Waking up is hard.
You’re groggy and the sleep feels so so good.
“Just ten more minutes,” you tell yourself.
You set your phone to snooze and drift back to dreamland.
Ten minutes later and you’re startled back to consciousness. The phone goes off, again and again. And you hit snooze, again and again.
It’s easy to do. After all, getting up requires more effort than hitting the snooze button on your phone.
It’s the power of inertia at work.
The Power of Inertia
Inertia exists in your business, your personal life, and even your personal relationships.
Inertia keeps you from getting up and crushing the day. It keeps your customers from switching providers or heading over to the website on the mailer you sent them. It might even keep you from leaving a toxic relationship.
The things that are easy to do are the things most people will do. Jumping over sunk costs fallacies or thoughts of “I don’t have time” are major hurdles for most folks.
But what if you could convince yourself and your customers to stop snoozing? Imagine turning the power of inertia on its head so you could change a particular perspective or behavior.
For me, getting out of bed is an internal conversation. “Seneca, get out of bed now. You can sleep when you’re dead.” My counter-inertia is knowing that my time here is limited. I’ve got work to do, dammit. And like that–POW, I’m out of bed.
What’s your inertia? What are the inertia points for your customers?
How can you take the hard things–the very beneficial things, and make them the easy things?
It starts with understanding the internal dialogue. As I mentioned above, I talk myself out of bed each day instead of hitting snooze. What internal dialogues are your customers having?
Getting people out of snooze mode is like stopping a train. Stopping a train in its tracks is hard and potentially dangerous. A safer and more practical method is to simply pull the lever and switch the tracks.
The marketer, the coach, the therapist–they all seek to move the train in more productive directions. But all that starts with figuring out which train you’re on and which lever to pull.
Are you up to the challenge?
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