Chloe Nwangwu: Hey there, I am Chloe Nwangwu, I’m now adjusting my stuff, I probably should have done that sooner. Hi there, I’m Chloe Nwangwu, the brand scientist, and I am your humble host for this session on how to talk about your thing as the world changes. A little bit about me. My job is really to ensure that if you are an under-recognized person, that you are as impossible to ignore as science and I can get you. That’s my job. I make you impossible to ignore with science. That is sort of the angle that I am coming to this talk with. This, of course, our very important participant is my emotional support Baby Yoda, Grogu, who gives me joy and life. That’s it for the introductions. Let’s get started.
I’m going to share my screen because I best believe I have slides. Hopefully, you can see my screen, it would be really bad if you could not. Hopefully, you can see my screen. We’ll see once this recording is done if that proves to be the case. With all that said, again, welcome to how to talk about your thing as the world changes. Now I always like to start off any talk that I give with an agenda because consent is one of my core values. It’s important to me that folks always know where they are at all times so that they can consent to moving forward or they can ask to hold off if they need more time to process. Now, you are not here with me live necessarily as I’m recording this.
Consent-wise, I will ask you to take things into your own hands and utilize the play and pause buttons at your discretion. Right now we are in the welcome sequence. The next thing we’ll be talking about is why what we’re dealing with, what we’re talking about today is important, aside from the obvious reasons and what this has to do with being neurodivergent. Then we’ll get into a little bit on tackling something that I call the invisibility tax and that’s really connected to point number two. Then we’ll get into how to talk about your thing, specifically from the angle of giving the people what they want. Then finally, that second bit about the world changing, how to apply context.
That’s what we’re going to do. Hopefully, you’re all on board. Hopefully, I have your consent to move forward. If not, please click pause. If so, let’s go. As I said, first things first, why is this important? Okay, well, there are the obvious reasons. Obviously, it is important to know how to talk about your thing, especially if you’re running a business, because that is a huge part of where your income and your revenue and your profit comes from. It’s just important from that perspective. What about some of the non-obvious reasons? Amongst many things, I am known as the person who coined the phrase under-recognition.
Under-recognition is simply a concession to the reality that there are some of us, the world has been conditioned to overlook and under-appreciate systemically as the status quo. That includes folks who would be typically or traditionally marginalized, folks like us here, people of color, neurodivergent folks who are differently abled, runs the gamut. More often than not, folks who are traditionally marginalized are also under-recognized. The reason that I bring this up, the idea of under-recognition is because one side of the under-recognition coin has to do with resources, okay? Specifically what I’m talking about is something that I’ve termed the invisibility tax.
That’s essentially the extra bit of time, attention, money, energy, resources, really, that we as under-recognized folks are demanded to pay in order to be visible at all. In fact, to be as visible as our peers if we dare. As folks who are neurodivergent, we are almost always already operating from a resource deficit because the world around us wasn’t built to accommodate us. In fact, accommodations are a pretty recent thing. We’re already operating at a deficit as far as especially our time and our energy is concerned. Then you add on top of that the invisibility taxes that we’re often asked to pay to be visible. This is why this topic is so key. It’s so important.
Because this isn’t just knowing how to sell or talk about your thing or messaging or what have you. It’s not just that. This is also about making sure that we can allocate our already limited resources effectively so that we can thrive, so that we can succeed. Now what I’ve got on screen here are some examples of what different facets of the invisibility tax can entail. These are just three. There are more than these. I wanted to share some of these so that you could see what I’m talking about. Feel free to pause here to give these a much deeper look. For now, I’m going to move on. That’s why this is so important, and how this might affect those of us who are neurodivergent.
How do we tackle the invisibility tax to start with? Obviously, it’s a lot more nuanced than what I’m going to share, but I’m going to share the three overarching steps. First things first, we got to know if it’s affecting you or not. Now chances are, if you’re here, it probably is. The thing that’s also key here is ensuring that we know the extent to which it is affecting you. The way that you can do that is by assessing three things, three metrics. One, the extent to which you’re able to get many more of the right people to connect with what it is that you’re doing.
