Matt asks Alper for advice on how to handle a crisis of confidence his clients often face shortly after starting work.

Episode transcript:

Alper Rozanes
Alper today, I want to pick your brain little bit.

Alper Rozanes
Go ahead.

Matt Krause
And I’ve noticed I’ve been doing this this line of work, my line of work is basically teaching people who are not native speakers how native speakers of English, how to present in English and do it well.

Alper Rozanes
Yep.

Matt Krause
Okay. So, and I’ve noticed a pattern. I’ve been doing this for about 10 years. And so I’ve noticed a pattern and it happens in almost every client. So I wanted to pick your brain about that pattern and see if you have any thoughts on on how I could be handling it better. Is that cool?

Alper Rozanes
Okay, that sounds good. Yeah.

Matt Krause
Okay, I’ve noticed that. And by the way, just a side note, as I was thinking about this, I was, I’ve been thinking a lot about Blair Enns recently. And we’ve discussed, we’ve mentioned Blair ends many times on this podcast.

Matt Krause
You know, how Blair Enns has the four conversations that you go through with the client before the sale is completed?

Matt Krause
Okay. So this is a situation that comes up after the sale is completed. But as I was thinking about it, I kept, the reason I kept thinking about Blair Enns was because I was like, okay, this situation comes up after the sale is completed. But it might be very similar to what Blair Enns would say about one of those conversations before the sale is completed.

Matt Krause
So maybe I should, in addition to picking your brain here today, maybe I should also listen to the Blair Enns podcast again.

Alper Rozanes
Yeah, we should pick his brain too.

Matt Krause
Yeah, we should pick his brain too, I wonder if he would come on the show, that would be quite an honor.

Matt Krause
Okay, so the question that I wanted to ask, or the pattern that I wanted to ask you about today is the crisis of confidence that in my line of work, typically comes about three to four weeks after the work has started. And that’s when the…

Alper Rozanes
Just to be clear, does it come to you, or to the people you’re working with?

Matt Krause
Well, oh, it comes to the people that I’m working with. So the people that I’m working with are having the crisis of confidence, and I want to be able to walk them through it better.

Alper Rozanes
Okay.

Matt Krause
And the crisis of confidence is that, let’s back up a second. When they first come to me, so about a month before this happens, or two months before this happens, depending on however long the sales cycle is, at some point, before they decide to work with me, they’re like, I have a problem. And Matt can help me with it.

Matt Krause
So so they kind of, you know, in the first couple weeks of the engagement, there’s the honeymoon period, where Matt is still the shiny new object.

Matt Krause
And, you know, whatever problems the client is having in the client’s professional life, Matt’s gonna solve ’em. And then And that…

Alper Rozanes
That’s not a bad position to be in, yeah.

Matt Krause
Yeah, that’s a great position, and that position lasts for about two weeks, and then the…

Alper Rozanes
You’re on the pedestal.

Matt Krause
Pardon me? I’m on the pedestal, and I’m on the pedestal for about two weeks, and then…

Alper Rozanes
And then you’re taken down.

Matt Krause
Yeah, and then I get knocked off the pedestal.

Matt Krause
And the way that that looks is that usually about three or four weeks after the, the engagement begins, so it’s time to knock Matt off the pedestal. And during this period, the three to four weeks after the engagement begins, the client has a kind of a crisis of confidence. And the client is thinking, the solutions that Matt is recommending, the road that Matt is taking me down, it feels unfamiliar, I don’t like it.

Matt Krause
And since a lot of my work is in Turkey with Turks, they’ve come through an education system, which is very heavy on grammar. And so grammar is their comfort zone that they can fall back on. So basically, the client is falling back…

Matt Krause
The client, worried about the strange new road that Matt is taking them down, falls back on what is comfortable to them, and to a lot of the clients, for me, the clients’ comfort zone is grammar. And so, oh, go ahead…

Alper Rozanes
Just to make sure that I understand you clearly, when you say fall back to the comfort zone, you’re not talking about an area that they feel confident, you’re talking about an area that they blame their lack of confidence on.

Matt Krause
They feel… They lack confidence. So the… they’re not confident about anything anymore, and so they fall back on where they’re comfortable, and comfortable things tend to in a non confident situation, comfortable things tend to bring people confidence, or at least people go back to comfortable things with confidence.

Matt Krause
So they go back to their comfort zone, and their comfort zone is grammar. And that is absolutely none of the four things that I’m walking them through. And so at this point, I start thinking, Well, you know, the answer to the question, how do I solve the problem I came to Matt with? The answer to that question is not more of the thing that caused the problem that I came to Matt with.

