My topic is too depressing for my audience

Show Notes

In this episode, I tackle why you’re experiencing a disconnect with your target audience when you discuss tough topics. We’ll talk about your mindset and some practical tips to help you fix your messaging. 

Other resources

• The RELEASE Method - 7 steps to releasing your biggest sales blocks + attracting your next client
• Book a sales call with Khalida

More on Khalida

 

Khalida DuBose is a business coach specializing in mindset and simplified business strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color online business owners nail the foundations of running a successful business and cultivate a rock-solid mindset as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com. Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at [e-mail].

 

The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.

Creators & Guests

Host

Khalida DuBose

Business + Mindset Coach

Producer

Zuri Berry

Principal Producer at ZMC Podcasts

What is The Black Girl Business Bar?

The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.

Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.

Hey friends, welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If this is your first time listening, I am so happy to have you here. I am your host Khalida DuBose. And today I wanna share with you my thoughts on the importance of reframing your thoughts around topics that you're speaking to your audience about that feel heavy or depressing.

So every once in a while, I'm coaching. and I hear sentiments about not wanting to create messages for. My audience that are depressing or too heavy. I hear this a lot and I know I have people in my audience who are life coaches, they're divorce lawyers, or divorce coaches, dating coaches, attachment coaches, therapists, you name it.

But even those people who don't seem to have who work with people who have heavy topics going on, like myself, I'm a, I'm a business coach, but there are still touchy topics that we have to go over from time to time because our ideal clients are dealing with very real pain points.

So sometimes when you have to keep talking about a pain point, it can seem like, wow, am I just being really depressing right now?

So I wanted to talk about this and I really want to focus in here on mindset. And then I'll talk to you about some practical tips, of course. But I wanna focus on mindset because what I really usually see happening is what you're doing is you're typically inexperienced at marketing. Okay. So what I mean by that is you're still exercising your marketing muscle, and/ or you are having your own thoughts. Like you're thinking about how you would feel if you were in a similar situation and you were reading your content, or you were listening to the podcast in which you were talking about the heavy topic on, and how you would feel if you were hearing this information or if you were reading this information. And then what you do is you transfer those feelings onto your customer.

Okay, so I'm gonna say this right out the gate. No building up to it. The problem is not that your audience doesn't want to hear this. Okay. Let's just get that out of the way. The problem is not that the topics are too heavy for your audience. Your audience already knows what their problems are and they are looking for them to be solved.

So that's not the problem. The problem is your thoughts. And that's why I wanna start with mindset because you really have to clean up how you think about things and you have to clean up your own mindset and beliefs before you can start to feel comfortable really diving in and digging into these subjects that are really gonna help your clients start to see their problemsin a different way, and eventually solve them, or start to reach out to you so that they can have the transformation that you're promising.

So let's check in on your beliefs and your thoughts. Okay. I'm gonna ask you some questions and see what resonates with you. Are the pieces of content that you're creating or you're speaking on? Are you absolutely sure that they affect your audience? Or are you just guessing? So are you sure that this is what's going on? These are the issues that your audience is having, or are you just making a guess because maybe you share identities with them or you used to be in the same situation.

I am all for making content that is point of view, but I do really believe that your content, most of it and if I had to break it down in percentages, I would say 80 to 85% of your content should be really addressing the issues, concerns, thoughts, feelings, et cetera, that your ideal clients are having, because that's who you're trying to attract.

Okay. I do think that point of view content can be helpful. I know some people say like, nothing you produce should be outside of what somebody said to you and your audience, your ideal client saying to you. But I disagree. I think that when you produce, point of view content, it helps to, balance out your brand and let people know a little bit about you.

So the next question that I wanna ask is have you made peace with the topics or grown past that stage? And what I mean by that is if you still have these pain points that you're talking about, that you're saying feel heavy and that your audience doesn't wanna hear about, if you still have those pain points or you are still working through it, or you haven't grown past that stage, it is going to feel heavy. Because it's gonna feel like you're, you're guessing you haven't gotten to the other side of it yet. So you're still kind of guessing you're still in the messy middle, and you're guessing about it. And you're trying to talk about it as if you're the expert. And so it's gonna feel like it's heavy and then your brain is gonna try to pass that off to be somebody else's problem, i.e. your audience, and my audience feels like this is too heavy. Right.

And usually a confirmation bias comes in if you're lacking engagement. So if you post something and you're not getting a lot of engagement, then your brain will say, see, it's too heavy. That's why people aren't responding to it because you already felt like it was heavy. That thought came from you, not your audience.

Don't be in a rush to solve everybody's problems. You can solve, just help people solve what you can solve today, trying to solve problems that you haven't solved for yourself yet, where you have no experience with all it does is create turmoil within you.

And then all of a sudden you'll notice, like, imposter syndrome start to creep up. It starts to creep up because you really don't know the outcome, right? Your brain is searching for the evidence that it doesn't have, et cetera. So don't feel the need to do that. If you haven't solved something yet, don't promise it to anybody else.

All right. So my third question is how are you feeling about your offer? I actually have a lot of questions in this, this third overall question, but how are you feeling about your offer? Do you believe in it? Do you think that it is really helpful for your people? Are you confident about your offer?

And I don't want you to confuse confidence with, okay, well, sometimes when I get in front of the camera or when I'm on podcast, I feel a bit nervous. You can be nervous when you're standing in front of people talking, but you're confident in what you're offering. You're confident that you can help people. Those are two different things. Okay. So don't, don't confuse them.