Two, the extent to which you’re able to get many more of the right people to notice what it is that you’re doing, and three, the extent to which you’re able to get many more of the right people to commit to what it is that you’re doing. When you’re able to do all of these things at asufficiently high level, you then have a brand that’s impossible to ignore. Now, each of these metrics, when we measure them, you come out on the other side understanding the phase of visibility that you’re in, that’s how I’ll put it. You understand the phase of visibility that you’re in.
The reason that that’s important when it comes to tackling the invisibility tax is that you want to make sure that you’re doing the right things at the right time. It’s entirely possible to do the right things at the wrong time. Sequence is key and sequence is important. That’s why understanding what phase of visibility you happen to be in is so key because you know what it is you should be focused on given the phase of visibility that you’re in. Say all that to say that this first step, yes, is the invisibility tax affecting you, and to what extent, really translates to, okay, what phase of visibility are you in?
Now, the second thing that you then do once you know the phase of visibility that you’re in is this, you determine what part of your ecosystem of influence you should be tending to. That becomes really clear once you know the phase of visibility you’re in. Now, I know I’m using a lot of new terminology here and there are definitions on the screen to sort of help out, but let me explain a little bit about what I mean. When you are looking to be visible, there’s a process that you’re going through. You’re looking to gain, maintain, and translate the attention of others, often into recognition of your body of work.
By recognition, I don’t necessarily mean they’re like, oh, that person’s amazing, even though I’m sure that’s great. I mean literally recognition. They’re like, oh yes, I know that person. I’ve heard of that person. I’ve heard of that word. I’ve heard of that work. Recognition. That process of gaining, maintaining, and translating the attention of others into recognition, that requires a vehicle. You need a thing, an apparatus, infrastructure that allows you to do those things. That infrastructure is what I call your ecosystem of influence. Because you are taking folks from the process of having just become aware of you, you’ve gained their attention, to translating the attention into some sort of change in behavior.
These three things that you see before you right here are the three pieces of one’s ecosystem of influence. Step two of tackling the invisibility tax is to know which piece of your ecosystem of influence you’re going to tend to. Again, that becomes super clear when you know the phase of visibility that you’re in. Now, I’ve got, like I said here, some definitions that will help you understand each of these pieces a little bit better, but I want to move on because I want to get to the application of goods. Final step is that you then want to make brand choices that are based on how the brain actually works.
Now, I’ll go through this really quickly, but if you ever have questions about this or anything that I’ve shared, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m my best when people ask me questions. This first bit here is that our attention is limited. That’s something that I’m sure most of us know and have dealt with personally or just are aware of. Our attention is limited and that’s everyone. We don’t have unlimited resources with which we pay attention. That’s why our brain’s filters are so important. They’re very judicious. They’re basically trying to get us from point A to point B so that we live and that we thrive. Without our brain’s filters, we just sort of wake up and stare at our hands for days and then we die of starvation.
This is why it’s really key to understand that our attention is limited because we see a lot of things throughout our day. A lot of things literally get seen by our eyes. We don’t notice everything that we see. When I say that our attention is limited, I’m saying this to remind us that it is important not only to be seen, i.e. being everywhere all the time, all at once, but to be noticed. That’s a different faculty altogether. You want to make decisions understanding the ways in which our attention is limited, why it’s limited, and how to overcome those limitations and to be noticed. Second point here, we’re easily overloaded.
It’s actually pretty easy to overload the attentional resources of a human being, especially today where there’s more for us to pay attention to than there has ever been at any point in human history. The number of things, the scope of things that we need to pay attention to continues to rise exponentially. Having a pandemic and all of the things, the sort of social instability that has surrounded us in the last decade-plus have really been contributing to the ways in which our brains are easily overloaded. That’s two. Number three, awareness of mental models. Now, mental models are just the ways in which we think the world works.
