Don't be a hero. Be a guide.
We’ve all heard about the idea of the hero’s journey, where the main protagonist answers the call, goes out on an adventure, overcomes obstacles and challenges and finds strength and wisdom in the process. It’s a full circle kind of adventure all about transformation and transcendence. If you're an entrepreneur, then chances are you are pretty familiar with this storyline.
Every entrepreneur has had a series of moments in their life where they realized that something could be done differently - our own unique cluster of catalysts for why we start a business in the first place. We set off and start taking action in the world. We face obstacles one-by-one, working long hours, climbing steep learning curves and perhaps putting in more blood, sweat, and tears than we anticipated. After 10,000+ hours of mastery, we're ready to come back home and tell the world all about it.
At this point, it’s easy to want to position yourself as the hero. Our websites become shining showcases of our achievements and all of the ways we can make peoples lives better. We fill our sales copy with all of the ways that our clients are currently failing and how we can save them from themselves. We pile on the inadequacy, trigger their fears, hype up the scarcity and over-promise on all of the ways that we can solve their problems. Talk about a dysfunctional way to start a relationship!
With that set-up (aka traditional marketing techniques) both the entrepreneur and the customer are set up to fail in the end. The customer fails because they bought from a place of fear and impulse instead of cultivating healthy rational decision making. The entrepreneur fails because an unhealthy set of unrealistic expectations have been created that they most likely can't live up too.
Don’t be a hero. Be a guide.
The best way for a business to be in service to other people is to let your customer be the hero of their own journey and be the guide instead. How do you do that?
Let them know that you've been where they are currently, you know the territory and you can help them with the obstacles that they are about to face.
You can give them a really good map for how to make it through and can equip them and support them along the way.
You can also set up realistic expectations for the role you are about to play and healthy boundaries for where that begins and ends.
Genuine collaboration and initiative are so much more likely to be fostered when a healthy dynamic is created. Your relationship will be built on the real tangible impact you can have on their path rather than fear and manipulation. I don't know about you, but that's looking a lot more like the client relationships I want to have.
The hero dynamic has been overplayed. Let's put it to rest and see what's down this road shall we?