How Your Messaging Is Unclear – Ep.014

How Your Messaging Is Unclear – Ep.014

SHOWNOTES

Introduction:

• The episode delves into the nuances of effective messaging, exploring the gap between what you intend to communicate and how your ideal clients interpret your message.

Section 1: Messaging Intention vs. Interpretation

• Understanding the subtle differences between your messaging intentions and your ideal client’s interpretations is crucial for successful communication.

Section 2: The Four Aims of Ideal Client Interpretation

• Explore the key factors — Assets, Actions, Abilities, and Awareness — that shape how your ideal clients interpret your message.

Section 3: Common Messaging Mistake

• Learn to avoid the common mistake of telling your ideal clients what they already know and discover ways to keep your messaging fresh and engaging.

Section 4: Going Deeper: The Importance of Context

• Understand the significance of providing deep context in your messaging to prevent misinterpretation and enhance communication.

Section 5: The Role of Framing in Effective Messaging

• Delve into how framing, including addressing the problem, presenting the desired outcome, and seeking feedback, can significantly impact the effectiveness of your message.

Section 6: Understanding Your Client’s Core Beliefs and Desires

• Explore why a deep understanding of your ideal client’s core beliefs and desires is paramount for crafting messages that resonate and drive engagement.

Conclusion:

• Summarize the key takeaways: effective messaging involves aligning intentions with interpretations, addressing common mistakes, providing context, utilizing strategic framing, and understanding your client’s core beliefs.

LISTEN TO SHOW

TRANSCRIPT

I had this on my mind last night. Because yesterday I had someone who is in my mastermind.

He was talking to me and he was like, I have this ad that I put out and it’s got a ton of engagement, but almost every single person. Is someone that is not a good fit. And he was like, so I know it’s a messaging problem. Because it’s actually getting leads, but almost every single one of these leads are about three steps behind where I need them to be, to be a perfect fit for my offer.

So he was like Ashley, you’re the messaging queen. Is there any way that you could take a look. I said yes, absolutely. So I started looking at it yesterday. He said it over and I did a loom video for him, but as I was reading it, I started to see a few things and, recorded this live video for him.

And I was saying, here’s why certain things are attracting someone who is at a lower level than what you had intentionally wanted to attract. So. I want to talk about that today. And a few things that I saw in his post as well is that I see so often in messaging and in content. And so I want to start it off by saying there are two parts to this, right?

There is your intention. A lot of you guys, right? Your messaging or not law, you guys, everyone, you write your messaging, you write your content with an intention. Sometimes I even want to add that that intention is a subconscious intention that you actually don’t realize that you’re doing.

And I actually see this a lot. I can, when I read content, I can, 100% feel the energy that that piece of content came from. And it goes back to the intention, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, but you have an intention with your messaging. Most of the time, if you’re selling an offer, your intention is to get a lead right.

To, to sell your offer. And the flip side of that is the interpretation of the ideal client. And this is where I see. So, so many things go wrong and. With my, my friend that’s in the mastermind, he was basically like, my intention is to get this person, but they’re coming to me and they’re saying this, this, this, this, and this.

And it was almost, their interpretation was completely different than what he had originally thought his intention was. So I want to talk about this because what ends up happening? Any person receives a piece of information. If we read something, we hear something, we watch something. Every single person will have a different interpretation.

And there’s a few reasons for that. Because the interpretation is actually, this is if you’ve heard me other, other podcast episodes, or if you, if you’ve worked with me, you’ve heard about my foray method, right. I talk about my foray method and it is a way that I break down ideal client. And the reason why I break this down as I use a lot of NLP, which is neuro-linguistic programming because.

The way that our brains work is a lot of the times when we hear something, we see something, we experience something. We are going to process, process, process it in a completely different way than the person sitting next to us. Even if they heard the same thing, they saw the same thing, they experienced the same thing.

Everyone is going to have a different interpretation based off of what I call for. Right. Four things. So the first is the assets that they already have, what you own, things that you, that are your property, things that you own. So I will give you a really simple example. Let’s say I’m a coach persons next to me is a coach.

