 disease and chronic illnesses. She also owns a private practice, Seattle Direct Counseling, an online counseling and coaching service. Both are on board press. She's an avid endurance athlete at the Ironman and 100 kilometer ultramarathon distances, loves cats, and uses all that time swimming, biking, and running everywhere to think of ways to get people to eat real food. Please walk out and make sure I had no idea this morning whether there'd be two people or 20 people and I want to share something that happened to me a few years ago. As I drove down the street in Seattle, it was a sunny day. I had my windows up. This is kind of a while ago, so I actually had the type of windows you've got to roll down. I'm driving along a really skinny street with cars parked on either side and and and. There was no parking on this street. And as I'm driving down, I see this woman who's coming out of her house, and she's got a parking spot that's designated to her home. She's got a car there, she's about to load something through the car, and I say to myself, I need to stop and tell this woman something. And she says, I'm parking a spot so you could just keep driving along. This car comes towards me. And because the street's very narrow, it's one direction, one car at a time. I think I guess I gotta go back up. My back of the back of the back of the car, I find another place to pull my car back into. This car comes back. I go back to where I was. I say to the lady, excuse me, lady, what? And she says, didn't you hear what I said? And then sure enough, right when I'm about to tell her what she needs to hear, another car comes down. I'm like, oh shoot. Go back up the window. Drive backwards again. Go into a parking spot for a second. Let the car come by. This time I think, okay, I'm going to do this right. So I come back and drive up to her. Hold on a minute, one last. And say, lady, I've got to. And she starts on her little tirade again. Yeah, I am not getting at my back. And I just interrupt her. I said, lady, you need to listen to what I have to say to you. Your panty hose and your shirt is sticking out her panty hose. The whole skirt and her panty was out there exposed for the world to see. And she's saying we're about to go downtown to deliver a presentation. Our skirt and shirt and everything would have been stuck down there. Pink panties on there. Really cute. And you don't think that's what she wanted to show them. So what I want to share with you is about this discovery process. And what I want to share with you that I hope that you need to hear, or you know somebody who needs to hear this, whether you are a business owner yourself, or you're a designer working with clients, trying to help other people understand the process of trying to create something big of your website and blog content. And I'm kind of, it's not about you, it's about them. It's about who out there is going to be seeing this end product. Sorry for my little technology issues earlier, but I will catch us up. I would like you to keep this image in mind. My experience with helping clients, and I am a psychotherapist, as was mentioned before, I help those through conflict. And it's often this thing. Under the thing that the client needs to see. It's not the disputes and headbutting that sits up on the surface. It's the thing under the thing. When you're communicating with clients, you want to keep drilling down beneath the surface to understand what's truly hanging them up on something and getting them stuck. So what is that thing under the thing for designers and for clients? As a client, I had this fantastic idea. In 2015, as was mentioned in my bio, I was already in the way of having been diagnosed with celiac disease, hermetophonist dermatitis, which are both autoimmune diseases, and over 300 food allergies and intolerances. I was one very, very sick person. And a driving law, but better by 2015. I got diagnosed in 2013. By 2015, I had this idea that I would be creating a website and blog that had services and products for people like myself. Because I knew there were over 23 million people with autoimmune disease. Add another 50 to 75 million just in the US alone, who had at least one serious food allergy. Millions more with intolerances. And then we had this other section of people with chronic illnesses who had to make some kind of lifestyle shift. And what I was hearing feedback from other doctors, nurses, and mental health professionals is that these people would learn what it is they need to do, but they had a hard time implementing it. And my idea for a website and service was to create a way for them to learn the lifestyle piece. Something that wasn't really being well represented out in terms of websites. Lots of medical information does not have it implemented. So I found myself a fantastic designer and we got to work. I hired Natalie McGuire of Natalie McGuire Designs in Oregon. Her eyes started chit chatting about what it is that I envisioned. And then she sent me this fantastic workbook. I mean it was amazing. It had all these different fancy words in it. I'm not in the industry. So I was just like ooing and awing. Wow, this is great. This has been making easy for me to talk about what it is I want to do and to get this beautiful end product. And Natalie's really into the idea that every website should be both functional and beautiful. I'm down with that. I'm really good. It's kind of gone a little bit, starting funny heads. Not in a really negative way, but in a way where I would try to say one thing and she would say another and we were almost saying the same thing but sort of also missing each other at the same time. And all the behaviorists I was like, hmm, what's that all about? And she wanted to make certain that I understand certain concepts so supposedly they were all laid out. But then I would get stuck over and over again. She would say, okay now we need to work on this section of your content. So here's a bunch of questions. And the questions were straightforward, but then what she mapped it to in terms of the labels, what she called things, I had no clue what they actually meant. If you're on the inside of the industry, then you know what you're looking for. If you say write me an about me page, you know what you're talking about. But that's life. It is not. The client thinks, here's what an about me page is about. Oh, it's about everything that I've done since kindergarten. It's about me. I had no clue about the page. It's far more than that. It's about 20% about me as a client and 80% about them. The audience out there who's not meant you yet who doesn't know about your products and services or your idea or your nonprofit or anything like that. And so if the client, the vague mistake out there, the vague, the client doesn't get it. It looks like this. