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Your Call to Adventure
We talked a little bit about your customer's journey of transformation and understanding that through the lens of the hero's journey story architect. I'm actually going to issue a call to adventure to you. Essentially, harnessing the power and force of transformation to build your business is a hero's journey for you, as a leader, as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, as a product designer. When you look at the companies that have managed to do this, they're basically like three flavors or ways that journey plays out. Sometimes it's a journey, I call it a customer journey, where customers all have this one kind of problem and then the company helps them solve for that problem. And a whole industry's cus target audience can actually experience change in their life. Sometimes it's a whole industry journey. Like, hotels were out there trying to make a bunch of better hotels, and then Airbnb figured out a way to help people stay in homes and feel like locals. Right, so the whole industry has ...
sort of transformed, had this transformational journey. And, sometimes it's just a company specific journey. You're doing this, now you do that. (laughs) but, regardless of which kind of transformational hero's journey your business is going to be on. It's not going to get there without one or more leaders, one or more people will have to intentionally decide to make a change. This is true whether your business is you or whether your business is 10,000 people. Somebody kinda has to decide that they want something to be different in order to start doing the projects and rethinks involved in serving a transformational consumer. The sort of call to adventure that I'm gonna issue today, is to challenge you, watcher, (laughs) to be the leader-hero who decides to take that journey. If your company is 10,000 people, you may not be able to turn, in fact especially if you're the CEO, (laughs), it's actually really hard to move that ship. And also, all of these changes take one person to start them. I'm challenging you to decide that you're going to take a journey of your own. To kick start some change in whatever realm you have influence. And in fact, this kind of thing can be that career making influence creating type experience. If you decide to use your journey toward leadership in your career, to make your customer's journey of transformation easier, that is how beloved brands are built. It is generally someone decided. (laughs) I see this issue, I see customers having this problem, I know this is what we exist to help solve for, I'm gonna figure out someway to do it in my little way. That is how careers are made. That is how influence is made. That is how brand love is won. It is how brilliant product ideas are innovated. It is how content is created that people just fall in love with, and read, and watch because it changes them. Start thinking about what your journey is gonna look like. Start visualizing your quest. Start visualizing the result that you would like to see, the thing that you would like to see change in your realm of influencing your business. And, plan for it. So often, we'll take a course, and read a book, and get a really cool idea, and be like, that's awesome, and go back to work, (laughs) the next day. As a a matter of change management, it's sort of like that thing you know, nothing happens unless you put it in your calendar is my experience of life right now. To the point like someone asked me yesterday, what's that alarm? There is an alarm on my phone, a nine p.m. every night for brushing my dog's teeth because if I want it to happen it has to get in the calendar. That is just how it is. Allocate resource to it, plan it, decide you're gonna spend some time on it. Map it out, calendar when you're gonna spend the time on it. Clear out, there's this concept I teach a lot in Soul Tour of decathexis, are any of you familiar, well a couple of you have done those programs, but is anyone familiar with that phrase decathexis? So, cathexis is when you do anything or engage in any behavior, relationship, interaction, you invest some of yourself into it. You pour some of your energy into it, little or big, pour time into it, money into it, whatever. Decathexis is when you stop doing that thing and you get a bunch of that back. No matter what it is, if you stop doing something, you get some of that energy that inner fire back to devote then, then it's freed up. You can figure out what to point it at. Often, with really busy people like many of you are, you wanna do a change initiative but you don't stop doing anything else. There's no resource for it. Plan it, visualize it, and plan it, allocate resource to it, stop doing, decide what you're willing to stop doing to do the work of the rethinks that it takes to serve your transformational consumer. And, if you are working with a team, and all of us are. Even if you're a solo entrepreneur your often working with a designer, vendor, whoever, a VA, or maybe you have a big team, actually put some sort of thought into change management. If you're doing something this way right now, you want to be doing it this way, many things may have to happen to get you from here to there. And there is an incredible body of work on how to manage change in groups of people. I would say there's some of that treated in the book, just put some thought into it. Don't expect it's just gonna happen 'cause you read the book or watched the brilliant videos. (laughs) Alright, so let's talk about what the journey looks like though, that I can forecast for you pretty easily. There are basically five individual facets of your business that you have to rethink if you wanna do this work of reaching, and engaging, and become beloved by the transformational consumer. The first is, you have to rethink what you sell. It's in red, 'cause we're gonna talk about it right now. (laughs) The second, is that we have to rethink our competition. And I'll tell ya, I'll just flag for you, when I say rethink, I don't mean like tweak. (laughs) I mean like, there's some paradigm shifts that we're talking about. The third, will be rethink your customer and to become an expert on their journey, which we'll dedicate a whole session to. And the fourth, will be to rethink your content and marketing, which also gets a whole session today. The fifth, goes back to some of the things I was just talking about in terms of change management and rethinking your team, and your culture, and how things work, and figuring out how to influence them, even from perhaps not at the top.
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