Dave Alsobrooks
The Mindset Mindset
Knowing your audience is essential in any conversation. This applies not only to conversations in the middle of your sales funnel or how to retarget, but also when speaking with your uncle after a year of being sequestered, bumping into your yoga instructor away from the studio, or replying to a friend's text when she unknowingly just pissed you off.
How well do you understand your audience? You may not know their income or educational background, but you may know that they get frustrated when waiting in line, any line, even the express lane. Or that they have a strong people-pleaser mentality. You know them as people, as human beings. You understand their mindset and how they approach life. This is valuable.
But mindsets can change, and that's what makes them tricky. It requires some listening to determine someone's mindset in a given situation. Listening can be challenging in a busy world, but it's essential for effective communication. Yes and no questions and answers are useful for setting parameters and establishing boundaries, but true listening can fill in all the gaps in between. Think about the flow of traffic in a city like New York—it oozes along between the rigid boundaries of streets and avenues at its own pace, only loosely adhering to the soft barriers of painted lanes. Understanding the flow and volume in real-time provides a more accurate insight than simply measuring the distance between points A and B.
These days, it is important to prioritize listening over bombarding others with cold, hard facts. Simply relying on statistics, demographics, and behavior metrics can limit possibilities and overlook the complexities of individuals. While these data points are immensely valuable, it is also crucial to consider people's mindsets and circumstances rather than solely relying on their past behaviors, even if they were exhibited recently. It may seem efficient to reduce people to mere numbers, but as we gather more data and analyze behaviors, we risk becoming complacent in our efforts to truly connect what we know and who we are trying to reach.
Mindsets, despite their fickleness, play a foundational role as they shape an individual's approach to the world. They can provide valuable insights for analysis and predictive recommendations. However, even in situations where we have to play the game, it is important to leave space for improvisation and consider mindsets as a means to more effectively communicate.
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Bound creates connection through surfacing truths and building connection. A free 30-minute consultation provides everything we need to know to put together a plan for articulating your story in a way that is true to you and the promises you wish to make and keep with others. The ones that will help you forge deep relationships that serve the long term health of your endeavor.