How to Leverage What Everyone Has In Common for Your Success

How to Leverage What Everyone Has In Common for Your Success

What is most personal, is most general.
– Carl Rogers

Empathy.

It’s often defined as the ability to sense another’s emotions…or to connect with another on a personal level.

It can seem like a niche, soft skill. Not one, perhaps, that you need to prioritize in your business.

However, sometimes simply putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can provide the essential insight you need to level-up a business decision.

Interested in making your brand messaging personal, real, and instantly successful?

Want to motivate your employees to help them get through a hard project?

Need a metric for gauging a product launch’s success?

Take a minute.

Close your eyes.

Think about how you’d like to receive that message. Which words would speak to you. What problems you’d need a product to solve. The inspiration you’d need to get fired up.

Here’s a surprising fact: We’re not as unique as we think we are.

What resonates with you will very likely resonate with another.

What are YOUR personal pain points…what makes YOU, personally, excited? Write that information down. Make a plan to use it.

After all, the intimately personal is often the most widely appreciated.

Successful comedians often point out that they delve into the most personal stories they can for their material. They dig deep. They cite details.

It’d be easy – perhaps even logical – to assume that this practice would result in very niche humor. The opposite often happens. By tapping into the emotion in their lives, by regaling us with stubbed toes and frustrating bills and the other tiny parts of their day, they’ve tapped into a common human experience. We get that. We love that.

Now, flip that on its head and apply it to your business.

As you think about your customers, think about yourself. Put them in your shoes for a moment.

Here’s how to use the personal to give your business a practical boost.

1. Pain points are surprisingly unifying. If you don’t like something, other people likely don’t enjoy that thing, either. Solving a problem that you experience will make other people ridiculously grateful.
2. Make your marketing streams more specific and personal. You might feel that by doing so you’re excluding wide swathes of potential customers. Avoid this by focusing on incorporating personal experiences – much like comedians do! – to ensure that your brand feels real and personable.
3. Wondering how to motivate your employees during a tough time? Think back to when you most needed a boost. What did you do? Do that for your team. They’ll likely appreciate it.

Struggling, boredom, dejection, confusion: These are all personal, isolating mindsets that we tend to believe we experience alone. That isn’t true. We all struggle.

If you can speak to that most personal part of someone, you’ll be speaking to everyone. There’s power in that.