Move the Pain Forward

It’s hard to break bad habits. It’s hard to change especially when you cannot yet sense the danger of not changing.

If you smoke a cigarette today you won’t die. Well, at least you won’t die today. And you won’t die tomorrow either.

If you eat bad and don’t exercise for a week, nothing really bad will happen. Your health won’t be diminished, you aren’t any greater danger of cancer or heart attack regardless of what you eat for a week.

Over time, bad decisions have a way of catching up with you. You get to choose your actions, but you don’t get to choose the consequences. And you don’t get to choose when necessarily you will suffer those consequences.

Moving Danger Forward

But this isn’t about you. It’s about your clients. Some of your dream clients believe that change would be simply adding bubbles to the warm bath that is the status quo that they’re comfortable sitting in now. They aren’t compelled to change because the danger, the risk, isn’t close enough to be felt.

Some of your prospective clients will put off the inevitable for as long is as humanly possible. Money not spent today is more valuable than the outcome you sell if it means your prospective client has to go through the pain of change. They’d rather wait until they have to.

It’s easy to change when you have the right motivation. When the doctor tells you that if you don’t quit cigarettes or change your diet and begin exercising you were cutting the very few years you have left off of your life, you can change in an instant. But if the doctor tells you that you may or may not suffer any repercussions from the choice you make for a long time, it’s likely you’ll continue doing whatever it is you’re doing now.

A Little Push

Some of your dream clients need a push. Some of them need you to prod them along. Some of them need you to take the danger that appears to them as something far away and move it closer to help them understand the implications of the actions they’re making now.

There is a reason the basic elements of survival are the largest base of Maslow’s hierarchy can. People will do all sorts of things if their very survival is at stake, including things they would rather not do and changes they would rather not make.

If you would serve your clients you would move that pain forward so they can feel it now and avoid the harsher repercussions that will inevitably come later.