As business owners we’re taught a few things about entrepreneurship:
-Get in peoples heads to make them feel seen
-Use pain points to do the above statement
-Be of authority/be an expert
For most people, following these suggested rules don’t feel good, but most people don’t know what to do instead.
The idea of pain points make sense—dig in where someone feels most vulnerable, twist their shame until they feel motivated to no longer feel so bad and they buy their thing.
However when we move this way we aren’t moving from a trauma aware place.
If we look at business from the lens of a human first, trauma aware approach, we ensure that we seek to reduce harm to ourselves and others.
Pain points seek to harm but they’ve been so normalized we don’t even realize it.
They almost ensure that we are re-exposing someone to their trauma.
So, what do you do instead?
You can:
- Hold someone in their vulnerability without exploiting their trauma
- Ask questions VS assuming:
- Instead of “I see you, I know you’re hurting”, try “do you ever feel like…..?”
- Focus on seeing someone as a whole human, and not just a problem, or their pain. When you single in on someones hurt, it’s hard for the person to see themselves in their wholeness as well.
- Focus on pleasure points VS pain points.
- Instead of “have you been hurting and desperately seeking a way out?”, try, “Are you craving a bit more ease in your world?”.
Moving away from using pain points is a really simple and small shift you can make to start moving from a trauma aware space in your business.
The business industry is the problem, not you—maybe you’ve been using pain points and now you’re like ‘shit, I’ve been harming people’. It’s okay, we all have caused harm and we all will cause more in the future. what we want to focus on now is how we aim to reduce the harm wherever possible.
