#469 The simple shift that turns your audience from "not interested" to "tell me more" instantly. (Personal development wisdom snippets)

Are you unintentionally making your audience think they don’t need you? 
Discover the surprising reason why "teaching too much" can hurt your ability to connect and convert.

Snippet of wisdom 66.

In this series, I select my favourite, most insightful moments from previous episodes of the podcast.

Most entrepreneurs and speakers believe that solving their audience’s problems during a presentation builds trust and credibility. But what if this approach actually drives potential clients away?

In this snippet of wisdom, my guest Steve Lowell uncovers why revealing problems—not solving them—is the key to becoming indispensable to your audience.

1. Learn the counterintuitive reason why teaching too much content can harm your impact as a speaker.
2. Discover how to shift from being "someone they don’t need" to "the person they absolutely must work with."
3. Get actionable strategies to reveal the audience’s hidden problems and position yourself as their ideal solution.

Listen now to learn how to captivate your audience, reveal the problem they didn’t know they had, and position yourself as the expert they truly need!

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𝗩𝗔𝗟𝗨𝗔𝗕𝗟𝗘 𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗥𝗖𝗘𝗦

Listen to the full conversation with Steve Lowell in episode #382:

https://bit.ly/pdm_382 

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Want to be a guest on Personal Development Mastery?

Send Agi Keramidas a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/personaldevelopmentmastery

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Personal development inspiration, insights, and actions to implement for living with purpose.

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Transcript

Agi Keramidas: 0:00

In this episode, you will discover the simple shift that turns your audience from not interested. To tell me more, instantly, welcome to Personal Development mastery podcast, and this is another snippet of wisdom where I select my favorite most insightful moments from previous episodes. Today's snippet is from my conversation with Steve Lowell, a master of the art of speaking with five decades on stage. It is about the surprising reason why, quote, unquote, solving your audience problem can actually hurt your ability to connect and convert. Let's dive right in.

Steve Lowell: 0:51

So here are some of the most common reasons. First, it starts off again with mindset. If we, you know, and I won't spend a lot more time on this, but if we, if we go into a presentation and our objective is primarily to separate the audience from their money, then it's a problem. It'll never it'll never succeed. But here are some functional challenges, and the first one is this, and I made this mistake for decades, Agi, not years, decades. I made this mistake. And the mistake was I always thought that if I get in front of an audience, and if I teach them a lot of great things, if I teach them how to do this and how to do that, they're going to walk away with some amazing value. They're going to love me, and they're going to want to hire me or join my program. And I've learned the hard way that that's the absolute opposite is true. You see the biggest mistake? I see that that entrepreneurs make one of the biggest mistakes, is that they teach too much, and what happens now is the audience thinks that they have what they need. So we've always been taught as entrepreneurs and even as speakers, we've been taught to solve problems. Our job is to solve the client's problem, solve the audience's problem, but from a speaking perspective, our job is not to solve the problem. If we solve the problem in the audience's mind, then they don't need us anymore. So our job is not to solve their problem. Our job is to reveal the problem. Our job is to change something in the audience's mind that makes them go like this. We want the audience to go, you know, I've never thought of it like that before, or I've never heard it like that before. We want to change their perspective. We want to rattle their beliefs. We want to shake their paradigms a little bit, and now, when we do that, now they're open to learn. They know they have to learn something new. So that's that's the first thing we need to do. The next thing we need to do is we need to step back from the objective of separating them from their money and go more into the objective of positioning ourselves as somebody they need. You see, anytime we speak or present, we only position ourselves in one of two ways, and there are only two we either position ourselves as somebody they need or as somebody they don't. And so if we give them too much content, and if we if we solve their problem, and if we teach them all kinds of things, and if we give them all kinds of solutions, we're positioning ourselves as somebody they don't need, because they're going to take all that great stuff and they're going to go away thinking they can do it themselves, and they don't need me anymore. So to position themselves as somebody I need, I need the audience to go, man, I never thought of it like that before. I'm doing something wrong. I need this person to help me. That's where we have to get the audience. Then after we do that, all the high pressure stuff doesn't need to be done. It's just a matter of sitting down with them and figuring out how you can serve them. Now, there's all kinds of strategy you know behind how do we get the audience there?

Agi Keramidas: 4:04

I would like to ask for two strategies, one for revealing the problem and one for positioning oneself as the person that the audience needs.

Steve Lowell: 4:19

I'll give you an explanation, then I'll give you an example, right? The explanation is this. We need to find a way that draws a straight line between us and the audience's problem, and it's a straight line that they didn't know existed, and that's that's the difficult thing. So it's like the audience, when they first see you, they don't know that you can solve their problem, and then you have to show them that the way you can solve their problem is by revealing a problem they hadn't thought about. So I'll give you a simple example. Okay, so when I speak, I usually tell this story. I first I asked the audience this question. I asked the audience, you know, put. Up your hand if you or somebody you know is in the market for a tennis instructor. Now, when I do that, most people don't put their hands up. Some do. Some don't, but usually, out of 100 people, one hand might go up, because people just generally aren't walking the earth looking for a tennis instructor. So I tell the audience this. I say I'm going to bet that at least 30 of you out of 100 are in the market for a tennis instructor right now, or, you know, somebody who is. So the audience starts thinking, yeah, how are you going to do that? You know? So then I tell him about this guy named Brian. Now, Brian came to me about 20 years ago, and he said, Steve, I'm going to all the events. I'm shaking all the hands. I'm speaking with all the people. He said, I'm just not getting the business that I need. I said, Well, Brian, what do you do? He says, I'm a tennis instructor. And we see what the market is for tennis instructors. So whenever he says, I'm a tennis instructor, what he's doing is he's positioning himself as somebody they don't need. So we taught Brian how to position himself as somebody they do need so now, if you saw Brian today and said, What do you do? Brian would say something like this. He'd say, Well, you know how sometimes kids have so much energy, they're bouncing off the walls, they're so excited, they're making all kinds of noise, and the parents have no idea what to do with these kids. He'd say, Well, what I do is I take these kids. I take kids of any age, I bring them on a tennis court, I absolutely exhaust them, and then I hand them back to their parents, and then I ask the audience, put up your hand if you just might know somebody who might be in the market for a tennis instructor. And all of a sudden, every hand in the place goes up now here's what it demonstrates. It demonstrates the point that just by changing the way you speak, by drawing a straight line between yourself and the audience's problem, a straight line that they haven't considered before, you can change the room from I'm not interested to tell me more, very, very, very quickly. So drawing that straight line, that's the work, that's the part that I do. That's what I do, is I help people draw that straight line. So there is no short answer to how to do that, because everybody's different. But the outcome is, when you speak, you position yourself as somebody they need instead of somebody they don't. And to do that, we need to be clear what exactly do they need that they don't really know they need. And that's how we do that.

Agi Keramidas: 7:34

Thank you for listening. You will find a full conversation with Steve Lowell in episode 382, the link is in the episode description. If you enjoy listening and appreciate what we're doing here, the quick, simple favor I'm asking of you is to click the subscribe button until next time. Stand out don't fit in