What You Teach vs. What You Tease

Welcome to Million Dollar Grit, the podcast that dives deep into the world of entrepreneurship, where tenacity meets strategy and dreams meet reality. My name is Julie, and I explore the raw, often overlooked truths of what it takes to succeed in business and in life. It's not just about the glossy success stories, it's about the grit it takes to get there. Hey everyone, this is Julie Chenell, and today I'm coming to you with a topic called What You Teach versus what you tease. Many of you know I have a private mastermind group and I personally work with business owners on their funnels, marketing, and biz development. I joke I'm the business partner that you don't have to pay equity to, but probably the number one thing I do with my clients is help them work out the difference between what they teach and what they tease. So I'm gonna use an example today 'cause it's way easier if we're talking about an actual you know, business. So let's say you're an expert in relationships. Specifically, you help women who are unsatisfied in their relationship figure out whether to stay or leave and then how to unpack it all. So because you are the teacher, mentor, coach, expert, whatever, whatever you want to call yourself, you're going to work with a lot of these women. You're going to start to notice patterns and layers, and you're going to be able to see the root of the issue the majority of the time. So after 5 years of doing this with women, it's going to be something that you can spot near instantly. So in this example, which I'm making up, by the way, you realize that for most women who are really dissatisfied in their relationship, they just don't want to acknowledge that they've outgrown their life partner. It's easier to villainize their spouse, make it all their fault, and the shame attached to admitting that they've outgrown someone And that sort of like selfish judgment they fear keeps them from recognizing this truth. So that's the backdrop. That's the context. So you're an expert in relationships. You're getting ready to plan a 5-day challenge that leads into your one-on-one coaching. And just as a side note, if you're listening to this on the day it comes out, you might wanna go to launchgorgeous.com/register. Because I'm teaching all about challenges. So let's say you're my one-on-one client, you're in Digital Insiders, you talk to me every day on Voxer, and you come to me with a challenge idea. So we're going to call you Sue. Sue's going to show up in my Voxer and she's going to say something like, Julie, I want to do a 5-day challenge that leads to my coaching. I have a great challenge topic. Check it out. And she drops the link in Voxer and it says, The Next Chapter Challenge: Pave Your Ideal Path for the Next Phase of Your Life. My first response is going to always be, in this case, is that how your clients talk? Do they actually know that they have outgrown their life partner? And Sue will say something like, well, some, some do, but a lot of them don't. You know, they're just miserable and they're unhappy and they feel really trapped in their relationship. And then I'll, I'll say, okay, well, do they think it's their problem or do they think it's their spouse that's the problem? We all know the answer to this one, right? So Sue will say something like, Oh yeah, definitely. They think it's their spouse. They use a lot of pop psychology, TikTok, and they throw terms around like toxic and gaslighting and narcissist. So she's starting to show me how her customer is talking, right? And I'll say, well, is that actually true? Are they toxic and narcissistic? Are they gaslighting? And Sue will respond with something like, you know, it actually doesn't really matter. Even if it is full-on narcissism, even if it's not, it's just two people married at such a different time in their life. The woman really just hasn't come to grips with the fact that she's just outgrown the relationship. So here is a classic conversation where Sue is the expert. She's in teacher mode and she's doing what she does best, which is taking all of those years of expertise working with women and saying, you I know the root of the issue is they've outgrown their partner. You can talk all you want about narcissism and gaslighting and toxicity. You can talk about divorcing or not divorcing, but at the end of the day, most of the times it's just me helping these women come to grips with the fact that they've outgrown their partner. And so the teacher in her is overriding the marketer, the tease side. We talk about teasing not in a bad way, but just in sort of a, you want to kind of dangle a carrot, get the curiosity, get the attention, and get people to like look up, you know. And so what she's teaching, or what she's doing in her expertise, is not how she should be marketing, but she can't see it because she's such an expert, right? It's like telling someone who has two legs, pretend you only have one leg. So my response here is what you tease, right, which is what's going to go on that free challenge landing page— what you tease must ignite curiosity, intrigue, and make it appear feeling enough to register and then attend. And it must meet these women where they are, not where you are going to get them to go. So Sue says, okay, I get it. Well, many of them are actually hemming and hawing about divorce, whether to stick with it. They feel financially trapped at the idea of divorce, and so they kind of go in circles. I said, all right, well, this is where we need to meet them. So instead of a topic like the Next Chapter Challenge, pave