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Oh maybe you. Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Oh yeah, are you? Me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. It's the lady with the underwear and her pantyhose and her shirt tucked in her pantyhose. She can still do her job, she could have still presented, but she might be embarrassed later. The audience out there is having a hard time understanding what it is that they are going to be getting. They can read through that about the page, for example, and then kind of still walk away, okay? Well, I know a lot of stuff about the person behind this website and this blog, and then at the same time, the client is kind of dumbstruck as to why that audience out there doesn't get it. Well, some of the things that I discovered in this process of having this designer make my website is that we need to start back a little bit, and I started asking for shared language, asking her to explain what she meant by something. She thought it was really perfectly clear in her workbook, and in some ways it was. I'm not faulting her actually in her workbook. The workbook was great. It's just that for a person who's not part of the industry, what she thought she was asking for was not what she was getting from me, and that's why we were butting heads. So we need some shared language. That's the catboy poll. We don't, okay, let's start over again, let's figure out what are we trying to stay? So the first steps to building, to bridging the gap that are created, the gap between the designer and client, and the client and future audience is to develop shared language, and the way you do this is you stop doing whatever you're doing. You listen, what's the client trying to say, and then my thing, look for the same under the same. You do that by defining and then asking for the thing that you want, then telling them what it's called. You don't put out the word post necessarily, the label, and expect them to know what you're asking for. Describe, then put the label to it. That's called this. I learned from my friend and most excellent rebel rising speech coach, Dr. Michelle Mazer, she's here in Seattle. I learned that something like my about me page wasn't really about me, like I mentioned, it's more about what the audience out there is going to eventually see about why they want to work with me because they see actually themselves that I can, I kept wanting to just talk about what I've done, why people would want to work with me because of my credentials, or my background, and what I was missing is the about me was actually supposed to attract through the way of that outer audience out there being able to see themselves working with me. And that was a bit of a shift. Now I think that's kind of intuitive. I challenge you, go and look up. I'm not going to pick an industry. I'm not going to pick on anyone in particular. Attorneys. Go on an attorney's website and go to their about me page. Tell me if you are snoring by the second paragraph. Because their about me page is full of their credentials, which are necessary for you to know if you want to hire an attorney. It's full of a lot of detail about where they went to school and what kinds of cases they may have taken and what kinds of experiences they have. And maybe some references or people gave them great reviews. But it's not really what an about me page is about or supposed to be about. And so most people don't get the information. They actually need to make the decision of whether they want to work with you. And that's what Natalie was having a hard time translating to me or helping me understand I needed to do in terms of the content I would hand her to design into the about me page. Another example, so we can move away from about means, is this thing about mood boards. For the designers in the room, you all know what a mood board is, right? You want to ask me what I thought a mood board was when I heard that word? Kind of a mood board was just the mood that I felt like I was in when I would look at it like, oh, this is my mood board. It's the mood that you want to project that helps attract the kind of client that you want. That's the mood board that she was talking about, but I didn't get that. Now can you see why we kept going? I'm not getting it. She needed to help me understand what a mood board was. Everything from how she was looking at asking me questions about what kind of logo I wanted because I didn't have a logo. I'm going to show you some examples next, but even just that process of it, I needed to have her explain to me what the purpose of the logo was to define what it is and what its true function was because I just kept picking things based on stuff that I liked, which is fine for me to start with. But I wasn't thinking about how is my audience out there going to connect with my logo. And then I thought, well, maybe that's just me. Let me go look around. So I started looking around at other people's websites and examples of logos. And I could see the same thing. I could see logos I totally could not connect with because it was around somebody else's vision for themselves that they forgot that extra piece. And whoever designed it with it, whether it was themselves or somebody else, didn't tell them how to bridge that gap. After you've gotten the client to stop and then listen to you, ask them questions, you can keep reminding that client to ask this question as they give you the content and the emotional mood or experience that needs to be improved in their finished life. And keep asking them how will this translate to your client out there, their future client, their future audience. It's from myology advocate where people who are sick and tired that is the number one complaint when they come to me is that they are tired by that. They're physically tired. Some of them are losing hope. When you are drained of all