Our mental models, those frameworks actually influence what we pay attention to and what we notice. For example, now that I’ve shared with you the concept of underrecognition and the invisibility tax, chances are pretty high, though not perfectly high because I skimmed over it a bit, but chances are pretty high that you’ll start to notice little things here and there that connect to those ideas. That’s because your mental model, if I’ve done my job, has shifted just the tiniest bit. We want to be aware of these mental models so that we can operate within them and shift and break them when necessary. Finally, we want to understand that the status quo is something that’s really difficult to shift.
The reason for that is that we’ve been hardwired to defend it. Any switch from what is status quo, no matter how wonderful, egalitarian, generous, great, justice-oriented, what have you, every shift from the status quo feels like losing. We’ve been wired to feel that way. We need to be aware of the fact that a lot of what we are trying to get folks to do is shift from the status quo, and that status quo is being jealously defended by our brains’ faculties. Understanding all four of these things and operating accordingly is how we beat, it’s how we tackle, it’s how we neutralize the invisibility tax.
Now that we’ve said all that, let’s get into the primary topic of today, which is how do we talk about what it is that we do, our thing, even as the context and the world around us changes. First things first, you want to give the people what they want. I know that this is something that folks have said probably to you a bunch of times. If it feels complicated to you, you are correct. Knowing and understanding what people want, it is really complicated. You’re not wrong about that, but here’s how we can decode that a little bit. First things first, let’s have this awareness that people rarely want one thing. We’re really complex and we want multiple things at the same time, all at once.
It’s actually the context around us that determines what matters most to us from that morass and mess of wants at any one given time. That’s also part of why it can feel like the things that people want keeps shifting and that’s honestly because it does. Context will shift the thing that matters most in that mess of things that we want. What we want to do at the end of the day is organize all of those many motivations coherently so that we can understand and see them all at once and understand the dynamics that run between them. I want to validate you that yes, this is complicated, but like I said, we’re going to decode this just a little bit. Step one on how we decode this, look at stakeholders.
Now, I know that often when folks are talking about who it is that you want to pay attention to and who it is that you want to know what they want, we’re usually talking about an ideal client avatar. I have a lot of thoughts on that. In fact, I am known in these internet streets for having very, very specific thoughts about that. We won’t totally get into those today, but what I will say is this. Lots of different kinds of people can have the same kinds of motivations and motivational drivers to generate them. We don’t necessarily want to mistake things like gender or race, demographics, and even psychographics as things that give us insight into what people want because they don’t necessarily.
The other thing is that we want to be aware that there are a whole bunch of stakeholders that contribute to the success of any organization or any business. Just focusing on the ideal client, who I’ve termed here protagonists, is limited in not a great way. You’re hampering, you’re smothering your possible success. Protagonists aren’t just ideal client avatars. They include folks that you want to have buying from you and folks that make decisions around those things. Those are protagonists. Then we also have, we have champions, we have gatekeepers, we have mediators and advocates. Gatekeepers are a type of stakeholder that we tend to overlook.
As under-recognized folks, we cannot afford to overlook gatekeepers. We want to be as aware of what motivates our gatekeepers as we are of what motivates our protagonists. We want to have that same level, sometimes an even deeper understanding of what drives and motivates those folks, because that is often how we are going to get access to the opportunities that let us be in front of our protagonists. I have here some definitions about each of these kinds of stakeholders. Go ahead and pause so that you can get a better primer on who each of these stakeholders are, but just understand that these stakeholders are determined by motivations. That is how they are grouped.
The more of these stakeholders that you know and understand, the wider your reach actually becomes. That’s another reason that understanding the entire palette of stakeholders is really, really key. Step one of being able to talk about your thing as context shifts is understanding which stakeholder you are speaking to because that allows you to understand which motivations you’re speaking to. That’s step one. Now let’s get a little bit tactical. Here’s an application that you can apply right away. Make a list of at least three goals, three things that each of these types of stakeholders, the five that we mentioned in the previous slide, are trying to do.