And an asset of mine is let’s say I have 10 clients. Okay. I have 10 contracts, signed clients working with me. The coach next to me has four signed contracts next to me. We are going to have different interpretations or different thoughts about that. Right? Those are two different assets. Even if we had the same asset, let’s say that I had 10, she had 10, we are still going to have a different interpretation of that.

your interpretation is going to come down to four different factors. Assets are going to be the first one, depending on what assets you already have. The second part of the aim, the four AMF is the action. What actions has someone already taken to get the assets that they currently have, or to not get things that they want.

So what are the actions that they’ve already taken and all of these things, again, go into interpretation, right? And then the third one is. What abilities does someone have? Because I could probably have the ability, I can have the ability to write, copy and messaging. My husband stinks at it.

He doesn’t have that ability. You’re not that he could learn, but he doesn’t have that ability right now. And then the fourth thing is the biggest, most important thing. And this is where I spent. So, so, so, so, so much time with my, with my clients. The fourth one is the awareness. The awareness stage are what are the person’s values and what are their beliefs?

And when, I mean beliefs, what are the mindset thing going on in their head that you can’t see that are causing them to take, to feel a certain way and to take certain actions, right? This is where the magic happens. But the thing about it is your beliefs can change every.

And this is why when I create messaging, why I create content, I do it from a place of a mindset and belief shifting content. I will give you a prime example. Let’s even look at the term of having a lot of money. Okay. First of all, that’s completely subjective. What I think is a lot of money might be completely different than what Jennifer thinks is a lot of money.

But let’s just even use the phrase a lot. Someone might think, oh, that’s awesome. I’m successful. I’m it’s freedom. Right. But then another person might hear the term having a lot of money and they immediately think Greek or they think risk or they think responsibility. And. It’s again.

It’s what are their beliefs? So if you are a coach and you’re out here talking about, I can help you make a hundred thousand dollars a month, you need to know what are the money beliefs of your ideal client. And when you’re speaking to those who need to know how to ship them, because I desire I desire can be.

Universal. We can all have a desire to want more money, but the reason why all of us don’t have more money is because we have beliefs holding us back from getting those money from getting that money or getting more money. So you have to know what are those beliefs. Okay. And that all goes into interpretation what you believe is going to determine how you interpret what you read, what you hear and what you see. So you as a service provider, if your messaging is not speaking to and overcoming and shifting the negative beliefs of your ideal client, they are going to interpret everything that you say in a different way than what you intended it to say.

And then if you have the fear of being misunderstood, Raising my hand over here, you’re going to then get frustrated. You’re probably going to resent the people coming along. And it’s just going to cause you a lot of things and making it mean something, because any time we read something, anytime we see something, we put meaning to it based off of.

The assets that we have, the actions that we’ve taken in our life, the abilities that we have and the awareness, which goes into what we were taught as a child, our beliefs, our core value, I religion, all of that. We will make something mean something based off our interpretation. So you as a business owner, this is why I always say that so many people do not know their ideal client well enough because you do not know them on the awareness.

level You do not know them on the, what are they believing level? You do not know them on what were they taught as a child level. Right. And because you don’t know that what you’re putting out, your intention of what you’re putting out is not being interpreted the way that you intended it to be interpreted.

And this is what I see. So I’m going to actually walk through I’m going to walk through three or four things. That I see happening that will calls messaging to be misinterpreted. So this I talk about this quite often, but I’m going to do it in a different lens today. So telling them what they already know.

I see this so much in content. Where they are literally telling people their ideal client, what their ideal client already knows. Now the intention of this is could be two. Make them aware of what they’re talking about. I’ll give you an example of my friend in my mastermind.

He, he helps people create habits, right? Like morning habits. And he kept saying, change your habits, change your life. And he kept saying, you have a habit problem. And I was like, your, your ideal client already knows that they all, they have probably heard 50 million times. Your idol Klein has probably already read the five hour work week or.

