Reply To: Exercise 5: 5 People Who Feel the Problem
Talking to People with the Problem
[The Problem]
Movement leaders feel ill-equipped, overwhelmed, and discouraged by the technical and creative demands of building a digital presence that reflects their authentic message, attracts the right audience, and supports the change they seek to make.
Going into this exercise, I expected it to be straightforward, since these individuals are not only my clients but also part of the community I want to serve. However, the conversations turned out to be more nuanced and complex than I anticipated. Each person had a different perspective on the problem, even though there were overlapping struggles.
Conversations:
• Josh expressed frustration and a feeling of being misunderstood. He described building his online presence as a “slog” comparable to tedious admin work. He’s been working on communicating his ideas for almost 10 years and identified part of the challenge as other people being stuck in their ways and closed off to new information. He noted that people often can’t engage with his ideas because they’re in a rut themselves, but he emphasized that he trusts me to understand his message.
• Ulrike, on the other hand, felt at a bit of a loss. She’s been committed to bootstrapping her business and building her website by herself but has hit a wall. After our talk, she felt more encouraged to try again and we plan to check in soon. Her experience highlighted the importance of not just offering solutions, but offering encouragement when people feel stuck.
• Andy was flustered and overwhelmed with maintaining his site. He appreciated that I understood his problem and felt like we were learning together, which reinforced the importance of trust in the client relationship.
• Nic, being more technically skilled but time-constrained, took the conversation in another direction. He helped me problem-solve by giving advice on potential solutions. It felt more like a collaboration, which was refreshing and reaffirmed that some clients don’t just need solutions—they want to be part of creating them.
• Paige is focused on integrating mental and physical health into her business through a blend of in-person training and online platforms. However, she feels overwhelmed by the amount of content she needs to create, particularly for social media, and the challenge of calling in ideal clients. She finds posting content stressful and struggles to juggle her online business with other jobs. While she’s not tech-savvy, she has managed to set start setting up a squarespace, but the difficulty of balancing everything makes it hard to maintain momentum.
Key Takeaways:
A consistent theme that emerged from these discussions was trust. Many people struggle with these problems because they feel vulnerable or misunderstood. But once they feel that their concerns are understood and that there’s someone they can trust, they open up and engage more.
I also noticed that people tend to view the problem as deeply personal—it’s tied to their mission, their identity, and their sense of progress. This makes it easy for them to ignore outside advice, even if they get solicited for help often, which is why it’s crucial to build rapport before offering solutions.
People’s problems are personal, even if the solution is technical: Most people don’t see their challenges as purely technical. Their struggle to manage their websites is tied to their broader goals and sense of personal mission, which makes it feel weighty and overwhelming. This means that providing solutions is more than just technical support—it’s about understanding and helping them move forward emotionally too.
Next Steps:
Moving forward, I need to focus on continuing to engage with more people who feel the problem, then I can refine the approach and start developing the systems to deliver solutions at scale.