Matt Krause
But I don’t say that because well, you know, that’s not very polite. So, so I’ve gone through a number of stages in how I’ve handled that over the years. Like I say, I’ve been doing this for about 10 years.

Matt Krause
And so back at the beginning, some years ago, many years ago, I would handle it by actually trying to address the question itself. And the question, in my case would be, can you recommend a grammar book, and me being a native speaker of English, there is absolutely no way that I, I’ve never even seen an English grammar book I have…

Matt Krause
If you want to understand the grammar of a language, the last person that you should ask is a native speaker of that language. And, and so I would feel bad about myself, because the client was asking me to do something. And I was trying to do it, but I knew that what I was doing was worse than what they could get elsewhere. So, everybody was feeling bad in the situation. So it wasn’t working.

Matt Krause
So about eight years ago, I moved on to stage two of trying to handle this situation. And Stage Two was ignore the request or ignore the crisis of confidence, the client is having a crisis of confidence, and just just ignore it pretend that it’s not happening.

Alper Rozanes
I’m sure that worked out pretty well.

Matt Krause
Surprise, surprise, that didn’t work out very well at all.

Matt Krause
So I moved on to stage three. And I did stage three for a couple of years. And because it worked a little bit better, not a whole lot better, but a little bit better. And stage three was acknowledge the crisis of confidence, so address it head on, talk to the client about it.

Matt Krause
But then try to address the client’s crisis of confidence by outlining the four steps that we were going through. And that because there are four steps that I go through to get the client the results that the client is looking for. And when I would try to outline those four steps, the clients eyes would glaze over, because they don’t want to hear Matt outlining the four steps, that’s boring.

Alper Rozanes
They want to put you back on the pedestal, and you’re not helping them.

Matt Krause
Yeah, they want to put me back on the pedestal. And that is not helping at all.

Matt Krause
So So Matt is not on the pedestal still. So he lasts a little bit longer, but he’s not on the pedestal yet.

Matt Krause
So over the past couple years, I moved on to stage or to step four. And step four is address the crisis of confidence. Don’t Don’t ignore the client’s crisis of confidence.

Alper Rozanes
Thank god.

Matt Krause
So address the clients crisis of confidence. But instead of trying to outline the four steps that I’m walking them through, just stay high level, and paint a picture of clients that I’ve worked with in the past, which basically goes like this, I worked with client XYZ, and they used to be in place ABC, and then they came to me, and now they’re in place DEF, they’re in a different place. Now they’re in a better place. And then client two…

Matt Krause
I didn’t mean that the way it came out…

Alper Rozanes
We put our clients into better places.

Matt Krause
Yeah, I didn’t mean that the way it came out, they’re in a better position. They’re in a better position now. So they came to me and they’re in a better position now.

Matt Krause
And then client to client three, client three, client three, client four. So usually it’s three or four clients. And then my potential client who was having the crisis of confidence is much happier. Now I’m back on the pedestal, they have the confidence that they need to go ahead with these unfamiliar four steps. So problem solved.

Matt Krause
And so I wanted to ask you, so my, my basic, big picture theme is that Matt’s clients, about three to four weeks after the work starts, are going through a crisis of confidence.

Matt Krause
And I just wanted to ask you in your work, have you experienced a similar thing where clients sometime after they have retained you sometime after they’ve decided to work with you they go through a crisis of confidence of some sort, and what do you do in that situation?

Alper Rozanes
That’s a good question.

Alper Rozanes
One thing that comes to my mind is not several weeks into the engagement but several hours maybe.

Alper Rozanes
And usually in, in trainings in corporate trainings especially, we start the day nice with the promise of a new perspective towards presentations, new perspective towards delivering the message, etc.

Alper Rozanes
And a couple of hours into that engagement or in the afternoon, let’s say, when we’re talking about the actual slides, or how to make them better, I drop the bomb of, you know, simplifying the slides and dividing them if necessary, into into multiple pages, etc.

Alper Rozanes
That I would believe is one of the areas I will be receiving the hardest pushback, as in, this is not familiar, and we don’t like where you’re leading us.

Alper Rozanes
I think, I think that’s in line with the sensation that you were talking about.

Matt Krause
Yeah.

Alper Rozanes
And I can certainly understand that because it is actually a new reality, not not reality, maybe, but it’s uncharted, new uncharted waters that I’m trying to drag them into.

Alper Rozanes
And I think it’s understandable that there is pushback. And when I ask, for example, some of the reasoning can be around losing detail, or nuances, that complicated slice can contain or, in some extreme cases, the simplification process can feel like, Yeah, but we’re dumbing down the presentation. So we’re losing depth, or we’re losing, we’re being overly simplistic.