Atomic habits. Like they’ve already read all of these things. They have heard everything that you were saying before. They’ve probably already taken action on everything that you’re saying before they already know they have a habit problem. Right. They already know this. So again, his intention was not a bad one.

It was just to bring awareness. But the interpretation that I usually see what happens. The people who he’s trying to attract, he’s trying to attract that person. Who’s already taken action, who has read those books who really want to join his program to get support in doing it right? Because his is all about not implementation, but integration.

His intention is to attract those people. But really what that is saying to those people is you’re just like everybody else and quit rubbing it in my. Right. And this is what I talk about all the time with manipulation marketing, where you are trying to make your ideal client wrong so that you can be right.

So you’re telling them, and you’re prodding on those pain points and you’re just reminding them of all the things and mistakes they’ve made and the bad decisions they’ve made in the past. And when you do that, you’re literally on a subconscious level telling them that they’re not good enough that they can’t trust themselves.

And it gets them. Right because they feel dumb and they feel stupid and you’re calling it out. And it’s not, again, that’s not your intention, but a lot of times that is the interpretation. I’m also giving you another example is that has nothing to do with business. How many times I’m going to laugh because my husband’s over here.

How many times has your spouse or your parent or your friend or somebody told you something like 10 times. And you’re just like, I know you’ve already told me that, right? I don’t understand what you’re saying. You quit telling me the same thing over and over again. We’ve all been there. And this is what happens a lot in messaging.

This is what happens a lot in messaging is that you just keep telling your ideal client what they already know, but that’s not the actual problem. For him. What we did in his messaging is I told him I was like, to them, they’ve already implemented. Right? So you can’t keep telling them, you just have to keep taking the actions.

They’ve already taken actions and they keep falling off the bandwagon. That is what you need to speak to. So we literally went in and we. It’s not about implementation. It’s about integration. You’re doing all the things that you need to do, but the reason why you keep falling off the bandwagon is because we’re trying to implement all of these changes at one time, instead of slowly integrating them into your routine.

And when we said. That makes so much sense. And we completely changed that. And he was like, God, this feels so much better. This speaks to someone so much higher than what I was getting. And he was getting the lazy people on the couch who didn’t want to do anything, but they I mean, they hadn’t taken any action towards doing anything.

And so that’s what we did. We changed it. So instead of sitting here, harping on the idol, Being wrong. We basically were like, no, you are doing all the right things. Right. You’re taking out two fricking yes. Hallelujah. Good on you. I want you to take action, but there’s just a small tweak you need to make, to be able to really stick to taking this app.

So that’s what I see a lot is that people are always trying to tell their ideal clients what they already know. You’ve heard me talk about this too, about Doug content. And I’m always like, duh, if someone reads your content and they can literally go duh, or I already know that you have to change your content and your messaging, you are not speaking to them on a deep enough.

I’m going to keep going a third reason why I see your messaging getting misinterpreted is because you aren’t going deep enough with context. Okay. Now you probably rolling your eyes cause you hear it’s not about content. It’s about context. Okay. I’m going to give it to you in a completely different way.

When I say there’s not enough context it’s because you’re speaking so broadly on a circumstantial or an action level. But you’re not putting in enough context as to what is happening around that action or that circumstance. Let me give you an example. Right? So the same behavior or the same circumstance can take on different contexts.

Okay. So I’m going to give you a real life example because I studied abroad in Holland. Okay. I studied abroad in Hong Kong when I was in college. I absolutely loved it. And this is what I’m going to give you. I’m going to give you two different incidents. Okay. I’m in Hong Kong and I’m standing to get on the tram and a elderly man comes up next to me, grabs my arm.

Okay. And puts his head. On my shoulder. He was probably in his eighties. Bless his little heart, so sweet, but he comes up and he lays down on my shoulder. She’s a complete stranger. Okay. Cool. In Hong Kong that is actually very common. Elderly are worshipped basically in Hong Kong because they are very wise.