your energy, you can't even read a website. The fact that I'm standing here today after being hospitalized over and over again of going from having a double master's and being able to memorize top seconds to having to rely on notes because my cognitive processes were interrupted for about two years and so I've been building it back since then. Now I understand what my audience is feeling. So everything into this design started reflecting that. She gave me a sample and I go, that font is too hard for a tired person to read. Make it darker, make it bigger, make it easier to read, give it shape. So I didn't always have the label like I can't exactly say, I want this kind of font because I'm not in the industry, but I know it when I saw it. And so then we could dialogue that way. Fonts needed to be darker, easier to read, not tiny. Images needed to pop. Content needed to address illness dead on and not be sanitized. When we buy sanitized, we have nice, polite ways of saying, I had a challenge of talking about some very, very personal medical issues, not just personal me, but personal speech for a few, for all humans. But all of us need to take a poop. And sometimes it's not very pretty. So people have gastrointestinal issues of which a lot of people in the autoimmune community do. We're talking about IVS, ulcerative colitis, celiac disease being one of them, and a whole host of other autoimmune conditions. The time they spend in the bathroom can be quite painful and very, very intense. And so we made certain that that concept would not be sanitized. So the first things you see are not about me. It's about them. So this is one of the first pages you'll see when you pull up the final design that we came up with. Feel of your body doesn't have to be so good wrenching. If you go to other websites with similar concepts about food allergies, about autoimmune disease, you don't see that. The more of the about me stuff, the more of my place is what I was thinking of. And instead we decided to go in the opposite direction. How can the outer audience out there already see themselves here? The funny thing is that when Nala came up with this idea of saying like really working with me to try and put something like this up front, he said, you have to show me how you want to sell it to the people out there. And my first response was, well I'm not in sales. And so this third challenge that you want to help your clients with is to bridge this other gap when they tell you or demonstrate that they really don't understand how to sell their product or service. They're going to get hung up and install because of this word sales copy. They don't understand what it is that you're asking information for. And in my case when she asked me for sales copy, I, it's kind of embarrassing to say, but I made her a bunch of stuff that sounds like about me. No surprise, right? And I'm not in the industry. I didn't know what she was asking for. So I gave her more about me content. And she came back and said, that's more about me content. I need sales content. I need sales copy. And I just went, okay, I don't know what you're asking. So she walked me through it. So some of the ways that you can identify if your clients are getting hung up at this spot is that they stall. They give you more about me stuff. The copy looks super duper busy. It's hard to understand. It might be not something the audience has a point of view at all. So if an audience member were to read it, they're going, this is more about the person I'm interested in purchasing. At this point, now that you're probably one of the best things you possibly could, so if you're stuck here, I think that you should think about talking to someone who writes sales copy. This isn't her saying, that's okay. And it was such a relief because I thought I was stuck with it as her client trying to come up with sales copy and not understanding what it is that she was looking for. We kind of just bashed around with that for another three months. That's not what I do. But it's not really what she did. So she said, it's okay. Let's find a person who can write your sales copy. And so I did find someone and that person looked with me and again didn't put the label on saying we're going to write sales copy now. She just asked the right questions. I gave her the content and then she showed me how it lines up into five different areas to put into a page and then I sent that over to Natalie and said, is this what you want? And she said, yes, this is sales copy. Okay, so now we're back on track. So one of the options is you could refer someone who writes good sales copy to do that piece of it and then use that shared language for communicating. Don't use any industry words. You also have the option to build off of anything that your client does know or examples that they have said that they liked other people's websites and kind of worked off of that. So you might not have to have your client hire out an additional person. One of the other things I thought about was from the audience's point of view, in the finished sales copy does that audience member then know how to get a consultation or purchase a product or why they're purchasing of what benefits they would get out of it and what they could do with that knowledge if they'd plot that product or surface now or in the future. And for many of you that's very, very intuitive. For me, after looking at all these different websites that never answered those questions, it wasn't as intuitive for me to understand that until that was pointed out to me. Then I could look up samples of websites out there while their nets and go, oh, I have no clue what I've got here. I write it so that the people out there do know. And from there we got this final front page though. So the new board photos were all taken and based on not just the mood that I was in at the moment, but the mood that I wanted to put my future audience in. And that is because we came up with what my friend Dr. Michelle Laser called her three word rebellion. Away from you, remember what I'm all about. Why did I want to create this website in the first place? And my mission became this three word rebellion making food fun again. It's actually four words. Step close enough. And we made all of the pictures all the colors about fun. So there's the lines, there's the oranges, there's the plate