Processed Thinking
Processed foods are hazardous to your health. That’s a medical fact. But are processed thoughts hazardous to the health of your business?
Do processed thinkers kill business?
They can.
Today, I had lunch with a very successful friend and client of ours. He’s a very animated character. He is extremely bright, passionate and oozing with energy. On the table was a discussion about producing a joint event together. As he explained his vision for the program, I kept resisting his ideas because I felt the content didn’t justify the cost.
In my mind, I was thinking that is so basic and obvious – everybody knows that.
Each time I objected, he rebuttalled, “That’s because you’re a processed thinker!”
After rinsing and repeating this cycle a few times, I finally had to take a few minutes to consider WHAT exactly he was saying – I had never heard that term before.
What does it mean to be a processed thinker?
As someone who recently attended our Influencing from the front seminar, my friend shared with me some of the key take-aways he had received from our event.
In addition, he listed off all the skills that program teaches and the concepts that Influenceology teaches and how they impact his profession – Chiropractic.
It was a refreshing reminder of something I had learned a long time ago. In order to create value for your clients, you only need to know more than they do.
All the things that I think are so basic and rudimentary, to our clients are earth-shattering new concepts.
I was looking at the “value created” from my point of view, not from my customer’s point of view.
I was making decisions as a “processed thinker”.
A processed thinker is someone that has lots of experience or training in a certain area. They have been exposed to a certain way of thinking – they process information almost automatically.
I am a processed thinker in personal development after having spent so many years working for Anthony Robbins. NLP, Meta-frames, affirmations, incantations, Wheel of life, Alkaline diets, spiral dynamics, belief systems, these are things that my brain has processed a gazillion times (not to be mistaken for a brazilian times – which is way bigger). Yet, every year, there are 1000’s of people who are having their lives transformed because these ideas, these concepts are brand new to them.
I am also a processed thinker in the fields of presentation skills and marketing. Preframing, Storyselling, commitment frames, law of commitment & consistency, anchoring, contrast, marking, AVK, structures, SEO, wordpress, PPC, CRM, forms, CSS, HTML are all things that I often ASSUME everybody knows, because I know them.
It’s simply not true.
As a hobby, I enjoy producing EMD (Electric Dance Music). I have a friend that is a signed recording artist and has produced for some of the biggest names in music. He needed some help with a website so I helped him out in return for a private lesson in music production. We spent nearly 2 hours going over a process that he is able to do in less than 2 minutes. It’s so simple for him because he has been doing that for the last 9 years, but I was blown away. I enjoyed every second of it. It was worth every minute I had invested in his website (which he had spent hours trying to solve on his own and I fixed it in 15 minutes).
Have you experienced this? Do you rattle your brain searching for ways to delivery value to your clients that is out of this world – to blow their minds?
My guess is you do. And I bet you do it with “processed thinking”.
I doesn’t have to be that hard. You possess, knowledge, experience, tools and skills that you assume aren’t valuable, because, “hey! who am? Everybody knows this stuff”. But they don’t. They don’t even know a smidgen of what you know in your field of expertise.
And if they do, they aren’t your ideal prospect.
Here is a 3-step plan to ferret out some easy ways to deliver value to your clients and prospects.
Step1: Write down a list of the 20 simplest tasks that you do every week or monthly
Step2:Create a video tutorial with step by step instructions on how to accomplish that task.
Step 3: Send it out to your sphere of influence as a “How-To” tip
The lesson here is that even the most rudimentary, simple thing that you could with eye closed has value to a person that doesn’t know how to do it. So the next time you are producing a product, creating a blog post or making a video, remind yourself that it doesn’t have to blow your mind, it just has to be valuable to right person. With this philosophy and time, you will be sure to add value to everyone in your circle of influence.
[Ed. Note: Jeff Paro is the co-creator of Video Marketing Content. 52+ Weeks of Unique and Valuable video marketing content blueprints that build deep meaningful relationships with your database, website visitors and social media followers. Discover how you can leverage the power of video here. You’ve never seen anything like this before.]
