Ep 66: Why you MUST Know Your Avatar if you Want to Grow with Ginger Dean

May 23

Why you MUST Know Your Avatar if you Want to Grow with Ginger Dean

If you're like me, you've probably heard a lot about the importance of figuring out your "ideal customer" or avatar. Maybe you've even started working on it, but got distracted by other things. Well, it's time to refocus and listen up, because today we have a special guest, Ginger Dean, who's going to explain why understanding your customer's inner thoughts and desires is crucial for your business success. Ginger has used this strategy to build a massive membership with thousands of members, and she's here to share her secrets with us.

Ginger Dean is a psychotherapist and the creator of Loving Me After We, a membership program that helps women break free from the cycle of rejection and heartbreak. Ginger's unique background and expertise in healing trauma after toxic relationships make her an invaluable resource for anyone looking to build confidence and find peace after difficult experiences.

But what I really want to focus on today is one of Ginger's most powerful skills: her ability to connect with her audience. As business owners, we all know that building strong relationships with our customers is key to success, but it's easier said than done. Ginger has mastered the art of creating a safe, supportive space for her members, but what stood out to me is her profound understanding of her membership avatar and their internal dialogue. So whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, you won't want to miss this.

Favorite Community

What is your favorite community you have ever been a part of and what did you love about it?

I would say that Stu's TME community is the best because of his incredible energy level. During a recent consult, the person I was speaking with said they could only handle two 10-minute doses of his energy, that's how energetic he is! And I completely agree, it's amazing. You're going to love the program.

The community is unlike any other I've experienced. Everyone is plugged in and engaged, constantly asking questions and helping each other out. It's a purposeful group that runs like a well-oiled machine. From a community perspective, I'm always in awe of how seamlessly everything works together. On the front end, it looks great, but on the back end, there are so many moving pieces that all come together perfectly. If there's ever an issue, the responsiveness of the group is incredible. Overall, it just feels really plugged in, and that's what I love about it.

Getting into the Mind of your Avatar

How did you develop the skill of getting into the mind of the person that you want to serve and speak to them, and oftentimes with humor?

I spent six or seven years of my earlier career working with kids from the foster care system, who were coming from low socioeconomic backgrounds and facing a myriad of challenges. The focus of our work was on attachment trauma because they had been taken out of their bio parents' home and placed with a foster parent. My job was to help them adjust to the new environment while everyone was in survival mode. Many people believe that if you are coming out of foster care, you should want to be away from a parent that hurt you, but that is the furthest thing from a foster child's mind. For the most part, they want to go back home. So we tried to get them to acclimate to rules, structure, consistency, and consistent food on the table, but they often resented that. Helping foster parents not internalize the struggle was always a challenge because we wanted them to be there.

I always advise people not to become a foster parent just to give back because foster children will test that desire to give back. After working with kids and later with adults, I realized that regardless of where the adult came from in terms of socioeconomic status, they had the same issues as the children. For instance, if an adult had a problem attaching to their bio parent, they might be an avoidance type, not knowing how to connect to others or have empathy for someone else's feelings. Understanding their own history and working with them on attachment trauma is crucial. My experience working with kids helps me understand the inner child in each adult today. I can speak to the inner little girls who just want to be loved and seen, and how important it is to acknowledge the different ways in which men and women are socialized. It is crucial to understand that our experiences socially are so different.

I have talked to women from different parts of the world and was surprised by how similar our experiences were in terms of socialization. Being able to speak to the inner child who is going through all of these different changes and just wanting to be loved is essential.

Foster children are often given messages that they are not good enough and need to change to be loved. As a child growing up in a home with parents in survival mode, you get the same message. My experience communicating the internal experiences of children to judges, determining whether they should go back home or not, has helped me translate play therapy conversations into reports. Joking about the internal dialogue helps some people laugh at themselves and ease the emotional load.

Most of my audience is at a place where they can say they don't want to do that again and are willing to be less judgmental and more compassionate with themselves. It makes it easier to look back and say, "I probably shouldn't have sent 50 text messages because I didn't hear from them," and then decide to do things differently next time.

Develop Your Avatar

What has your journey been like trying to really develop that avatar?

It's interesting because it's exactly what I am doing now. I am revamping it a little bit in terms of learning today's language. Initially, what I did was speak directly to my audience. Writing great copy is something I'm a huge fan of, and before launching, I definitely focused on that.

