Do you have the courage to repeat your ideas?

Transcript:

Don’t make me repeat myself. If you’re a parent, you’ve probably said this to your kids. More broadly, I think many of us are afraid to repeat ourselves to colleagues, customers, clients, vendors, other business partners, because we get self-conscious. We lack the courage to be willing to repeat our thoughts and our ideas. And that’s essential for thought leadership.

I’m Bill Sherman, COO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and today I want to talk about the patience necessary to repeat your ideas to get them across to your target audiences. Thought leadership. You may have spent a year, two years, five, ten, a lifetime thinking deeply about a topic. You love the intricacy and nuance, but your target audience may be ready only for a one-on-one introduction. They may only want the smallest detail, the first baby step into the idea. And you want to take them into the deep end of the pool without water wings.

So one of the things that you need is the courage and the patience to be willing to repeat your basic ideas again and again to a target audience, knowing that they’re probably many, many steps behind you. Now, your audience is going to be looking to you for signals. Are you engaged with the one-on-one, or are you disengaged? It’s very easy when you practice thought leadership to be disengaged with the basic steps because, well, you thought about those years ago. But to your audience, they’re new and they’re fresh.

So every time you connect with an audience, bring a little bit of that joy, that spark in your eyes, and be patient, sort of like a first-grade teacher has the patience of teaching the alphabet to students again and again. It’s not new to them, just like the thought leadership ideas you have may not be new to you, but you’re opening up a whole new world for your audience. Anyway, have a great day, and we’ll talk again.

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