In promoting your offers, there’s a very simple rule that often doesn’t get acknowledged or understood.
The simple rule is: “Don’t use post-transformational language with pre-transformational audience.”
So, what does that mean?
It means that the complex or nuanced understanding that you have of the topic or area or problem you address for folks has its own language. And, many of your best clients no doubt adopt the language you use, so you have a common way of talking about it.
However, the folks who have not yet stepped in with you, don’t yet have that language or even the understanding that the language points to.
Why is this so frustrating?
One of the reasons it’s so frustrating is because it often gets interpreted as having to “dumb down” for your audience, which is NOT true.
You do not have to dumb down your ideas. However, you cannot effectively talk to people about things they don’t yet know, and especially not in specialized or technical language.
For instance, this really comes up in the Third Station of the Heart, and its conditions, its states, and… what? What am I talking about?
Well, that’s very Sufi-specific language that I rarely use even with my clients. While it might be intriguing in small doses, ultimately it loses people.
If you must know, the Third Station of the Heart has to do with Politeness, also known as “Right Relationship.” Which is a profound spiritual teaching, and also applies in this context.
I don’t have to dumb down the idea of “right relationship,” of being polite with people’s hearts. I also don’t want to go on a whole esoteric lecture about this concept, I want to stay focused, with politeness and care, on what’s important to the person on the page.
If I had written this with a title referring to the Third Station of the Heart, or Politeness, and then went into the language my sheikh used with us as his students… 90 out of a hundred wouldn’t have gotten past the headline, of the ten who did, nine of them would have quit after a paragraph or so.
Because it’s using post-transformational, or specialized language to speak to folks who are totally unfamiliar with it. They aren’t less than, there’s nothing wrong with them.
To make it even simpler, when I was in college I spent time in France and learned to speak French. Which is completely the wrong language to be speaking here in central Pennsylvania (German, Spanish or Hindi would have been more useful).
Practical two minute exercise:
- What’s an important concept from your speciality, training, or focus? How would you talk about it with another specialist?
- What part of that concept is useful to someone who has never even heard of the work you do?
- Can you write or speak a paragraph about that concept in plain language, without any specialized terms?
For an example, you can see what I wrote about not speaking French in central Pennsylvania.
I know you want to help people.
We all do, we want to help so much it sometimes aches. The first step is to find the language that they speak, and let go of using our own specialized language in those contexts where someone has not yet committed to stepping in.
It’s our job to be the first to be vulnerable, to be the first to open our heart, to be the first to try being accessible. Once they become a client, they then have the commitment, and the desire, and the need to learn the language, as they are going through the process of being transformed by your work.
I’m curious how this lands, and if you have any questions.
with love,
Mark Silver, M.Div.
Heart of Business, Inc.
Every act of business can be an act of love.
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