Good Life Project - Get Psychic With Your “Avatar”

Episode Date: September 29, 2015

If you've been to the movies or watched cartoons, you've seen the word "Avatar" before. But, when we talk about building a career or company, it has a very special meaning.Your avatar is the person you're looking to help. The one you want and need to serve and elevate. It's your potential customer, client, diner, patient, participant, camper or student.If you want to build a successful career, experience or venture, you need to get to know your avatar on the most intimate level.You need to know her name, where she lives, her age, fears, desires, hopes, struggles, and influences. You need to understand a day in her life, then a week, a month, a year and a decade. You have to understand the conversations going on in her head, the language she used to talk to herself and the pictures she paints with her mind.It's hard work to get this detailed, but it's also make or break. It lets you serve, solve and build on a different level.But, here's the thing. The two reasons most commonly offered to "know your avatar"—to solve her problem better and to communicate with her more effectively—they matter, BUT they're not actually the most important reason to do this work.There's something bigger, more important. Something nobody talks about. Ignoring this reason is a huge miss.And that's what we're talking about in this week's short and sweet GLP Riff. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's riff is called The Truth About Your Avatar. So you may have heard this word, you may have not heard the word, but there's a term called avatar. Some people call it persona. And when you're looking to build a career or business, if you want to be an entrepreneur or solopreneur, people say the first thing that you need to do is figure out who is your avatar. Who is that person that you want to serve and solve for? Who's the person you want to create products and solutions for? Who's the person you want to build your business, your idea around?

And people often ask me, well, why is it so important to find an avatar? And there are a couple of common reasons that are very often offered when this question comes up. So one common reason is that you do it so that you can make sure that you're actually solving a real problem, one that belongs to somebody, rather than something that you're just kind of inventing in your head, because we tend to do that. We are odd people that way. The second reason is that it lets you really understand the conversation that's already going on in the head of the person who you're looking to serve and build around so that you can really create more tailored and effective solutions. And also so that you can create messaging experiences so that you can

speak to them in a way that's more powerful, that allows you to just enter the conversation that's already going on in their head and do it in a way which is compelling and shows that you're there for real and to actually, you understand that conversation, you understand them, and you figured out a way to help. But there's a subtler reason to do this, to figure out who your avatar might be, that in my mind, at least, trumps them all. And it gives you someone to care about other than yourself. It lets you be genuinely of service. And that for you ramps feelings of meaning and purpose with what you're doing. And it gives you somebody to fall in love with. And that really profoundly, it elevates the nature of what you're doing. It elevates the experience of coming up with a solution. It elevates the level of service and touch that you're doing. It elevates the experience of coming up with a solution. It elevates the

level of service and touch that you're then willing to wrap around what you're doing and the depth of connection and the devotion and people will feel that on the level that profoundly affects them, even though they may never even be able to quantify or identify what makes you and what you create so different in a way that's better. And when you do that, not only do you come at it from a place where it's just more joyful and more meaningful, and you get so much more out of it, but so do they, so do the people that you want to serve. So you want to really understand who is that person that you're going to be in service of. What's their life like?

What's the conversation in their head? Who is that avatar? And how best do I serve and speak to them? That allows you to build business most effectively. But at the same time, it allows you to find somebody to fall in love with, and to elevate the experience of what you're building from simply building a business, to being in service of somebody I actually care about. And that gives you the chance to not just build something which is viable and lucrative, but something which returns to you not only money, but deeper

sense of meaning, a deeper sense of contribution and service. So I hope that makes sense. I hope if you're thinking about it and you've been sort of maybe even thinking about a new venture and struggling with having to actually do the work to figure out who is that avatar for you, that this gives you another level of reason to do the work because it's not easy work, but it's really powerful work. As always, I hope you enjoyed this Good Life Project short and sweet riff. It's always my pleasure to be hanging out with you guys. If you have questions that you think would be interesting to answer on future riffs, you can always go ahead and just send those questions over to support at goodlifeproject.com. And if it makes sense,

then I will absolutely fold them into a future riff and speak to them so that we can all learn together. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for a good life project