I learned to be direct and get to the point quickly when a Judge Judy-style judge was presiding over cases I worked on. This skill was valuable, and being direct was never hard for me. I thought about how to get someone's attention and speak to them directly, not just asking if they went through a breakup, but asking if they were chasing love that didn't love them back.

Before launching, I created a challenge via my Facebook group that asked, "What are the three things that keep you up at night about toxic relationships?" It was a great question because it spoke directly to their reason for being there. We used group leads and had a spreadsheet of 5,000+ responses. Then, we excluded words like "I" and "things" and found that the most common words in the responses were rejection, abandonment, and betrayal.

Before launching something new, I routinely ask my audience what they are struggling with. Recently, they have been dealing with situation ships, which are temporary relationships where one person wants more than the other, leading to heartbreak. We launched a program about situation ships, and other issues like premature attachment, obsessing over someone, betrayal trauma, abandonment, and rejection were also covered in classes.

We performed a lot of masterclasses based on what they were telling me, which allowed us to grow quickly. The challenge we created covered all their pain points, and we used a soap opera style sequence for emails and other content. It worked well because they could relate to me as a therapist who had experienced similar issues.

Today, I ask my audience what's keeping them up at night, what they're working on, and what their ideal outcome looks like. Then, I use ChatGPT to extrapolate pain points from their responses and give me three life examples of what this would look like in a toxic relationship. The tool categorizes responses, and I revamp my copy to speak directly to their specific issues.

Be Authentic Quickly

Do you experience, when people join your membership, that it feels like they go deep quickly, and are able to be authentic pretty quick?

Yes, we definitely have some wallflowers in the group, which is fine and expected. In Facebook groups, people can post anonymously, and I love that now because it makes more people feel comfortable posting their stuff. For example, one person may have posted four times the previous week about something but feels some kind of shame about it. Then they'll come back and post something anonymously, and I'm like, "Is that okay?" They ask, and I say, "It's totally fine. You can do whatever you want as long as you're respectful." They share quite a bit with each other because even those who are on the fence or on the sidelines see that there are so many different personalities.

One of the things I appreciate about the group is that they're very direct and hold each other accountable. They don't sugarcoat anything, but they're not cruel either. They can say, "You don't deserve that," instead of waiting a little longer to see if they change, especially if the person described physical violence and having a restraining order. We've had people post a room that's just been messed over because of physical abuse. So, I ask them to put trigger warnings on their posts before they go live, and if they're already live, to add a trigger warning.

I'm often surprised by how deep and vulnerable they can be with each other. It's being modeled by other girls in the community, and I love that for them because unless it's your therapist's office or you have a bestie committed to listening to you around the clock, where else do you have this community to say, "My ex has done all these different things to me, but I still can't get over them. I can't stop thinking, but I'm still going to their house at two o'clock in the morning to see who's over there. I'm sending them 50 text messages." Then, other ladies chime in and say, "I went through that too, and when I experienced that, this is what happened to me, and this is how I actually was able to move past that."

One of the things we've really helped them do is look at what the person is asking for instead of going towards, "This happened to me, so this has to be happening to you." Sometimes I'll just put something out there and say, "What do you need from us right now?" Instead of trying to problem solve or give immediate advice, we have hashtags like #advice and #askquestion that people can go through. So, they know we're going to be here to be supportive.

Sometimes people are in conflict about how to handle a particular issue, but I think it's great because in our niche, there are anxiously attached and avoidantly attached delegations of people in relationships, and they tend to be at odds with each other. What I love about the membership is that I've watched anxiously attached people have a lot of angst towards the other side. As an avoidant woman, they're able to say, "Well, I may avoid in this situation that you're describing, and this is how I would feel if it were me." They receive that very differently than if it was their partner telling them, "I need space, and this is why." If it's another woman saying, "Yeah, I'm avoided too," they know that when you try to tell us too much too soon or you want too much from us before we're able to digest it, it can feel too much. It's not about you; it's about this internal response we have where we want to shut down, and we just don't want to talk. When they can hear that, as opposed to internalizing not wanting to talk as "I don't want to talk to you because I don't like you," versus "Oh, so this is a thing where just like I get scared inside and I want to yell." Instead of yelling for them, they just retreat.

