WIIFM Got You Here. It Will Not Get You There.

What happens when WIIFM stops being enough.

Saturday edition of CTRL by JP Bristol

Some of us still hear WIIFM like a radio station we grew up on.
Most of us treated it like survival because for a long time it was.
The shift starts when you stop tuning in out of habit.

The station most of us never stopped hearing....

The Old Frequency

I first heard WIIFM at an insurance conference over a decade ago. John Maxwell was the keynote, and he was not celebrating it. He was calling it out.

What’s in it for me.

It is the filter every message passes through. The reason most communication falls flat. The invisible question your audience is asking while you are still clearing your throat.

Most sales trainers teach you to exploit WIIFM.

Maxwell treated it as something you had to grow past.

The Gen X Tension

We grew up in the gap between the company man and the free agent.

We watched pensions disappear. We watched layoffs hit people who did everything right. We learned that asking what’s in it for me was not selfish. It was survival.

I saw it firsthand in my IT years. People with twenty years in the building were gone in a single morning. Good people who followed every rule. Watching that happen taught all of us the same lesson. Protect yourself because no one else is doing it for you.

So when someone tells us to move beyond WIIFM and embrace servant leadership, it feels different when you have the scars to prove it.

We have two decades or more of receipts. We added value. We showed up. We took the late calls and the extra projects. We watched younger, cheaper talent get promoted around us.

So the quiet question becomes: have we already given enough.

Fair question.

The Reinvention Shift

Here is what Maxwell understood that most motivational speakers miss.

The shift from me to we is not about self-sacrifice. It is about position.

If you are building something beyond your corporate role, like a consulting practice, a coaching offer, a community, or a body of work that outlives your job title, WIIFM is not the enemy. It is the bridge.

You start where they are.

What’s in it for me.

Then you answer that so clearly and so consistently that it naturally becomes:

What’s in it for us.

This is the CTRL approach to communication:

Clarity: Name their WIIFM out loud. No guessing and no cute language.
Tenacity: Keep answering it in every interaction, not just the pitch.
Reinvention: Treat WIIFM as a diagnostic. If people do not engage, you did not answer their question.
Legacy: Build systems and offers that serve so well that your value becomes obvious without you explaining it.

The Professional’s Advantage

Here is the beauty of experience.

You can hold both truths at the same time.

Yes, people filter everything through what’s in it for me.
Yes, long term success requires moving beyond transactions.

You do not ignore WIIFM. You earn the right to rise above it.

When a prospect asks about your service, you solve their immediate problem first. Then you show them the larger transformation. That is when the question shifts from what is in it for me to how do we make this happen.

When a team member resists change, you start with their concern. Then you widen the frame to show how this helps everyone, including them.

Maxwell was right. We is better than me.
What rarely gets said out loud is that we lands best with people who already showed up for years. People like us.

The Saturday Question

As you plan your week, ask yourself:

Where are you still operating from scarcity. From the defensive WIIFM your corporate years drilled into you.

And where could you shift to abundance. Using WIIFM as a tool to serve others so effectively that the line between their success and yours disappears.

Here is the paradox that makes reinvention possible.

The fastest way to get what you want is to help enough people get what they need.

Not because it sounds noble. Because it works.

CTRL+ALT

What if the people who taught you to ask what’s in it for me were not wrong. They were training you for your next role to answer that question better than anyone else for the people you serve now.

That is the move.

CTRL: R

Like CTRL Signals? The CTRL-ALT-REINVENT community is the unfiltered room. Real stories, real people, real progress.

CTRL by JP Bristol
Clarity. Tenacity. Reinvention. Legacy.

* Image created by Google Image FX