And if you are if you’re on a tram and. An elderly person is standing and you do not get up out of your seat and let them sit. You are, you are seeing it’s very disrespectful. A lot of elderly in Hong Kong are not put in nursing homes like they are taking care of in their own home. Like their family takes care of them.

They’re highly respected. Now in the U S if I was standing, waiting to get on a bus or something, and an old man came up to me and like immediately grabbed my arm and laid on me, it would be a completely different experience. Right. I’d probably be like, oh, what in the world is going on? Right. It’s a completely different experience.

And knowing these two stories, you have to have the context, right? If I just said there was one incident where I was standing in LA, like standing in line and someone old man came up to me and laid on me. And I told you that story in two separate things, but I didn’t give you the context of, I was in Hong Kong versus I was in the United States.

The whole story would be completely. Right. You have to have the context now, what does this look like in business? I hear this all the time of people like, okay, I can help you get to 20 K 30 K months, 15 million other coaches can say the same thing. You need to have context. Okay. What type of business are they?

Where are they starting? Right. What other things are going on into their business? How are they marketing their business? Are they using organic marketing? Are they using ads? Are they using Instagram? Are they using video? Are they using, what are they using? You have to have context and I do not see enough context in messaging.

Like it, it, I just feel like sometimes I can read something and I’m like, I feel like I just read that three other times. And. You can’t go too broad. You have to get so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so deep in context, now, using the same example of Hong Kong, if I told that story and I didn’t give you context of why it was not rude, right.

Why that was not rude in Hong Kong to do that, you would be like, okay, Right. It would be completely different. I mean, I gave you context. I gave you background. I’ll give you another example. I took international business was my major in college and we had to take an entire course on cultural practices and other countries because it was international.

And I cannot for the I’m like, I totally just lost it. I cannot tell you what country it was, but. I have to go look it up. There’s a specific country that if you Burke, that is a sign of respect, that the meal was so awesome. So like your loudest biggest belt was a sign of respect. If you do that in the United States, that’s disgusting, right?

If you’re at a restaurant and you belts really loud, people are like, what the world? Right. You have to have context, you have to have context. So I’m going to keep it. That was the third one. Well, I think one or two kind of went together, but that was another thing I don’t see is I don’t see enough context.

And then the last one is what I’m going to call the positioning. Right. So what I mean by positioning is a lot of the times people don’t position or frame things in the right way, they should be framed. Oh, Kristin said, slurping in Japan is good. Yeah, God, I cannot stand the sound of slurping. So maybe Japan is not the place for me to go.

But what I mean by frames is a lot of the times people will position or they’ll frame things in a certain way that doesn’t match what their ideal client is looking for. So I’m going to kind of like lead this into two separate things. So what I mean by frames is there’s in an L in, in, in LP, there are certain things.

Called frames. There’s actually several different ones, but ones that I see a lot of people get wrong is something I call the problem frame, the outcome frame and the feedback versus failure frame. Okay. So what that means is a lot of times people will create content and they put it positioned around the.

Like a problem frame. And because they’re positioning it around a problem, they’re inviting people in who have the problem, but they aren’t solution aware. Does that make sense? You want your ideal client to be problem and solution aware you want, you want them to understand that they have the problem and they know why they have the problem and they know what’s going to fix the problem.

What I see a lot of people do is they, they talk a lot about the problems that their idle clients had or, oh, you’re not getting clients not getting enough leads X, Y, Z, but then they’re trying to sell the outcome, which is the next one, the outcome frame, or they’re trying to sell the solution, being like do Instagram reels when that person’s not even on Instagram, that’s not why they’re not getting.

Right. And so you didn’t try to convince them that they have the problem and the, they need the solution that you offer. So they need to then actually, instead of framing it in a problem frame, they need to frame it in a solution frame or an outcome frame. And sometimes I see the opposite is where I’ll see, they talk strictly about the outcome, but they never talk about.

How they actually help that person get the outcome. So then they’re going to say, oh, I help you lose 50 pounds. Right. Let’s just say your health coach. You say, oh, I helped you lose 50 pounds. But the way that you do it is CrossFit. And then you have someone who comes in here who has had surgery on both knees and they can’t do heavy lifting.

