Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal people here in Sydney, Australia.
In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
Welcome to this episode. We are focusing on change this season. So of course, I want to talk about conflict, because I’m fun like that, but specifically how we can use conflict as a way to grow ourselves, grow our businesses, grow our client base, grow our cash, and grow our prospects. So before we kick off properly, I want to first define our terms because what I’m talking about today is not antagonism, it’s not being, you know, relentlessly negative. It’s not active hostility or, you know, always being oppositional, always sporting for a fight. That is not what we’re talking about today.
What I’m talking about instead is conflict as a willingness to be uncomfortable, to speak up and to risk being ostracised or made fun of because of that. It is not for the faint of heart, there are many, many people who would rather chew on broken glass than actively wade into a situation where conflict is likely to result. So I wanna talk about three different areas today. I wanna talk about conflict with our clients, conflict with our prospects, and conflict in our marketing.
So let’s kick off. First, things first. We are servicing clients, right? We are servicing clients, we are serving clients. I’m not going to split hairs here, but what I’m talking about is moving from that gun for hire, going from gig to gig, where people hire you because you are convenient and because you do what is asked of you. You are a yes girl.
Or they are hiring you because you are the expert, you are the authority in your particular domain, and they are paying for you to give them the God’s honest truth as you see it. So they want you to push back and argue with them. They want you to wade into complex or nuanced territory. They are actively seeking someone who is going to tell them what their honest opinion is, rather than playing nice. So in order for change to occur, right, it requires disruption. If a client comes to us and says, I want to change things up, this is where I am, this is where I wanna be, then disruption is required. And disruption requires a fierce commitment to ensure that the conflict and the uncertainty which comes when you shake things up because make no mistake, there will be uncertainty, there will be mess, and I’ve seen this in myself on multiple occasions where I’m having a complex conversation with a coaching client, where we are tackling something which is not straightforward, where it’s not clear and it’s not obvious what the decision should be. It’s not clear or obvious what the direction is that we should take. I can feel it in my body, my desire to rush. What happens at that moment is there is ambiguity, there is uncertainty, I don’t like it. And what happens next is I can feel my tendency to want to rush through the process into a conclusion, into certainty once more, into some kind of resolution and it’s required a lot of self-compassion and awareness to not do this over the years.
So if you are not a gun for hire, you are not somebody who’s being paid for the output of their hours, but instead you are some kind of consultant, coach, expert, or leader, where people, clients are paying you for your ideas and opinions. You’re going to have to wade into uncomfortable territory. Yeah. And it’s often been the case that people don’t necessarily agree with the opinions that I give them. And this is true in coaching, but it was certainly far more true when I worked as a digital marketing agency owner. It was far more common there where I’d try and give advice and I’d say to a client, this is what you should do, this is what we should do, this is a good idea, that’s not a good idea, and they would push back and disagree with me. And I like to make my case twice, yeah? And if they push back after I’ve made my case clearly and obviously and I’ve explained my thinking, I’ve explained the rationale behind my opinion and the client still decides, no, I disagree, I want to make a different decision, then that’s fine, but I want to make sure that I say it twice because we can miss things the first time. You wanna try everything in life twice just to make sure you really didn’t like it the first time. And then I can sleep easy at night, right? I can sleep knowing that I’ve done, I’ve said my piece.
So when we are in an ideal client relationship and we have a mutual admiration society with our clients, where we are two equal consenting, mutually respectful, intelligent people. There’s no weird power games. There’s no weird power hierarchy, and it is a beautiful and unique relationship, I believe, that’s very different from friends, especially in coaching. You know, it is such a unique relationship because depending on the friend in a friendship, some people, you know, are more or less supportive. Some people are always supportive, which is a great friend to have, of course, but not so much a useful friend for telling you the truth, for telling you the hard truth. Or, you know, they’re not supportive and friends have almost always got a bias or an agenda.
Now, of course, coaches have biases, have biases, whatever the plural of bias is. A coach is not Buddha just because they’re a coach, but their agenda is always to have your best interests at heart, to help you get what you want. That is my job, is to help my clients to get what they want. So this is, I believe, a unique relationship. And it’s also unique because when we have that mutual admiration society, respect will increase when healthy respectful debate occurs, because it’s easier for me or you to be agreeable and to say everything’s fine and dandy and aren’t you wonderful and isn’t this great and aren’t we having good time and blah, blah, blah. That is way easier than it is to initiate difficult, complicated, ambiguous, uncertain conversations. And that is why, one of the many reasons why I love business coaching, why I love doing what I do. But that’s by the by.
Let’s move on to our second topic, our second group, which is prospects. So we are having conversations. People are reaching out to us. We are reaching out to them. We are talking about potentially doing business together and there is an inherent conflict in this because of course, not every conversation, not every sales conversation turns into a, you know, an exciting, wonderful, vulnerable, amazing, you know, conversation. Sometimes it does. I love those conversations. Sometimes it’s like, yes, and it’s fun and everybody’s laughing. And you know, there’s a vulnerability in a sales conversation, which I just love. People are, you know, not everybody, but the right people are willing to go deep with you and you are in effect a stranger. It might be the very first conversation you’ve ever had and it’s an absolute honour when that happens. It’s an honour. But, you know, inherent in sales is this rejection or acceptance. People say yes, they want to work with you, great. Or they say no. And most of the time, of course, people don’t say no, because it’s somehow some weird, strange taboo and they’d rather say anything but no. But do they trust us or do they find us unbelievable? That is kind of, you know, the heart of what makes sales so scary for so many people. And there is also, you know, in a sales call, the introduction of conflict by the seller, you know, apologies for using this term. If you don’t identify with that term, neither do I. But for the sake of clarity, you know, the person selling has to introduce some kind of conflict because if it’s not volunteered by the person who, the prospects, then, you know, it’s not gonna be a very deep or interesting or transformational conversation, right? So if nothing changes, nothing changes.