that's ready to put food on it customized to you versus prescribed to people what they're going to eat. The lines in front of the eyes being very silly. We had tons of fun doing the photography for this site. And I want to summarize what I said before to say we want to strive to understand the thing under the thing by asking questions, stopping, listening, developing the shared language. We want to mine the gaps in what your client understands about translating that idea to the audience that's out there waiting to hear about their products and services. Then you want to help your client avoid the pitfalls of being useless about the page or another way of just saying that is get them past the me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me stage by helping them discover what the about me page is about. I'll say one last thing about that. I think that it's actually pretty healthy for clients to come to you with natural narcissism. Not all narcissism is bad. It means that they believe in the mission of their idea. They've already sold it to themselves. They just don't know how to sell it out there. That's where you as a designer, that's where you as a programmer, that's where you as a part of a design team can help get them past their natural narcissism so that they can reach that audience out there. You're at the same time as for the four passions that I did for narcissism. Right. So it doesn't just end up being, this is what I did in the past, maybe it becomes, this is what I'm passionate about to share with you. You're absolutely right. Thank you. And I do want to say a couple of words about why WordPress because obviously these websites can be put on to anything. I was just going to verify people and come back to it that there's so many people out there who want and have good ideas that they want to turn into websites but they have no idea how to run a website. I come from the mental health community so lots and lots of people on private practice, their idea of a website is creating a static one page thing that space is saying for the next 12 years. And you can go out there and look at it and it looks like their websites are dead. And I thought, I'm going to do this front of the website out there. My needs to look like there's some activity going on. Needs to look active. Needs to look like you can build a community. Where should I go? WordPress. It just so happened that Natalie was really, really keen on the idea of handing it off to a young WordPress. She had worked with client after client who's just like me with no design background, no tech background. And she would teach them, hand them off on WordPress and get them going so they could go underneath the hood and do all the kinds of things that I love to be able to do. One is control. How many of us don't have some control issues? You want to be able to get into your site anytime and something changes and be able to do that overnight or within an hour because I have seen this happen before but something changes and then I've got friends going, I can't change this on my websites. I don't know how. So many times there's things in my history that just change really quickly. How many of you have heard that there is a vaccine that is being developed for Celiac disease? Have you seen it? Okay. Maria has in the back. If you don't know anything about Celiac disease you wouldn't have heard it. It's kind of a big deal even though in another way it's not a big deal but in terms of the research community this is a big deal and if by some chance this were to actually be passed through the FDA approval on a fast track and was available say 2019 which it inevitably could be. If you were in my industry in healthcare you would want people to change everything on your website very, very quickly to adapt to that. Now I happen to give you an opinion it's not going to be that or shattering but if it were I want to have the power to go in there and change it and not have to wait on somebody else to do it because I can tell you I just know too many people who have old material on their sites that they don't have a clue how to change and it's really unfortunate because we have such powerful tools. So I like the control I like the ease of use. The WordPress community has just done such a fantastic job in making these tools easy to use and if not easy then they have tutorials and if not tutorials they have help desks and about help desks you can write in and ask any question you want and get an answer very quickly or a forum of people answering the question and I love that it makes me feel less alone. I like the response again it's about how quick that I can get in there and how quickly I can see people react to the changes that I make. I've been using WordPress since 2009 and I've never looked back since. I can see in the clients of this desire to work with Natalie that they too are experiencing some of the same things. So I'll look at the bottom of the page after it says Natalie require design and I'll say Powered by WordPress or some of the indication that it has been transferred onto WordPress and I then know as I watch different owners of sites making little updates and I'm like yeah I can do that too. It's just a big look of the logo that we ended up with. I love the fact that there's some verbs on there which is an empty player. I mean work here to collaborate and see what's going to end up on your plate, what's for dinner. The way you contact me is through my email address there with an email at myallergyadvent.com just forget how to spell email just remember it's in your phone I-M-E-I the I-M-E-I number in your phone. I've purposely left a huge amount of time for you to ask questions because I think this is the dialogue stuff that you can't do as something like why isn't this working? I have a little bit of imposter syndrome I tend to see that I'm blind everything on myself and oftentimes the problem is that again the thing under the thing is something we've created or collaborated on together to get into a challenge and then also something we can collaborate on to get out of the challenge so I'd like to use the rest of the time to think about some questions like these studies that we can talk about together that follow this minding the gap and looking for the thing under the thing so I'm going to open up questions. So I just went to the