“How can I help you?” can change your life.
If you’re like me, you may have just started a business or want to start a business soon. Or you have been thinking about starting a blog or podcast. You have all these ideas for things you want to do and all these clients you want to serve and all this money you want to make. That you will be financially free and all that. But there’s a very important question you need to ask yourself:
How do I know if my idea will make money?
This question will lead you down a road of fleshing out your product idea, getting a few of your friends and family to hear about your idea and more importantly, see if they are willing to pay you for it and come out of pocket. Once this happens, you know you are onto something and more often than not, this is good data to start your business with. But I want to propose another question before you ask this one. I think this question will uncover so much more than your idea for your business. I think this question can put you on the path to changing your life:
How can I help You?
I’ve worked as a Customer Service Professional for the past twelve years. If you work in any capacity as a customer service professional, you know we usually ask this question when we first interact with a customer. Why do we? Because we want to know what we can do for them, not the other way around. What if we applied this question to our life, or to start our own business? If you ask “How can I help you?” enough times, to enough people, something great starts happening:
You figure out the degree you like to help people.
Everyone likes to help someone. There’s at least one person you would help, regardless the issue or cost. The meanest person you know or work with is the most helpful to someone else because we usually want to help persons we like and trust. But how much persons do you honestly want to help? Some persons are great helping one or two persons, some would prefer to help thousands. Be honest with yourself and you will be of more value to those you wish to serve.
You figure out what people want (or don’t want).
Asking this questions really gets into someone’s pain point. There’s usually that thing we would pay a large amount to fix because the benefits from fixing that are 10X or 100X. Or sometimes we don’t want something. You may be able to fix a pain point of yours but when you marry this to what people want/don’t want, I believe you can really scale your reach. This also helps you not only validate some of the ideas you have but puts in perspective your ability to deliver based on the skills you have right now.
You can find a greater purpose.
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others — Mahatma Gandhi
I’ve been really lost in terms of work and life purpose in the last year. That made me make some radical changes. I left my job and will be doing some travel and writing. My second move was to create a business but I realized I was not 100% passionate about what I wanted to do. Asking persons “How can I help?” or “What do you need?” has helped me discover my strengths. I was always great at helping persons figure out their next career move or life move, giving them increased clarity. So I’ve pivoted into coaching. Coaching persons gives me a greater sense of purpose and allows me to throw myself into a core group of persons, which I really like.
You will get greater stamina for your venture.
Having clarity on what you are doing to fix your customer’s issues will help you when the going get’s tough. The happiness you can get by ensuring you help yourself but fulfillment is what you get from truly helping others. Clarity in that fulfillment will take you through those lean months and years.
Call to Action
Imagine asking someone how you can help them and delivering that promise? How would that make you feel? If you apply it to your relationship with your wife/husband, your kids, your work life or your community? What are the outcomes? Here’s my “How can I help you!?” project:
- Ask five persons in your immediate circle, “How can I help you?”, “What do you need?” or “How can I make your life better?”
- Ask five persons out of your immediate circle (friends of friends. LinkedIn is great for this) the same questions.
- Ask five strangers the same thing.
- Take detailed notes, find similar threads.
- Align those threads to your strengths.
- Go forth and conquer!