There’s a reason why somebody’s on the sales call with you today. And that reason is that they want some kind of change. Otherwise, they would merrily and happily go about their life. So a common pushback, a common objection is that now is not the right time. In fact, it could probably be, I mean, I don’t have any data to back this up, but in my experience, in my experience of sales conversations, you know, because no is such a taboo word, people say not right now. Now is not the time, it’s not, you know, my dog is sick, my parents are coming to stay, my husband’s away, my wife is divorcing me, my children hate me, like there’s so much going on right now, now is not the right time. And so then, to address that objection or to turn towards that objection, you could say, well, tell me when the perfect time is. Tell me when you are going to have all your shit together, all the time in the world, tell me when your friends and family are gonna be supportive, tell me when this fantastical fantasy you have going in your head, when you are somebody who’s together and ready, is gonna happen.
And obviously, I’m not gonna say this because this sounds completely facitious and I would probably hang up on me too. But the point is that this is, you know, people don’t like being called out. It makes people feel uncomfortable and you need to be willing to sit in that discomfort. If you are to address an objection effectively, you need to be willing to stir the pot to provoke the discomfort and then to sit in it and be silent. People aren’t willing to make change until they feel that they have to. And oftentimes that is when they are in a point of immense pain, they’ve hit some kind of rock bottom. But you could call this out as well and you could say, look, it’s difficult to actually pull yourself out of rock bottom, it’s better to make the big bold change, to engage me and make that big bold change before you hit rock bottom, because it’s much harder, right? And when you’re able to skillfully, they may still say no, right? It may not result in a sale, that’s fine. You don’t want all of your sales conversations to result in a sale because otherwise something is, is awry. But when you can have those, when you can initiate those uncomfortable conversations and when you can respectfully call people out and when you can sit with them in their discomfort and when you can deal with this conflict in a mature way, then you will end up in a far greater position than when you started the call, even when they don’t buy from you right now.
So I posted on Facebook one time, I can’t remember exactly what the post was, but in the post, I think I mentioned something about embarrassing or embarrassment. And I got this, it provoked some kind of response from somebody in my world, which was disproportionate. So she was clearly and obviously triggered by my post and I remember thinking, oh my God, like, whoa. But I responded to her comments, and I think there were some all caps involved and probably some exclamation marks. And she went on about, I don’t know, nine months later, it was in the, it wasn’t straight away, but it was within the next year. She went on and she bought my flagship Hustle and Hap program. And I am certain, that a big part of that was the way that I handled that conflict that I had inadvertently provoked in that Facebook post.
So our final part of conflict is conflict in marketing. Now, if you are telling stories, a modern day digital marketing is storytelling. And storytelling, by the way, is not modern. Storytelling is not some new fendangled trend. Stories are how humans have always connected and always passed on information and culture. Education, this is how we learn. You know, what are holy books, if not a collection of stories.
But storytelling always must have a conflict, right? Because without a conflict, without tension, without some kind of disruption, there’s no story, there’s just some boring anecdote that people are enduring. If you want to interest other people, if you want to provoke other people, if you want to engage other people’s precious, limited time and attention, there has to be some kind of conflict or tension in your story. And storytelling is often about transformation and transformation is not an easy journey.
Same goes for music by the way, there is tension and resolution and tension and resolution in every good song. And I’m talking about musically, not lyrically, although they may well be the same in the lyrics. So the conflict and tension that we’re introducing, we are deliberately introducing because we want marketing that’s effective, right? We don’t just wanna be wasting our time posting stuff on the internet that provokes no response and doesn’t lead to any inquiries, any opportunities. We wanna actually get results from the effort and the creativity we’re putting online. If that’s to occur, then effective marketing needs to repel if it’s gonna attract. Like a magnet, a magnet will repel and a magnet will attract in equal measures.
So in order for us to do that effectively, we have to stand for something and against something. If we are a values-based business, a purpose-led business, if we are a social enterprise of some description, we must declare and share what we stand for and against. Because if we’re always happy, happy, joy, joy, and everything’s wonderful and dandy, and we’re not rocking the boat, we’re not talking politics, and we’re not actually saying something worth listening to, we lose our credibility. Yes, it’s kind of pleasant, but it’s not engaging. It’s not provocative. It doesn’t actually provoke any emotion or feeling.
And the same goes for negativity. If we’re relentlessly negative all of the time, we’re like that, you know, that boring friend or relative that you just, you know, your eyes glaze over and it hurts to be in their company because they’re sucking your life force, right? That is also not credible and it’s certainly not appealing. You don’t have credibility if all you ever do is bitch and moan about things.
So we need to find that tension and that resolution. We need to criticise the status quo. We need to critique the common wisdom, but we also need to offer some kind of resolution. We need to offer some new way of thinking about things, of approaching things, of solving old problems. The conflicts that we introduce in marketing, you know, is, I guess, to an extent, it is lower risk, or hopefully it feels lower risk, because it’s not one-to-one conversations. It’s not you know, as personal perhaps, as interacting with clients and interacting with prospective clients. There is a certain, I don’t wanna say anonymity, but you know, I would hope perhaps that it would feel somehow safer. But maybe that’s just me, maybe you disagree. Maybe you’re quite comfortable having, you know, difficult conversations, ambiguous conversations. Maybe you’re quite comfortable pushing back with clients, but you find it harder to introduce that conflict in your marketing. I don’t know, let me know.
If you have any questions about anything I’ve discussed today or you wanna continue the conversation, come and find me. You can find me over on Instagram. That’s probably my favorite social channel at the moment. @BrookMcCarthy, there’s no E on Brooke. And I will see you next time.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners, just like you, to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.
