Have you become the tool?
This article explores the concept of integrating external tools into your personality in order to build a stronger business by creating a stronger connection with your audience.
For this article, let’s use the example of me starting as a door to door salesperson selling electricity contracts.
When I started the job, I had no idea what I was doing. In fact, the moment someone would open the door, I wasn’t even able to say more than ‘Hello’ before I would start to stutter and stumble over my words.
The way I learned how to sell properly was by learning from external sources. I was given a script to learn and I received coaching from people who had the required experience to teach me. The external sources gave me the tools needed to learn the basics of selling.
At some point I started to analyze what it was that separated the top selling people of the average selling people within the company. What I found was that most top selling people were not using the tools in the exact same way that they were taught to use them. They had tweaked the tools to fit their style of selling while the average selling people were using the tools exactly the way they were taught to use them.
So are the tools faulty then? Should they be improved?
No, the tools were perfectly fine. They just were not created for high level selling. They were created to build a basic layer of competence. They were created to provide a foundation to build on top off. They were never created for high performance, they were created for basic competence.
The average selling people were using the external tools to sell. The top selling people took the external tools and made them internal tools by integrating them with their unique personality. By doing that, they were able to provide the potential customers with something the average selling people weren’t able to. Connection.
We all needed a foundation of competence to enable us to present and communicate a message. We all needed external tools to bring us a basic ability to deliver our message. The question is: Are you just using tools or have you integrated those tools into your own personality?
When you make a video of yourself, are you able to combine your authentic energy with the tools you have been given to deliver a meaningful message and create a connection with your audience?
An imperfect authentic delivery beats a perfect inauthentic one.
If you struggle with creating a connection through your delivery, ask yourself if you are truly showing your authentic self or if you are just delivering your message through the tools that you have been given. If you are rigidly holding on to external tools and theoretic rules, start to experiment and try to break the rules a little just to find out what happens. By doing that, you will find new ways of communicating that might work better for you.
An imperfect authentic delivery beats a perfect inauthentic one.