But if you're, if you aren't feeling confident, if you don't believe in it, then you're going to, those stories are gonna start to creep in about how others don't want to hear about this or about how it's too heavy or about how, like these are private topics and I really shouldn't bring them up.

So I just want you to be very aware that like your brain is a riddle solving machine and anytime it's sensing some discomfort, it says, okay, where's the discomfort coming from? And what it will do is try to zero in, right. And it's just so easy. Our audience is just such a nice little landing pad because they're kind of faceless and we can just blame everything on them.

Right. But I want you to get into this habit of believing that your audience is rarely if ever the problem. The problem is usually how you're looking at the circumstance and how you're thinking about it. So, in a nutshell, when you lack belief in your ability to help somebody or you're not confident, or you're still not sure about your offer, et cetera, then digging into topics that are sensitive or that might, you know, be a little bit more real, you know, that might ruffle few feathers, are gonna feel heavy. They might feel scary. You might feel a little bit insecure doing that. Okay. So you need to check in, check in with yourself, check in with your beliefs. Do you have beliefs that are going on? Are you at the level where you should be? Are you promising too much, before you automatically think, okay, I can't talk about this, this isn't my audience.

You might have to put it on hold or you might have to just shift how you're gonna talk about that in relation to what your skill level is.

So let's hop into some practical tips . And let's talk about what you can do. If you're the person who resonated with anything I just said about mindset, I want you to stop right here and realize that you need to clean up your thoughts. It's about the thoughts. You need to work on your mindset. But if you're like, okay, I think that my mindset's pretty in good shape. I need some practical tips. Okay. I want you to just really stop again. And one of my practical tips is to check your thoughts and assumptions about your, your audience. Unless multiple people come to you in an audience and say your stuff is depressing. And I like hate, I hate looking at it. It's just stressing me out. Okay. Unless people come to you and say that you are making it up, that people don't like your content. If people are following you, that means somebody wants to hear something from you.

So work with yourself, not against yourself. Stop making assumptions and actually talk to your people. That's practical tip number one. To help you with mindset drama, you really need to talk to your audience, get them on the phone, have a conversation with them, see what their problems are. Nobody wants you solving a problem that they don't have.

My second tip is make sure you are creating marketing materials you're messaging for the sake of attracting clients that you can help. Not for the sake of being a glorified content creator. So what I mean by that is when you create for the sake of helping someone, you're usually more in the mindset of, I wanna help my people.

Right. I know my people have this problem, so I'm gonna talk about it. And then I'm gonna talk about what's possible for them. All of a sudden the topic doesn't seem so heavy. Okay. Versus how does this make me look? I just need to post so that I stay relevant because I haven't post in a week or, I haven't sent out an email in a month, you know, and I, I just need to do this. I need to get my marketing efforts up. All of a sudden it becomes about you and not your people. Okay. And that's what, in my opinion, that's what a content creator does who doesn't have a plan. Who's not actually trying to help people reach out to them, sell to them. They're just trying to stay relevant. So that becomes more of a popularity contest, which is all about the creator and not the people that you're trying to help.

Finally, I wanna give you some tips around like the actual creation process here. So I know I'm kind of getting in the weeds, but I just love helping you guys out so much. Just because we have topics that sometimes are uncomfortable, does not mean that we have to approach them from like such a boring place. You can talk about things that are even heavy and hard and an upbeat, fun, funny, inspiring, refreshing way, right? Try to be appropriate and you'll know what's appropriate for your topic. But you can speak, from various angles and in different tones.

So angles, I think that's pretty self explanatory. But different tones, what I mean by that is the way that's unique to your understanding based on your lived experience, your current and previous clients and your point of view. So a tone is just something that people come to expect from you, and that is part of your brand.

You can find ways to incorporate humor and lightness that's appropriate for your topic. And usually the way you do this is by touching on where your client wants to be and how you're gonna help get them there. That immediately will lighten things up because you're talking about hope. And hope when we see that there's hope and we're like, oh my God, I'm in this place and I wanna be out of it. And then we say that there's hope that usually helps to light in the situation.

And you can talk about topics in a very real way. And I consider this refreshing. You wanna, you wanna try not to sugarcoat your topics anyway, that are a little bit heavier because people, number one will see through that. And number two, those who don't see through it, like maybe they're less experienced at being marketed towards, they'll start working with you and realize that there's a lot of dedicated effort that they have to do just to get their desired result. And sometimes that can make them feel very blindsided. Okay. So be careful of that.

Infuse your realness with what is possible on their journey to help your audience see the possibility versus just only stimulating their pain point. And I guarantee you every topic that's heavy, if you can, you know, just kind of incorporate some of these, tips will start to fill light and it'll also draw more people into you.

All right. So my final thoughts on this is always questioning your thoughts around what your audience thinks, what they're experiencing and what they want, unless they come up to you and tell you directly. And then even if they do that, you have to believe that only about that one person.

So talk to your audience and see what's going on. And then when you have a nice subset of them, then you can start marketing based on that, because there's probably more of them in the audience who have a similar problem.

Also, your audience wants your insights in relation to their problems. And the problems that they don't even have awareness around yet.

So they know what their situation is, so make sure you're speaking to them about it because it helps to number one, normalize it, number two, it lets them know that there is a way forward. And that is the hope. The hope that lighten this whole thing up. And as a bonus, if they resonate with you, then they might reach out to you for the, transformation that you're promising.

All right, friends. Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If you found today's episode helpful, make sure you take a screenshot and post it on socials. Tag me on social or tag me on Instagram so I can say hello to you. This summer, we are dropping episodes every other Tuesday on your favorite podcast player. And we can't wait to see you back then.