Specifically, think about something that they’re trying to do mechanically that you can help them with. A really great example of this goal is something like make vegan pasta. That’s a mechanical thing. That’s a thing that someone is trying to do, and it’s a goal that they have. I call these do goals. Make a list. In fact, grab a sheet of paper or however you’re taking notes and have five headers, one for each of the stakeholder types, and then under each stakeholder type, list at least three of these do goals. Next step is to put these do goals in chronological order. Now this is a trick that I have discovered through my own research.
I have never seen this not be the case, but you may be the first person to prove me wrong. Who knows? That is the fact that often when we struggle to talk about our thing or to communicate something, it’s often because we are trying to speak to more than one motivation at the same time. What I suggest folks do is list out, as we did in step one, these motivations. The thing folks often don’t realize is that these motivations actually exist in a sequence. One of them has to happen before all the other ones become possible. Another one has to happen after that first one but before the rest of them.
What I want you to do for step two is look at that list of at least three goals under each of those stakeholders and put them in chronological sequence. Which one has to happen first and then next and then so on and so forth. This is something that you can do from your own perspective as an expert, but also from the perspective of your stakeholders as the folks who are living that life. Both approaches yield fruitful results. All right, next. Next, we get to the how to apply context. This is the, okay, as the world changes, how do we understand what’s going to matter most to folks at any given time? The answer to this is making sure that you’ve got the right lens on. Here’s what I mean.
Before that, haha, I got you. Before that, feedback helps me so much. If you feel like you’ve learned anything from this presentation or this workshop, I would deeply appreciate it if you gave me two minutes of your time to give me some feedback on how I did. I’m not above bribery, trust me. When you take those two minutes, you will also get access to my visibility impact assessment for free. This assessment, what it’s going to do is it’s going to tell you the phase of visibility that you’re in. You remember I mentioned that before. It’s going to allow you to begin to tackle step one of tackling the invisibility text. I’m going to move on from this, but please, please, please, I really, really could use your feedback.
It helps me get better at what I’m doing, but it also allows me to gain more opportunities to do things like this. If however, you do not feel like jumping through all of those hoops just to get this freebie, you don’t have to, believe me. Only do this if you feel led. If you don’t, we’re going to be leaving a direct link to this assessment below so that you can grab that if you want. All right, moving on. I faked you out. Here’s how we apply context. Surprise, surprise, sometimes the world changes. When we’re thinking about a framework for understanding the shifts that can happen, one that I find helpful is what I call the market lens. This is something I developed myself.
It’s one of my favorite things I’ve developed ever. The way that it works is this. First, we understand that there are generally three market states in the world. We can have the state where we’re in like a bust economy where things are not going well. Then we have a boom economy where things are in fact going quite well and everyone’s living their best life. Then we have the market state that’s in between.
Now, generally, though this is not always the case, and this is something that you’ll want to check when you look at your various stakeholders and search them, generally, when we are in a bust market, economic sentiment, basically how folks feel about money and the resources that they have and the economy, generally, economic sentiment is low. That’s not always the case. There are some folks whose economic sentiment remains high even in a bust economy for various reasons. You got to find out yourself where your folks stand. Generally, when we’re in a bust market, economic sentiment is low. When we’re in a boom market, economic sentiment is generally high.
When we’re in that sort of in-between state, economic sentiment is in-between. Now, you’ll see over here that we have a timeline. The reason for that is this. We have no idea in the year of Beyonce 2028 which of these market states is going to be taking precedence at any one given time. We have no idea. However, I can guarantee you that whatever messaging or marketing or way in which you have decided to talk about your thing, whichever way you’ve decided to do that, it was done with one of these market states in mind. I’m going to pause there just to let that sink in.
Any way in which you’ve spoken about what you do and your thing up until this point has always been written with just one of these market states in mind. Has just been written from one of these market states. When all three of these are possible and when we have no idea what the next one is going to be. This is why folks will panic sometimes when the world around us changes and the things that we said before no longer seem to be working. That’s because we’ve only been speaking to one of these market states rather than being equipped to speak to all three. That is what I’m going to show you how to do. Here is how you speak to all three of these market states.