Alper Rozanes
So it could be one of the reasons behind. And sometimes it’s the simple resistance to change. Because, I mean, you know, the saying, it doesn’t work. I mean, it’s, I don’t remember the same, but there’s something like, this is how it has been done. This is how things go. In this organization. This is how things have always been done.

Alper Rozanes
And here’s this guy, me, in this case, throwing a wrench into the into all these gears that have been working seemingly flawlessly for decades. But of course, there are enough problems so that I am taking place as a trainer in that setting. And people can can resist the idea of doing things differently. And I think it’s perfectly understandable.

Matt Krause
When they are having this this crisis of confidence. They’re like, Okay, well, I like this advice that Alper is giving, but it’s not going to work in my world. What do you tell them? What how do you help them through that crisis that they’re having?

Alper Rozanes
Well, again, from the example of simplification, or simplifying the message, or the slides themselves, what I try to do is to clearly communicate the benefits like to explain how it can help the entire presentation, or the data or whatever that they want to show more accessible, more easier to understand, not only to their specific audience, but to anyone who might be you know, participating in the in the meeting or the presentation.

Alper Rozanes
And I want to I try to explain how it can be done without, let’s say, losing essential information. And I ask questions, I ask questions about what is the most important thing that you’re trying to convey here, because it cannot be five things, there is only one most important thing that they want to convey.

Alper Rozanes
There can be multiple important things that they want to convey, which is understandable, but there is only one most important. I ask that question. And then we somehow come up with a hierarchy of importance. And then we chart a new course for coming from top of that pyramid, hierarchy, let’s say, to the bottom, so we start with the most important one.

Alper Rozanes
And then we use the upcoming slides, which we created by by by dividing maybe one complicated slide into multiple, we use the upcoming slides as justifications for the importance or let’s say, the level of the most important topic.

Alper Rozanes
I can also provide examples like I can show them some before or after examples on how I took some complex information before, redesigned it, redistributed it among multiple slides and use them as side by side comparisons to show how simplification doesn’t necessarily mean loss of information.

Alper Rozanes
It can actually use to it can actually be used to enhance the, how should I say the clarity of the message that you’re trying to give? And I think my last point would be to talk about actively involving them.

Alper Rozanes
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to say hey, this is how it is done. This is how it should happen. If you want to succeed. No, I would, I would seek their engagement actually, especially the people who have the most concerns, and I would try to make sure that their ideas are heard their needs are met.

Alper Rozanes
And because I believe it’s not my position to say, this is how it should be done. But I believe it’s my position to show if things can be done in a different way with collaboration. I think it’s can ease their fears and make the changes, or or at least transitioning smoother.

Matt Krause
So before we, we need to wrap up in a few minutes here, but I have one more question for you.

Matt Krause
And so so a large part of what you described is, it seems to me is going to require your presence, it’s going to require that you be in the room because you have to help them sort out…

Alper Rozanes
Initially, yes.

Matt Krause
Yeah. Initially, you have to help them sort out what is going to be or what’s the most important message on the slide, and they’re all confused, and they see four messages and you’re like, No way, man, you got to reduce it to one. So. So a lot of that work is going to require Alper to be in the room, because Alper is going to help us stay focused on reducing this down to one really important message.

Matt Krause
And then, and then at the end of the day, Alper leaves, and they’re back on their own. They’re, you know, at their cubicle, or at their desk or whatever, how, you’re not in the room anymore. They have to walk through this on their own now, how do you ensure that they’re going to be able to walk through this on their own when you’re not in the room anymore?

Alper Rozanes
Well, it’s the same case with me because what I’m trying to have them do is simplifying their message and what that what I need to do in my case, is simplify my message towards them.

Alper Rozanes
And it is asking them to vigorously look for the most important message and any given slide at any given information.

Alper Rozanes
If you have a slide deck of 30, slides, go through them and find the most important the crucial, the inevitable message, let’s say that you cannot continue without conveying and build around that.

Alper Rozanes
So I think that’s kind of the mindset, the perspective that I would like to leave them with. So that when I’m not in the room, they can think, okay, what is the most important thing? What is the one thing that I can definitely not omit? What is the one thing that I definitely want to leave my audience with in the slide? I think that’s those are the questioning the mental internal questioning that I would want to leave them with.

Matt Krause
Okay. All right. So we’ve got to wrap it up today. So thank you very much Alper for helping walk me through this issue.

Alper Rozanes
Thank you. It’s good talking to you.