Episode 34: Hard Lessons I Learned About Pre-Framing This Past Week

Welcome to the Create youe Laptop Life podcast, where entrepreneurs all around the world come to learn how to market and grow their online business right from their laptops, wherever they are. We don't have traditional nine to five jobs, and we don't want them because financial and lifestyle security and freedom is too important to us. We know the world is changing for the better and that the freelance and entrepreneur economy is the cleaner, greener, smarter way to work for both families and businesses. My name is Julie, and this podcast will teach you everything you need to know about creating and growing your laptop life. Hey, everyone, this is Julie. And I am so fired up. And I'm not usually fired up. In fact, that is my friend Steven Larson's job. We are both coaches in the One Funnel Away challenge, and so his job is to be all fired up and kick people in the butt. And my job is to be kind of like Mary Poppins, you know, that kind, warm, nurturing teacher that everyone loves. But today I'm fired up. And so I have been sitting on this podcast about pre framing. And so now I'm just gonna jump in because some. Something happened today, and it was really, really interesting. All right, so last week I had a great conversation with Russell, and we were talking about pre framing and how critical it is in conversation. And so let me give you a really dramatic example about pre framing. And this happens in interpersonal relationships, in emails, in sales pages, everything. Let's say that you have cancer, right? And that's a terrible thing to have. And if you have this, like, idea in your head that you're healthy, and then you go to the doctor and they tell you you have cancer, all of a sudden, that's a really, really, like, that's bad news. It's very sad. It's very hard. It's like, it's horrible. Now, let's say that you already know you have cancer, right? And you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you that you're gonna have to have this really complicated surgery, but if it works, you're gonna live, right? So that surgery now is like the best news ever. Even though if you went in not knowing you had cancer and he told you, oh, you have cancer in this surgery, it would feel like the worst news ever, right? So it's always about the pre frame of how you set that person up. And so every single situation in life has multiple perspectives. And there's like that old Indian proverb about how there's an elephant in the middle of the room and everybody's blindfolded and they're kind of all around the elephant, but someone grabs the tusk and someone grabs the tail, and someone grabs the leg and the back or whatever, and they all give you a different perspective of the exact same animal. And so the reality is that there are multiple pre frames for any. For anything in life. Anything in life. If you just sit as, like, a marriage counselor and you listen to a couple fight, you're going to hear the pre frame from either side. And so I had this conversation with Russell last week, and I was, you know, I was having a moment. I was. You know, it's sometimes tricky because I work. I don't work in Boise. And so, like, I can feel like I'm far away from, like, the hub of everything. And so I can get in my own head, like, oh, what am I missing out on? You know? And I. It's this ongoing joke about fomo. Fomo. Fomo, which is fear of missing out. And so I can get in my own head, right? And so I have a pre frame that's a belief that's, like, making me see what's happening through a different lens, right? So if I'm coming at it from the lens of, like, oh, I'm being left out, and then something happens, I'm going to see that and be like, oh, see, I'm left out. Like, oh, I missed it. Oh, you know, like. And I'll just end up, you know, being upset. And yet if I talk. And I did, I told Russell I was like, oh, I feel left out. And he showed me his frame, his perspective. And then I was like, oh, I see it now from a completely different angle. Now I see it's a totally different frame that I'm looking at the same situation in. We had this happen with a project that we were working on, and the project, the person that was in charge of the project had a frame for the project. And so that frame included stress and frustration, all that kind of stuff. And it was so funny because once we took that project out from under that person and put it with somebody else who didn't have that frame, their frame was completely different. They were so excited. They thought it was super cool. And Russell and I were talking about how interesting it is that that same project, one that's associated with frustration and hardship when given to somebody else with a different frame now all of a sudden becomes exciting and cool. So pre frame is everything in marketing, you guys. It is everything in your relationships, in communication. Like, I can't explain how important it is. And today it happened Again, so a lot of you know that I'm running the one funnel away challenge. And the first time we ran it, we ran it without giving anybody the content ahead of time. So it was literally day one, boom, we dropped it. Day two, boom, we dropped it. In fact, we did this because we didn't have the content built out the first time. We were building it as we went. And so we knew it would be important to give everybody just what they needed that day. What Steven would call just in time learning. Right. And so. And everybody loved it. Seven thousand people went through it. It was like our greatest course of all times. Well, for a couple reasons this time around, because we're working one funnel away into a lot of our different funnels. We thought, well, maybe we should preload a member's area with the content just in case people don't make it to the Facebook group or they don't realize that it's a challenge and they feel like they didn't get their purchase. And so we thought we would front load the members area with the content. So we're on day one. Okay. So we've done the pre training week. We're on day one. And we quickly are realizing this is a terrible idea because what's happening is people are jumping ahead, they're getting confused, they're getting off track. And we know that the best way to learn is just in time learning. And we designed it that way. So we're like, okay, you know what? It's only day one. We got 29 days left. Let's just take that content away and then we'll drip it out. So we took everything away but today so that it would just like mitigate, overwhelm. And basically the entire Facebook group blew up. And most people were totally cool with it, but there were a few people that were so angry and they were so upset and they were like ready to ask for refunds because they were looking at it through the frame of we took their content away. The irony being that not one person in that 7,000 group the first time had the pre frame of the content. And they loved the drip. The drip was the most amazing thing ever because it was bite sized, it was actionable, it was exactly what they needed. Nothing that they didn't, they could complete it. That's what made it so successful. So the very thing that everybody loved that drove all kinds of success, because we set up a pre frame that was different because we were testing something, caused people to have a completely different experience. So pre frames and managing expectations are very similar. So when you are out there and you are sending emails and you are doing sales pages and you are getting on discovery calls with clients and you are posting on Facebook and you're talking to your husband or your spouse about entrepreneurship, keep in mind that every situation, no matter how benign or regular it seems, will have multiple different pre frames, multiple different doors at which you can enter that situation and have a reaction to it. Pick the right door. Make sure you are super intentional about which pre frame door you want to go into. Because I guarantee for every positive door there's a negative one because humans just will find every possible perspective. So I hope that helps. I hope that helps you think differently about the way you talk to your people, your customers, your team members, even your family members and people who don't necessarily understand business because the pre frame is everything. Thanks so much guys. Talk to you soon. 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