session on monetizing your webpage and the woman who spoke before do you do that with your webpage or is that your intent or is that or is it just more of an information source? It started out as an information resource but we started small with just a couple of services so one of them are for people who are just newly diagnosed with a food allergy or two or three or more or a serious autoimmune issue or both and they really have no clue where to start I have everything from basic batch cooking 101 to a virtual grocery shopping trip where I go with them with their phone into their grocery store and they show me the batch of labels and things they're thinking about and I teach them how to read the labels I teach them how to shop and put things together or to think about how to cook two times a week for all seven days of the week things like that so that's a service and we built that into my website so I thought about some services but selling them as a product and buying them pieces if you want or they could buy three days of group coaching so say they have a small community of people and they want to learn how to do this together they can then come in as a group and I would teach them virtually through different internet based programs and they can watch demonstrations of pretty much anything they want to know about the lifestyle pieces so it was adding in meditation for stress reduction learning how to get active how to cook again or how to clean out their entire house for every kind of personal hygiene and environmental issue or food issue because these people are so sensitive it can be just the tiniest thing what's just happened for example how many of you knew that the resin on your apples could contain food? Lots of other people haven't heard this so that was a new one to me I actually just recently got a tiny bit of a gluten exposure by eating an apple that I had thoroughly double scrub the resin off of that apple so we talk about this in a group study and that was another planet so great question I just wondered would you be a total environmental therapist? Yes I did because there was a group out there who contacted me they were called the Center for Chronic Wellness and they're located in Seattle to name.org and they wanted to put a list of different kinds of medical and mental health providers one of the things that's really true when you get any diagnosis of an autoimmune disease or a frugality of chronic illness is that you can experience a lot of anxiety and depression that's just kind of built into the experience it's a feature and so they wanted to list me there and I thought this is interesting because that would mean that some people will see that and want to hire me for my counseling background and others might want to hire me for the less medical side of the picture and they could choose so this side is all coaching and no medical the Seattle Drug Counseling which is my other practice that's all mental health and the state of Washington does not want us to mix the two so unfortunately I can't actually build out this stuff with the counseling sessions so they're either hiring me for counseling or they're hiring me for coaching and not both with a small area that I would call in that Zen Diagram section what we have in common is that Washington State believes that whenever a person is counseling from a licensed mental health therapist there's always some coaching involved so some people who have an autoimmune disease say I'm just conveying one multiple sclerosis we're going to have depression and anxiety going on right that's what I've been treating them for will they ask me questions about their autoimmune disease? Absolutely will they want some coaching on that? Sure can I put that in and build that into part of their therapy? Yes, we have about five minutes left so what is your process of determining what content you're going to write for the audience? Great question I started Facebook live and business page and would start taking my questions from the audience themselves so as they bring up issues I started close group they would ask me questions and I'd say can I take this question and actually build content around it because it was a great question and I should write about that I know you deal with autoimmune disease do you deal with anything else like PCOS or MAP or things like that I'm sorry I worry about problems you deal with that as well I worry within say it's Hashimoto's everyday it's absolutely if it's just weight issues it's not tied to another disease such as type 1 diabetes which is an autoimmune disease that's the autoimmune version of diabetes then yes if it's just weight and eating not as many people are going to be attracted to my website because they don't see themselves for those first pages I don't talk anything about weight control not that I couldn't because it's part of my counseling stuff and I deal with people that are in treatment for eating disorders energy but again I keep factors separate so it's a very different emphasis to us I guess there's more to that if you can put it under chronic illness yes do you ever feature in other stories on your phone from either readers or other people that might be sharing those experiences fantastic fantastic question I was texting my sister and the question was do I ever feature the stories of other people say readers who are writing in and I was just requesting information from a school teacher the chef at the school to ask about what the kids want to eat if they have food issues so yes, I said can I put me in contact with this person so I can hear what it's like for this person to cook 800 meals a day what it's like to provide for everyone plus the kids with special food needs yeah, great idea anybody else's I'm excited a little bit about that so like when you're getting these stories do you have a process for what kind of questions to ask like how is you happy with a story about my conversation no I'm brand new at this but because I'm a counselor I will say this, I'm really big into safety and privacy I'm always asked for consent can I share about this is this okay if you want me to make this anonymous do you want me to change your gender absolutely do that and that's one of the protection my license is required and then two to protect the person I think we're out of time thank you so much for showing up