So they have a desire to lose the 50 pounds, but because they have some type of medical. Restriction, they can’t do that. That’s not the easiest way for them to lose weight. So I see that a lot too, is that they then go straight always to the outcome, but they don’t actually speak to how they’re actually helping that person get the outcome.

And then the last frame is feedback versus failure frame. And this is weaves into what I was talking about earlier, instead of giving feedback as to what they see this person I don’t want to say doing wrong, cause I don’t think it’s doing wrong instead of getting feedback on their expertise and giving feedback on the things of the blind spots that they see.

They instead put the ideal client into a failure frame of you’re a complete failure because you don’t have this result yet. You’re a complete failure because you have this problem. You’re a complete failure because. You took all these actions and they didn’t work and now you feel stuck and you’ve tried everything and it didn’t work.

Can we please just use that, remove that line because you have not tried everything that is literally just putting your idle client in a very low level mentality. I would scream from the rooftops anyways. You get my picture, right? And so instead of giving feedback, they go into failure. And when you go into failure, you then can step into failure avoidance, which will make your client go get so overwhelmed with the fact that they haven’t gotten the outcome or results.

That they immediately will self-sabotage and go into failure avoidance, which means they don’t do anything or they do other patterns that are just going to keep them in the same cycle that they’re in. And that’s doing your client a huge disservice. And the last thing that I want to talk about, which is, I think the biggest reason why a lot of this happened.

Is roll my eyes a little bit because I feel, I feel like in marketing. So when people are like, you need to know your why you need to know your why, and it’s good to know your why, but you also need to know your client’s why, and I don’t need to say just their one, why you need to know their why why’s there are multiple ones.

What I mean by this, right? Is that everyone has desires. We just talked about outcome. So many people want the same. But why do they want that outcome? And when you ask why they’re going to say a few things, and then what they say, you can then pull out what it is they value and what it is they believe.

Let me give you an example. Everyone has the desire to increase profits, right? I think every business owner on this planet has a desire to increase. Profits can all agree on that, right? So. If I ask them why they might say something well, so then I can be able to pay off debt or that I can be able to have the savings in the account X, Y, Z.

So I can say, Hmm, based off that information, what are their beliefs that I could mirror back to them is that more money will bring more stability. So to them, I believe that they have is money equals. Do I believe that, or is that belief that, that thought that they have that belief is that self sabotaging them in some way.

And if I believe that it is, that’s the thought that I need to shift, but you have to ask them why, right? The desires are not the why the desires are, this is what I think is going to solve or get me to my. And then you have to understand, okay, well, where did that widen come from is a belief of some sort.

So the underlying belief of peop of maybe this person, my ideal client wanting more profits is because they think more money equals more stability. Right. And some people don’t think that really cause you, we use that earlier. Right? Sometimes more people think more money, more problems. They don’t think it’s more stability.

They think it’s more responsible. Right. And the reason why I bring this up is because what people find the most meaningful are the things that are core are connected to their core beliefs and those drive everything right. And core beliefs go into safety. What’s going to keep me safe. What’s going to help me grow.

Great. Survival, how am I going to survive? Right. And these are all programmed into our subconscious, but the desires that people have will always present there, they will always, always come from their core beliefs. And if those core beliefs that they have are not serving them. Then that’s what you have to shift, right?

Because I actually don’t believe that I’ll be straight, honest, you, I don’t believe more money will bring more stability because stability is subjective. Right. And I also feel that. If you are irresponsible with little, you are more likely going to be irresponsible with more. And if you’re irresponsible, that will never create stability because you’re going to continue to have beast and famine nuts.

How many people have had these abandoned months? Raise your hand. Maybe it’s because of. A month or two, you go really, really hard and then you get all the clients and you’re like, ah, yes, have all the clients. And so I don’t really need to show up in market. I’m just going to focus on my clients.

