If you pull this off,
Your customers will be hooked on serving you
Last week, we discovered why groups are so powerful to individuals:
We join a group to escape individual responsibility, “to be free from freedom.”
By joining, we make the group responsible for our failures and frustrations.
And more importantly, by immersing ourselves in the group, we can hide from having to face our fear of freedom.
But it’s not enough to simply join a group and become a part of something bigger than yourself.
To free yourself of the burden of freedom by identifying yourself with a group, you have to lose your own identity. And your customers are begging you for the opportunity to lose their identities and be free of freedom.
Let’s see how effectively this works, as I trash myself in true examples during my Toastmasters days …
Forget my failing career, I’m someone important:
I’m Mr. Toastmaster:
Back in 1998, I moved from Honolulu to San Francisco. In order to meet more people, in September 1999 I joined Toastmasters, the international organization of public speaking clubs. In fact, I joined the two largest, most successful clubs in San Francisco.
I joined for exactly two logical reasons:
- Reason #1: To take my presentation skills to the next level
- Reason #2: To expand my network of friends and business contacts in the new city where I now lived
Being an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for opportunities and within Toastmasters they crossed my path daily. I super-accelerated my speaking skills by jumping on every unfilled speaking slot. I super-accelerated my leadership skills by saying Yes whenever my clubs needed an officer. (At one point, I held 5 offices in my clubs simultaneously, then moved up to growing our district’s 200 clubs beyond their 3500 members.) I super-accelerated my visibility by getting my articles and photo published in the District Newsletter.
Each time I gave a speech, I buzzed off the positive feedback, which boosted my self-esteem more powerfully than mainlining some primo street heroin.
Each time I walked down the street, strange people waved while calling my name, came up humbly to introduce themselves, then walked away with a sense of pride.
The group: An escape from reality:
And more important than these, Toastmasters made up for the frustratingly slow progress I was making in my second career. That feeling that “at least something’s working right in my life,” more than the two logical reasons, was really why I stayed with the group. In the group, I could hide from having to face my frustrations of freedom.
I willingly threw away my own identity, substituting my roles in Toastmasters as who I was: great speaker, leader and contributor. Members began calling me “Mr. Toastmaster.”
Club work was taking up to 4 hours a day of my time. Or more.
Worse, didn’t even notice these clubs were sucking the lifeforce out of me: Writing, practicing, and delivering two speeches a week … organizing 3 meetings a month … and leading the clubs as president, VP education, VP membership, VP Public Relations, and treasurer.
In conversations, I could proudly point to my tremendous accomplishments on the fast track in Toastmasters, whereas I felt humiliated and embarrassed to talk about my career progress – because there wasn’t any.
WARNING:
Definitely habit-forming. Requires higher doses to achieve the same effect:
The self-esteem I was getting was way too powerful a habit to quit. I was a hard-core junkie and I was ready to do anything to get my next week’s fix.
Like that street heroin addict, I needed higher and higher doses each week just to reach the previous highs. At that point, the drug/club began failing and disappointing me. It no longer provided everything I needed. If I didn’t get glowing feedback from my obviously incredible speeches, I got ticked off. If fellow club officers didn’t accept my obviously all-wise suggestions, I felt betrayed.
It was getting harder to escape from the freedom, responsibility, and frustrations of my career and the real world.
Rehab:
And like that street heroin, you either die from an overdose or crash and burn.
And that’s exactly what I did: I had gotten so out of balance from the lifeforce drained from me that I was hospitalized for three weeks. After, I withdrew completely, becoming part of the whispered “Whatever Happened To” conversations. But I didn’t care. I just needed to find myself again.
For your customers:
Think about how you can build your business so your customers can participate somehow with a title and a sense of responsibility:
- Committees and Boards: Clubs and Nonprofits do this well: they form committees and hand out fancy titles along with some responsibilities … And I’m on the customer advisory board of Vertical Response, a large email service provider
- Online games and forum sites have players/customers serving as moderators and administrators
- Content providers (newspapers, magazines, news programs, blogs) have guest contributors: Did you ever notice scratchy-voiced Andy Rooney griping about something for 2 or 3 minutes at the end of CBS’ 60 Minutes? Or do you follow a blog with an entire team of outside regular contributors?
Sure, your customers want a product or service that works. Sure, they want the satisfaction of getting their problems solved.
But nobody on the face of the planet is so perfect and fulfilled that they won’t welcome an escape from their burden of responsiblities with its failures, frustrations.
Give them an escape and you’ll get them hooked on your drug.
Where are they escaping to? With Toastmasters, I escaped to that wonderful place where my group was “making effective communication a worldwide reality.”®
Yep, your customers escape to the non-existent Promised Land. As we’ll see next time as we revisit Mass Persuasion and sacred themes.
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