This One Character Trait Will Transform Your Marketing

There is one character trait will transform your content marketing and social media execution. Correctly applied this character trait will help you to understand your customer and marketplace better than you ever have before. The investment made in habitually developing and exercise this single are of personal development will have a sweeping positive impact across your entire organization. The challenge is that this specific character trait is undervalued today and incredibly hard to refine.

Humility.

The dictionary definition of humility is the quality of having a modest or low view of one’s importance.

But the current meaning of our words can lose the punch they once had when the word originated. Humility is derived from the latin humilitas. Humilitas is rooted in humus which means ground. Humility means low to the ground. So, in other words, keeping ourselves grounded in reality and taking our head out of the clouds.

But I think CS Lewis sums it best, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less”

How will humility transform your content marketing and social media approach? To keep ourselves grounded in reality, we will have not choice but to ensure we intimately understand our marketplace, the state of our ability to serve the market, our abilities to execute, and the nature of our desires to drive growth. This sort of humility will help us to naturally improve the way that we interact with our colleagues, teams, leadership, but most importantly with our customers. The improvement in customer and marketplace interaction will, in turn, result in content that is ordered entirely for the benefit of those we hope will consume it.

A commitment to honest reality, humility, will lead us to a single destination. Excellence.

Consider that today content that is developed for different marketplaces is almost always created with a self-centric primary objective. These self-centric objectives typically fall into one of two categories; More eyes. More leads.

In other words, content and social media is executed by asking “will this piece of content generate more attention for me?” or “Will this piece of content give me the opportunity to generate more leads.” Common to both of these considerations is “me.” In other words, the majority of content today begins from a place of my requirements and needs, not from my customers’, and most certainly not for my marketplaces’.

What we must do is reorder our efforts to place our objectives secondary. A notion which typically generates a fair degree of anxiety that prohibits us from inverting our priorities in the direction of the audience. If we are executing with our objectives prioritized first, even our highest pieces of quality content are going to fall short of making the largest possible impact on our market and to our would-be customers.

To address these anxieties so that we can constantly improve our ability to create content that is developed primarily to meet the tastes of our audience in the hopes of serving them we have to improve our ability to approach the task with humility.

We improve our ability to serve with humility with three simple steps.

Eliminating self-focused aspirations
Eliminating self-focused fears
Creating new hopes

Eliminating self-focused aspirations
We want to be positively recognized for our work. Recognition makes us feel good, keeps us motivated, and frequently drives our actions. These aspirations are natural, but what we must consider is how does our individual feeling of worth benefit our audience or our customers. The grounded reality is that these aspirations of our value have no intrinsic benefit to the market. Therefore, we must seek to create form a place of aspirational carelessness. That is the work product must exist completely beyond the sense of value or worth that it generates in us, and beyond any specific benefit that it generates for the company.

Eliminating self-focused fears
Our aspirations for recognition have a dark side, fear. The fear of being held in low esteem a great deterrent that has power over how we choose to execute. We have to rid ourselves of the anxiety that we have over possible perceptions of our content.

Creating new hopes
The last, and perhaps most important step, in improving our ability to serve our markets with humility is create a new set of professional hopes. We want to place at the center of our efforts the hope that we will not be recognized or commended for our work.

Yes you read that right, we need to hope for no praise at all. Why? Because if we can sincerely hope and desire that our work draws no attention the first two steps are even easier. And if the first two steps are easier we will slowly begin to serve our audience and customer solely from the desire of benefiting them as much as possible.

When we serve with this level of concern for our audience and our customers, we will deliver massive amounts of value to them. And, ironically, receive what we had hoped to have received when we were ME focused. More attention and more sales opportunities.
Getting to this level of humility is hard work. It takes practice and patience. If you are serious about giving it a try here is an exercise to employ.

Begin and end every single workday reciting this mantra.  Seriously. . . give it a shot for just five days; you’ll be surprised at the impact.

I choose to eliminate self-focused aspirations
The aspiration to be esteemed
The aspiration to be loved
The aspiration to be honored
The aspiration to be praised
The aspiration to be preferred to others
The aspiration to be consulted
The aspiration to be approved,

I choose to eliminate self-focused fears
The fear of being humiliated
The fear of being despised
The fear of being corrected
The fear of being forgotten
The fear of being ridiculed

I choose to create new hopes.
I hope others to be esteemed more than I.
I hope others to be others to be chosen before me
I hope others to be others may be praised and I unnoticed
I hope others to be others may be preferred to me in everything,
I hope others to become humbler than I, provided that I may become as humble as can.