How to Speak To Your Avatar

So I was in an event this week, speaking at my friend Julie Hawley’s summit. It’s the growth, what was it called? The conscious Investors growth summit. And this lovely gentleman, he comes up to me after I’m done speaking, and he’s sharing a little bit of his story. He was a police officer in a past life for the majority of his life, and now he is stepping into entrepreneurship, and he was recently diagnosed with ADHD. And so he comes up and he’s like, dude, it’s amazing hearing your story. I really appreciate it. You sharing these tactics and strategies helped me focus because I feel when I was in the police force, it was so easy to manage my ADHD. I didn’t realize I had it at that point, but it was pretty easy because that world, that environment was just so rapid fire, so much multitasking and switching between activities.

It never let your brain have a moment where it just needed to be with itself. But now, as he’s an entrepreneur, he’s finding himself having to sit in front of computers and do computer work and admin and all these things. And he’s like, it’s hard. I’ll be honest. It’s really a struggle. He’s like, but I love what I do, and what he does is a very interesting thing, and I think it’s actually very, very valuable. He helps real estate agents who are doing open houses and doing showings. He helps them protect themselves against violence that might occur, and it’s something that you might not consider.

Like, you maybe never stop to think about the fact that being a real estate agent is kind of dangerous in the sense that you’re often going into an environment where there are no other people with a stranger and that other person, you don’t know what their intentions are. And so his whole training is helping real estate agents, specifically female real estate agents, to protect themselves in those situations, whether that’s through the self defense side of, like, here’s what you do if somebody comes to attack you, but here’s how you. But also, like, the preparation side, like, what you need to be on the lookout for. So it’s a very, very fantastic service that he’s offering, and he has these clients that he served who’ve come to him and been like, you changed my life. You’ve really helped me a lot here. So he’s doing this remarkable service, and he’s learning the ropes of entrepreneurship, which is really cool. It’s a process we all, if you’re watching this, high probability that you are also an entrepreneur and you know what it’s like to try and figure it out on your own. And one of the things that’s really hard to figure out, I think in the beginning, when you’re first stepping into your business, your product, your service, is figuring out who exactly is your avatar and how do you speak to them.
So he kind of knows pretty precisely, to a high degree of certainty, actually, who his avatar is in a way that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners don’t know. In the beginning, he can really narrow it down to female real estate agents. Pretty straightforward, right? But the problem is, once you know who your avatar is, you then have to be able to put yourself into their shoes and speak their language and talk about them and talk about their problems in a way that resonates with their avatar. And this is where I think a lot of us go astray or have a difficult time. Like, we might have a great product for a perfect avatar, but it’s in our ability to communicate it to that person that we are getting lost in translation. I say this all the time, is that Victor Hugo said, there’s nothing in the world more powerful than an idea whose time has come. But an idea is only as effective as your ability to communicate it. If you can’t communicate the idea, then it can’t change anybody’s life.
And he shared with me one of his mottos or one of the little phrases that he uses to help stand out in the crowd. And it was something to the effect of helping savages go savage or something, when savages need to go savage or something like that. And it was worded much, much better than I just gave it credit for there. But the key word here was the word savage. And I was like, you know, just hold up for a second, dude. That’s great if you’re trying to attract, like, a 22 year old dude who resonates with the word savage. The problem is, I don’t know any female realtor who is going to see the word savage and think, that’s me. I resonate with that.
And they’re not thinking, I need to release the savage within. That’s a message that would apply coming from the background of being a police officer, where he’s probably hanging out with really high testosterone dudes, predominantly, and of course, there are women in that field, but predominantly, he’s going to be hanging out with high testosterone dudes. The idea of unleashing your inner savage makes a lot of sense, but is that the type of word that your target audience would use to describe themselves is that the desired outset. I don’t know any female who really wants to be a savage, per se, so I was like, just that one word might be turning your audience away. You have a great message, and you have the ability to put out some content that could truly change lives. But your messaging might just be slightly off. And so play with that and think, what is the word that my audience would use to describe themselves and their problems? What is the desired end state that they’re trying to get to? What does that look like? And then. And use those terms.

Use those words. So this is one of those ways that we just kind of subtly shoot ourselves in the foot. We don’t even realize it. So I wanted to share it with you, give you an opportunity to reflect on your avatar. What are the words you’re using to describe them in their problems? And is that actually a term that they would use to describe themselves? If not, it’s time to do a little bit of work and figure out what that is. So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate every single one of you for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode.

But until then, stay happy, folks. It’s my friends.