Now, the boom, the bust, the in-between, each of these are a market themselves. I’ve given each of these markets a name so that you can name the lens that you’re putting on. Now, when we are in that low economic sentiment sort of world, we are generally in what I call a fixed market. That’s the lens that you want to put on. In a fixed market, folks who are in a fixed market, rather, they don’t have the bandwidth or the resources to focus on anything beyond what’s immediately around them, temporally. They focus on the here and now, and they need a fix for the here and now, the thing that they’re dealing with in the here and now. Specifically, they’re looking for a prescription.
They’re looking for a prescription that’s going to deal with what they have got going on in the here and now. Now, when you’re in that in-between sort of economic sentiment state, you’re in what I call a prevent market. Generally, that’s the state that folks are in, and that’s the lens that you want to put on. Folks who are in a prevent market, they’ve got a little bit more bandwidth. Yes, they’re focusing on stuff that’s in the immediate term, but they also have enough bandwidth to look at stuff in the near term, stuff that’s coming down the pike, and they’re more focused on preventing something that they see coming up in the near term.
Whether or not that is preventing a loss of control or momentum, or it’s preventing something bad that they see possibly happening. They’re trying to prevent something. More specifically, they’re looking for protection. They are looking to either protect a state that they’re already in as they move forward, or they’re looking to protect themselves from possible threats that they see coming. That’s that middle state. Then finally, we have an improved market. This is when economic sentiment is high and folks have expansive bandwidth, so they can focus on the future and their best selves.
At this point, they are looking for strategies that will lead them or bring them to that higher, best version of themselves. Now, the reason I bring all of this out is because often when folks are struggling to talk about their thing and they’re finding that it’s not landing, often it’s because they’ll be speaking to somebody who’s in a different market state than the one that they’re speaking to. For example, this is why folks will talk about strategies. I have a strategy for this, I’m a strategist, I’m blah, blah, blah, all of this. It just won’t land for some folks. Generally, that’s because those folks are either in a fixed market or a prevent market. Strategies are not the thing, they don’t have the bandwidth for that.
Sorry, can’t do strategies, I need a prescription. I need the expert to hand me the thing, the literal to-do list, and I do the thing on the list and it leads me from point A to point B. You see that distinction? I hope you do. Here’s where we can apply some of this. You remember that list that you created before? Now, that list is something that I call an impact narrative. That chronological sequence of goals. Based on which of these three market lenses or markets folks happen to be in, you’re going to know what part of the impact narrative matters most to your person right then. How do I want to illustrate this? Yes, let’s do it this way.
If you are in a fixed market, you are more interested in the things that are at the start of that impact narrative. If you did a list of three, then it’s item number one, that’s the thing that they’re focused on, that’s the thing that’s going to matter most to them. If you’re in a prevent market, you have a little bit more bandwidth. Yes, you’re focusing on number one in that list of three. The thing that matters most to you is probably actually number two in that list of three. Then finally, if you’re in an improved market, chances are the thing that matters most to you is number three in that list of three. That’s how you pick the relevant motivation to speak to when you’re talking about your thing.
Then the final step that you want to do is that you want to frame it. That’s why I mentioned before, prescription, protection, and strategies. Because that’s how you can then frame this thing that matters most to them. Here are some examples from clients. I’ve had a client come out on the other side and said, okay, cool, they’re in a prevent market, they’re looking for protection and the goal or the thing that matters most to them is being an opportunity magnet. Maybe they’re looking for protection of their status as an opportunity magnet. Maybe they’re looking for protection on their journey towards becoming an opportunity magnet. That’s how this works.
Another example. That this person is in a fixed market. That means they’re looking for a prescription that will help them become a coveted voice. Somebody who folks really want to have on their stages. Prescription, very different energy from a strategy, very different energy from protection. This is what it looks like. I hope that this has been helpful. Definitely try out some of these applications. If you have questions, like I said, don’t hesitate to reach out. That’s it. Thanks so much for your time. Yes. Goodbye.
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