Becoming Not Targeting.

Jul 11
The Attraction Series · Part Two

Becoming, Not Targeting

Somewhere in every training programme, there's a worksheet. It asks you to describe your ideal client. Age range. Household income. Postcode. Life stage. Pain points. Fill in enough boxes and, apparently, you'll know exactly who to go after. Your Avatar. I mean, seriously, have relationships come to this future dystopian vision?

I want to be gentle about this, because I filled in that worksheet myself once, years ago, with the same earnest confidence everyone brings to it. It felt like clarity. It felt like strategy. It took me a long time to notice it was actually just wanting, wearing a spreadsheet.

Here's the quiet problem with targeting. It assumes the client is a fixed thing out there to be located, like a coordinate on a map, and that the job is aiming carefully enough to land on them. But we spent the last two instalments taking that assumption apart. The client isn't a coordinate. The client is already in motion, already looking, already drawn toward whatever is true and specific enough to notice. You don't aim at a bee. You become a flower it can find.

Which means the worksheet was never really describing your client. It was describing a target you'd invented so that wanting would feel like a plan.

A target is something you aim at. A becoming is something you are. One requires a spreadsheet. The other requires nothing but honesty.
So if not targeting, then what? This is where it gets practical, because "just become yourself" is the kind of sentence that sounds wise on a slide and means nothing the next morning when the diary's empty.

Becoming starts with a much smaller, much harder question than any avatar worksheet ever asked: not who do I want to attract, but who am I actually being right now, in the rooms I'm already in. Not the polished version. Not the version on the listing photo. The actual one — the one who rushes a phone call because the silence felt uncomfortable, or softens the truth about a property because the seller looked tired, or reaches for a script the moment a conversation gets hard.

Becoming is the slow work of closing the gap between that person and the person you actually are underneath the habits the industry trained into you. Targeting never touches that gap. It just adds a filter on top of it.

There's a way to tell, fairly reliably, which one you're doing on any given day

Wanting has a feeling to it, and it's not a pleasant one, even when it's dressed up as ambition. It feels like urgency. It feels like checking the phone. It feels like rehearsing what you'll say if they don't call back. If you notice that feeling, you're not becoming anything. You're aiming, hard, at a target, the same way you always were, just with better language for it.

Becoming feels almost boring by comparison, and that's exactly how you know it's working. It feels like doing the honest thing in the room you're already in, without checking whether it landed. It feels like writing the piece that's true rather than the one engineered to convert. It feels, most days, like nothing happened at all — until, months later, you notice the right people have simply started arriving, and you can't entirely explain why.

If you can feel yourself aiming, you're still wanting. If you can't feel anything at all except the quiet rightness of the work, you're becoming.

I don't think this makes targeting evil, exactly. It makes it beside the point. You can have the sharpest avatar worksheet ever filled in and still repel the very client it describes, because the client was never responding to your targeting. They were responding to whether you were real. And you can have no worksheet at all — no filters, no funnel, no defined audience — and still be found by exactly the right people, because you'd finally stopped aiming and started rooting.

That's the whole arc of both pieces, if I can draw it out plainly now that we're at the end of it. Manifesting was never wanting — it was becoming. The client was never something to chase — they were something to be found by. And you were never meant to be the bee, exhausting a short season in pursuit of the next flower. You were always meant to be the flower, rooted and true, trusting that whatever needed you was already on its way.

So the practice, if you want one, is small enough to start today. Notice the aiming. Let it go. Do the honest thing in the room you're already in. Everything else, the industry taught you to chase. This, nobody had to teach you at all.

— Chris
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