And then when the clients start to dwindle, you are like, oh my God, I went from a $30,000 a month to a $5,000 a month. And then you go into this panic of, oh my gosh, there’s no leads and I’m aluminum live it up. Right. And you go crazy. So the $30,000, didn’t not $30,000 a month. Did not create more stability for you because a month later you’re literally in the exact same spot you ran before you made the $30,000.

It’s because you have some, some belief, right. That is not allowing you to fulfill the idea that more money will be stability. So I think that’s a lie really at the end of the day. Right? Do you see how I did that? No, it’s probably confusing as my brain goes, but I hope that you, I hope that you can understand that and you might be thinking like, this is so deep.

Like why does any of this matter? Copywriting doesn’t teach this it’s because as coaches and consultants, your messaging is a reflection of your mindset. And if your mindset. I believe some of these things too, then you’re going to call in people who also believe some of these things, and it’s going to be really difficult for you to help them.

If you guys are both struggling with this, right? And if you don’t know these things, you’re always going to be calling in clients who are not a perfect fit for you. And this is what I, this is the reason why I do what I do, because when you call in clients who aren’t a good fit for you. You go into the spiral and the cycle of feast or famine months, you go in the cycle of resenting your clients in the, I just want to quit my business.

I don’t want to show up anymore. I want to create a new offer. I want to change it. You can’t scale. I just want to be that honest with the, you cannot scale. Right. But. It’s not the bad clients that are coming in. It’s your messaging that is attracting. Those clients are coming in and that’s your fault, not your clients, right?

Or the potential clients coming in. The reason why you’re attracting clients who are not a perfect fit for you is because you’re putting messaging out there that is calling. And because you don’t know who you need to target on the awareness and belief stage. This is why digging into

who your ideal client is to their core is so important. And I don’t see other people doing this. I don’t see people positioning it the way that I position. And it is how I’ve been able to close high tickets without hi tickets without sales calls, because I am literally speaking to the soul of my client there.

I can’t even tell you how many times people were like, I feel like, you know me better than I know myself. And I’m like, no, I’m just mirroring what you’re telling me back to you. And I’m letting you see it because I don’t have the ability to change. You only, you have the ability to change. Oh, it’s so I can talk about it for days and days and days, but I don’t want this to be the longest episode ever.

So I’ll end with this. Cause I have one more. I just realized I have one more example on my thing. In relation to the context and I, I should share it. I wrote down the way we communicate means more than what we communicate. And we’ve probably heard that several times. And I think that’s also where a lot of people get wrong with the context is that we are so focused on what we need to communicate versus the way we communicate it.

I will give you an example. Let’s just use the word. Yes. If I said yes, yes, yes. Same exact word, three different tones of voice, all three meetings. The first I was, yes. With a question mark, right? If you read that, yes. The question was like, huh? The other one was yes. With the exclamation point.

So excited versus yes, probably with periods dot, dot, dot that would be an annoyed. Yes. Alright, same word, three different interpretation based off of how I said it, which would be communicated in in a like speaking format. Auditory format is the word I was looking for. Second one is written format question, mark, exclamation point that, that, that we all read those very differently.

We have completely different thoughts, completely different emotions. Overall that right. I bet when I said yes, you probably thought of a time, like a question of like, when you question something, when I said, yeah, point you probably thought it was a really exciting time where you were screaming. Yes. Like all completely different versus yes, no dot.dot.

And I roll my eyes. You probably thought of me as a teenager being like, yes all different things, but if I just have. Yes. Yes. Yes. Britain three times on a piece of paper, you wouldn’t, they wouldn’t mean anything different if there was not context to them. So that’s what I meant by context.

I forgot to share that in the context part, but I love it. I hope this was very helpful. This was something that I tried to get a little bit deeper. I was like, okay, I’m going to nerd out on this a little bit. Again, to get this deep with your ideal client, it’s so important, and these are very simple things to fix in your messaging.

That will have a significantly larger like outcome and attract a completely different caliber of. And I just had talked to him. I tried to talk about him today, so that’s it. All right, I’ll talk to you guys later. Bye.