your ideal path for the next phase of your life, which is very general, very vague, and very much targeting someone who already knows that they've outgrown their current situation. We're gonna do something like this: Rise Beyond the Doubt, a 5-day roadmap for women stuck in the should I stay or should I go cycle of marriage. And so what this is going to do is it's going to attract people who read that and go, oh my gosh, I'm in that should I stay or should I go cycle of marriage. I am stuck. I do have doubts. I want to rise beyond the doubt. We're not going to call it a challenge. We're going to call it a roadmap because a challenge is a little too punky and positive, right? And these women are stuck and they really need a way out. They need a map. So from Next Chapter Challenge: Paving Your Ideal Path to Rise Beyond the Doubt: The 5-Day Roadmap for Women Stuck in the Should I Stay or Should I Go Cycle of Marriage, which one is going to tease better? Now the example that I just gave here now on this podcast may not seem all that hard. You may be listening and going, well, yeah, duh. But it took me probably a good hour of scripting out this podcast and writing it out as a blog post and an email. So I'm making it look easy. I did all that hard work and I present it to you on a 7-minute podcast as like a 6-inch putt. It's also incredibly difficult to do with your own stuff. And this is one of the main reasons why I suggest people get marketing and business coaches, because you need someone to bounce this stuff off of to, to help you see what you can't see. So of all the things that I do in Voxer, I would say in Voxer is a voice-to-voice app that I use with my one-on-one clients. This is probably what I do most, helping experts who are very good at what they do understand that what they teach should not be what they tease. And it requires them to walk back in time and almost selectively forget the things that they know. In order to tease and put copy out there in the world that hits people right where they're at. And a lot of times we scoff at the language that we have to use because we're beyond it. And not to say ego's involved or pride, but we get bored. We get so far down the expertise, expertise teacher pathway that we don't wanna go back to the beginning. It's like a math teacher who knows calculus and then has to go teach kindergarten math. In some cases, they can't do it. They can't go back that far. They— it's too hard for them to unlearn or to take that step back. But as marketers, what we tease has to be the corner that they're standing on, that that customer is thinking, how they're talking. And then once you have their attention, once you have their eyes on you, then you can start to teach. You can get into that zone. And I specifically work with a lot of people who aren't necessarily great marketers, but they're really, really good teachers and experts. And so they in some ways get annoyed at the good marketers, right? I'll hear this all the time. I am such a better teacher than so-and-so, and yet they're making millions and I'm not making a lot. And the only difference is that that person over there, for whatever reason, is a good marketer. It means they either have a really good coach, or it means that they're not actually an expert, so they're not getting tripped up with all the teaching expertise, language, and understanding because they're just marketers being marketers. And so they're actually— it's working to their advantage. Their ignorance is working to their advantage in marketing because they have no trouble staying on the corner where their customers are hanging out because they're not actually an expert. And so even though I say this with a huge grain of salt, but some of the best marketers in the world are really not great teachers because they're great marketers, but they haven't actually gone down the rabbit hole of their expertise to a level where they're really teaching the best they can possibly be. I would argue that one of the reasons why I'm not more mainstream in my niche is because I tend to err on my teacher side versus my marketer side. I'm a good marketer, but I am not the best marketer in the world. I think I, I hold both skills of teaching and marketing pretty balanced, but some of the really good marketers, you guys, are just down and out, all smoke and mirrors. So. The goal here is to create more balance so that if you are an expert in your field and you love to teach and you really want to get out there and you wanna impact more people, it's your moral obligation. I think I said that in the last podcast. It's your moral obligation to get better at marketing. You don't have to become a sleazeball bait and switch marketer, but you need to learn how to tease differently than you teach and understand the difference between the two and not get so caught up in, well, but that's not exactly what it's about. That's okay. We are simplifying, simplifying, simplifying, dumbing down the information, moving backwards into the customer journey when we use marketing language so that we can attract our ideal customer, get their attention, and then actually make a difference in their life. Talk to you soon. There you have it, folks, another dose of Million Dollar Grit. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired, equipped, and ready to face your own entrepreneurial journey with resolve. Remember, until next Until next time, embrace the struggle, harness your grit, and keep pushing forward. You're stronger than any challenge you face. I'm Julie Chenell, and this has been Million Dollar Grit.