Tell your network what matters most to you
The vast majority of my clients are entrepreneurs who initially came to me to help them post regularly on LinkedIn. They stay with me for years, because I help them think more clearly about what matters most to them.
Clarity is priceless
Some weeks, you’ll tell me about your philosophy of life, or business. Other times, you’ll describe vitally important developments at work. You might tell me what your five-year-old daughter taught you Sunday evening.
You’ll soon discover that it is a profoundly positive practice to pause once a week to remind yourself—and your entire network—what matters most.
Be more engaging on social media
After we talk, I abstract the most important part of our discussion into a social media post that you share. It uses your own words in a clear and compelling manner.
If you like, I can also craft messages to your team or other important communications you wish to serve. In short order, I’ll know your voice better than anyone else.
You're not just paying me for writing. The vast majority of my clients value our weekly conversations as extremely valuable in helping them clarify what matters most to them, and in refining how to best communicate with others.
You can leverage our conversations for much more than social media. Some clients use our sessions to generate content for a book. Others compose newsletter issues. A few simply use our time together to help solidify their thinking and plan for future innovations. And I have a handful of clients who use me as their executive coach.
10 Years of Weekly Conversations about What Matters Most
by Bruce Kasanoff
For ten years now, I've been holding weekly conversations with each of my ghostwriting clients, always beginning our discussion by asking them some version of, "What matters most?"
As background, over this period of time, my clients have included:
Entrepreneurs running companies with as few as one employee to some with hundreds of thousands of team members; most have 25 to 100
Executive coaches
Speakers
Executive recruiters
Technology executives
Here's what a decade of doing this has taught me:
Self-awareness is a practice, not a natural state. Almost no one is inherently self-aware. You either work at it on a regular basis or you are not self-aware. Even people who stop once a week, like clockwork, to reflect and self-assess find it challenging to maintain an accurate sense not only of how others perceive them, but also of why they behave the ways they do.
But the harder you work at it, the better you get.
We all have something valuable to share. Across an entire decade, I've come across fewer than five people who lacked something interesting to share each week. While many people are slightly apprehensive when they start working with me, almost everyone discovers that when they dig deep, they find buried treasure.
Most of the people who worry, "I don't have much to share," just haven't encountered enough interesting questions lately. My primary skill is asking questions, and this is often all it takes to shift someone from stuck to energized.
Being human is far more interesting than being perfect. No one wants to listen to the "smartest" person in the room pontificate week after week. Instead, most of us prefer to absorb genuine human stories to which we can relate. To say this another way, if you can relate to someone, you can learn from them.
Your first instinct is rarely your best instinct. After each conversation with a client, I write a piece in their name that summarizes the most interesting thing they shared with me this week. It is exceptionally rare that I use much that they said in the first 10 minutes or so of our conversation, even though my clients are quite insightful.
This is because the further you go into a deep conversation, the closer most of us get to highly powerful observations. It's not that your original idea was bad; it's that your ideas get better and better as you poke and prod at them.
Digging deeper is much more fun than it appears from the outside. I deliberately created the artwork at the top of this newsletter—the repeating series of 'what matters most' words—to initially feel a bit overwhelming to the average reader. I've learned that's how many people react when they first contemplate what I do.
But the actual reality is exactly the opposite. It is calming to ask yourself, "What matters most?" on a regular basis. It is comforting. Enlightening.
Why? Because the more often you ask yourself this question, the more likely you are to have a life filled with what feeds your soul.
What to expect working with me
This is an excerpt from Scott Martin’s Groundswell podcast “Being Human”, during which I gave him a behind-the-scenes look at my storytelling practice working with leading entrepreneurs.
Scott: Please tell me about the nature of your ghostwriting practice.
Bruce: My focus today—with both clients as well as people who read my articles and posts— is around what matters most.
So, for example, with the entrepreneurs with whom I work, I talk with each weekly and the first thing I say to them is some variation of, “What matters most?” You can answer that any way you like. You can say today, this week, this month or in my life.
When you do that on a consistent basis, you get profound answers. The sad part is that that is such a rare practice.
Scott: So what led you to discovering this? How did that discovery happen? What sort of started this?
Bruce: Well, I've been on a seven-year journey. When I started writing on LinkedIn, it was the first time in my life that I could write anything and people would read it and it didn't have to just be about marketing.
That helped me clarify, what do I really care about? Not what do I get paid to do, but what do I care about? And the longer that I've done that, the more people I've attracted.
And, and then as I started to structure a practice around what I was calling ghostwriting, I was surprised because—I don't want to create the impression that this happens every time—but there were conversations we would have that were deep, deep, deep conversation. Even though theoretically my job was to do a LinkedIn post. But my bias is away from being superficial. Therefore, if you give me a pat answer, I'm gonna push back a bit, respectfully.
Scott: What happens when you do that consistently?
Bruce: Over the course of months and years, I kept sliding towards more substance. I keep attracting ghostwriting clients who are willing to go deeper. It's very important to me to work with people that have two qualities. The first is they're willing to go deeper. And the second is they know how to build stuff. Companies. Movements. It’s through their ability to build large, positive creations that my work has impact; it’s through their willingness to go deeper that my work helps them.
Scott: Oh, that's amazing. So when you're working with people—and I don't know if it's a coach capacity or just in dialogue—what's the process you go through to help them with answering the question of what matters most? Do you want to share a little bit about what that looks like?
Bruce: It is simple on the surface, meaning that 95% of the time, it's a half hour conversation. I say something like what matters most to you, sometimes it’s what's on your mind this week. All my clients know that the goal is to go deeper, to be genuine, and to provide a window into your thinking for all the different stakeholders in your world.
I'm an intuitive person, not a regimented person. And I have stumbled upon something that's very powerful and that is almost better than a regimented system. I have about 15 of these conversations a week. They don't make me smarter, but they make me better able to find paths towards meaning for each individual. Part of it is that I truly listen.
Another is that the different conversations overlap in unusual ways. Almost all my clients are entrepreneurs, so they have some similar challenges, even though they have very different personalities. There are some weeks in which three people get right to the edge of what they really want to say and then back away. So then I think about how might I break through that? And it usually leads to progress. I'm not saying that every time it gets to these unbelievable outcomes, but the results are both genuine and meaningful.
I write something that's usually 200 to 400 words that summarizes the most important thing that person said. When you stop to think about it, coaches don't do that. Therapists don't do that. Psychologists don't do that. It's an extremely rare thing to have a weekly practice that helps you focus on what matters most to you. Someone else has been listening to you and then you share it with the world because you believe that it correctly summarizes how you feel. And those, those things are, sometimes they're fun, but a lot of times they're pretty profound.
Scott: Do you feel that you're at a point in helping navigate people issues, these kinds of conversations, that you're not merely sticking to a formal process, but you are intuitively just able to navigate the conversation—to move the needle like you say—to get your client closer to that breakthrough?
Bruce: Yes, because I think my best skill is interviewing people and because the output is so concise, meaning I'm not trying to write a 2,000 word article. I have the benefit of trying to connect the dots between what I'm hearing and we have plenty of time. If you talk for half an hour, you will speak about 7,500 words. I just really want 200 or 300 that capture what this week truly matters most to you. So I have a lot of freedom to repeat back what you said, to see if I got it. And then we might explore what happens if I turn it left or right 90 degrees.