One Way To Build Immersive Authority

Desert X is an annual outdoor art happening here in the Coachella Valley.

It works like this: each artist sites their work in a public setting where visitors interact with the art.

There’s a master map that viewers use to trek to the pieces—one of my favorites required a hike up a steep incline to an isolated desert hilltop—along with a single paragraph about the artist’s intent with the piece.

The other cool thing was some natural interacting with other visitors, which only rarely happens in a confined space like a museum.

We talked about the piece, the artist, the setting—or just commiserated on surviving the hike in full sun at 90+-degree temps.

It’s 100% immersive, which is probably why the experience is so sticky—it’s been a week since I interacted with my three favorites and I’m STILL pondering their message.

Which got me thinking about applying this to authority…

Each art piece is a physical rendering of the artist’s point of view, not unlike like your books or courses or even your membership offerings.

So what if all you did was write a paragraph to describe your thing and then stepped aside to let your people interact with it?

What would they learn?

And might they learn just as much (or more) from the others also there for the experience?

How might those discussions change their experience with your work?

Putting your point of view out to the world and inviting a potential audience to interact with it is an essential step to building authority.

But rarely do we sit back and just let our work “breathe”. To see where our tribe takes our gift as they immerse themselves in it.

Maybe that’s worth an occasional pause on the road to authority: allowing the tribe to tell us what’s next.

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