So being able to have the group communicate that to each other, I remember that thread did get a little heated, but it was great to see because they were able to realize that avoided people aren't evil. They're human just like you. They have the exact same internal experience, they just express it differently. But because the messenger was different, the original poster was able to understand, "Okay, so it's not really me, it's just how they're responding to me."

Transformation with Community

I think it's really beautiful that you don't coddle them because a lot of people I have communities where people come with their drama, and challenges, and in an effort to be overly kind, we're not actually encouraging them towards the transformation that they've paid for in that community.

Yes. And so one of the things I used to say with my clients is, "I want to tell you all of this stuff now because you could decide that you're not going to come back next week. So let's talk about the critical things that you need to take away from this session.

We can have a back and forth about it, but I think it's important for us to be honest, right? Because there's always this risk of sugarcoating someone and then something awful happens, and then you're like, 'Oh gosh, what if I had decided to have this conversation?' But sometimes you think as a therapist, 'Maybe they're not ready for this part just yet.'

We ask ourselves if they can handle this conversation at this moment. What I have found is that they can typically handle the conversation once you have built rapport, once you have been able to establish safety with them. So I love that we can be direct without being cruel to each other because I think in this niche, there's a lot of coddling.

People tend to overlook the community aspect, but they realize how lonely they are only after seeing multiple posts in the group from people like them. They realize that others are going through the same thing too. I receive messages from people who are surprised that this is actually a common problem. I have to remember how it was for me before I got involved in what I'm doing now.

Unless you've experienced it firsthand, it's hard to understand the feeling of someone disappearing for two months and then reappearing as if nothing is wrong. Even textbooks didn't cover this topic back then, and it's very much related to attachment styles and trauma, but the connection wasn't being made.

I can make the connection between a mother who gave you the silent treatment when you were growing up, and the reason why you consider it normal in your adult relationships? When someone tells me about their experiences, I can understand and say, "Ah, so that's why you behave that way." They often express surprise and say, "Wow, I didn't realize that was a thing, but it makes sense now." We normalize sharing stuff like that.

SO I'm not the only one speaking up about it in the community. They know if someone wants me to answer a question, they should tag me so that I know. Sometimes people want my opinion, and other times they just need to discuss things with each other. I let them do that because sometimes the actual issue is not what they initially thought it was. This approach gives them the opportunity to communicate and find a resolution without my interference.

Listen to your Community

I know so many business owners that pull out of the community, the bigger it gets, the more team they have, they start spending less and less time there. And maybe you're contributing less, but be in there listening more because this is where you'll just continue to get that information and refine how you're talking to your future members and your current ones.

You know, when you're interacting with others in the comments or in your own community, it's important to keep in mind where they want to be in terms of transformation. When I first joined Instagram, I focused on finding their soulmate. But I began to see that many of them were still struggling with issues like stalking their ex. I've noticed that some individuals are starting to open up and express their desire to feel more. It's no longer just about finding the perfect partner, but rather about not wanting to feel this way anymore.

As a psychotherapist, I often see people who come to me hoping to find their soulmate, but behind the scenes, they are still stuck on their ex, stalking them on social media. However, I've noticed that some individuals are starting to open up and express their desire to feel more. It's no longer just about finding the perfect partner, but rather about not wanting to feel this way anymore. As a therapist, it's often assumed that when clients come into the office, they already know their issues. However, on Instagram, people may not even realize they have a problem, but instead are just Googling someone's behavior at night. I was surprised when people started telling me that they don't want to feel like they don't like themselves anymore, and it was a valuable lesson for me to just listen to their experiences.

It's like, so you don't aspire to get married and have children by 25 to the same person? And their response was, no, truthfully, I just don't feel good about myself when I'm with them. This was a major realization for me. I had assumed that every woman wanted to find their soulmate, have children, and settle down by the age of 30. I did that myself. But then I learned that some people have different goals. They may have initially aimed for that, but the way they feel about themselves causes them to sabotage the relationship because stability feels too overwhelming. They feel like they need to make the shoe drop. When we listen to their stories, we have our own assumptions about what kind of transformation they need, but the process can be complex.

Our role is to support them in this journey, step by step, without overwhelming them with too many expectations or objectives. And while we may be thinking 10 steps ahead for them, for the person themselves, it's simply about taking the next step and that's enough. By focusing on this baby step, it gives them the momentum to progress to the next step.