover a healthier way to eat to become the healthier you found it in what I said.
But the mask of knowledge, the ego that “knows” even when it doesn’t, has an out because I told you that you could even believe HARVARD and still be wrong (because of those crooked researchers who took bribes from the sugar industry).
Done right, this is incredibly powerful.
In fact, this is especially powerful when put in the right part of your sales message — where you’re looking to invalidate other potential solutions they’ve tried.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
