What Preparing to Teach Taught Me About My Own Process

I’m speaking at The Content Club on 1st December. For those of you who don't know, that's the wonderful Jack Gaisford’s event in London with fifty people in a room, and I’m running a live version of the Demand Tension Map with them.

I’ve been preparing for it this week and I couldn't quite realise why this felt a little different.

Every time I run the Demand Tension Map with a client, it’s more of a conversation I suppose? I ask something, they answer, and we tend to reflect and chat through those answers together. It means I get to notice what they don’t say as much as what they do say. It might be a word they keep coming back to or a small passing comment.

But that's where the useful stuff lives. The 'gold' for want of a better word. And I find it by pulling, not projecting.

So standing in front of fifty people is completely different. I can’t pull and I have to project. I have to take something that’s inherently conversational and make it work as a framework someone can pick up and use on their own, without me in the room asking the awkward follow-up questions.

That’s made me think harder about what the Demand Tension Map actually is and what I’ve been assuming people understand about it that I’ve never actually said out loud.

When I’m with a client, I don’t really explain the three layers. I just move through them. The surface problem comes up naturally, then the emotional reality underneath it surfaces because I keep asking why. The future they’re reaching for emerges because I keep asking what good actually looks like for them specifically. We can drill down into their specific business so it feels relatable and immediately understandable.

None of that is a technique per se, more curious direction. But curiosity with a direction doesn’t really scale to a room of fifty people who’ve never met me. So I’ve had to think about what the actual structure is, what I’m doing when I think I’m just talking, and how to make that legible to someone who needs to do it themselves.

There’s something about teaching that forces a level of understanding that doing doesn’t really require. When you’re doing it, you can just crack on. When you’re teaching it, you have to be able to explain why the instinct is right and I'm finding that much more difficult!

I think this is probably true of most expert-led businesses. You develop a way of doing things that works until the point you refine it through repetition. And then someone asks you to explain it and you realise you’ve never quite put it into words, because you’ve never had to.

The businesses I work with who struggle to communicate what they do aren’t struggling because they're crap at what they do. Often the complete opposite, they're fantastically talented. They’re struggling because they’ve never been forced to make it understandable. They just do it, and it works, and the clients who come through referrals trust them enough that they never have to fully explain themselves.

Until a stranger lands on their website.

That stranger isn’t going to give them the benefit of the doubt. They’re not going to wait for the conversation, they need to understand, essentially instantly, whether this is for them.

The Demand Tension Map is how I help businesses get clear on what those first few lines should say and preparing to teach it has made me realise how much of that work is about helping founders articulate things they already know but have never had reason to say out loud.

So that’s what the workshop on 1st December is. Not really a talk, instead a room full of people doing that work together.

If you want to come, tickets are still available through The Content Club. Email me and I’ll send the link.