Hey there storyteller,
I write and speak about marketing and storytelling, but there are aspects that I don’t get the chance to expand upon that are essential aspects to becoming more visible and promoting your work.
The inner work is elusive and hard to describe at times, but I’ve noticed with myself and my client that shifting these beliefs needs to happen so you can own your story and expertise.
And for me, I had to go almost completely dormant from a marketing and client capacity level to arrive at this. It was somewhat out of my control due to chronic health concerns, but it forced me to go deep and be willing to accept that parts of my business didn’t need to continue.
It strengthened my thinking about how I uniquely serve clients and help them tell their powerful stories. Which informed speaking at my most successful speaking engagement to date in November of last year. (I'm doing an encore of this workshop, see below)
The cycle allows us to be sustainably creative because we’re connected to the core of our body of work and how we want to serve people.
Last year was unpredictable for me and many others, this year proves to be more of the same at best.
Read below how you can be more intentional about ramping up your marketing and content processes throughout the year.
FREE WORKSHOP
Craft Memorable Marketing with Stories that Sell
Speaking to your customers through engaging stories will set you apart in a crowded marketplace. Refresh your marketing goals and infuse your content with your unique voice & story with this Zoom workshop from 3/18 at 1 PM.
|
| What sections or topics do you want to see in this newsletter? |
|
|
|
|
|
|
How Doing Nothing Strengthens Your Creative Business
Strip back to the bare essentials
It’s not always possible to legit hibernate or put your life/business on hiatus. When I found out I was pregnant in 2019, I returned to nursing to prepare for parental leave.
I left my Board positions. Instead of trying to force it, I dropped the obligations I knew I couldn’t commit to anymore. When you’re pregnant, there’s a ready-made excuse. It’s less easy without some external situation you can point to, I’ve realized.
Then I passed out unconscious in someone’s yard in April on my way to my kid’s school. I had officially pushed it too hard. It took weeks to be able to not work from the couch or bed. All momentum I had gained was lost.
It was frustrating. I wondered if this would happen every time I started taking on more clients or speaking engagements. But I feel equally unsuited to full-time employment.
Something had to change.
It was the unpredictably slow periods of the year that helped me to experiment and realize that an MVP isn’t just for tech startups. You can have minimum viable content, minimum viable customer journey, or minimum viable tech/tools.
This helped me to understand how I operate and what my true capacity is, by building everything piece by piece.
What assets do I need at the moment?
How many people do I need to talk to to validate it?
What can I try or have already tried before that I can now leverage? How can I see creating as an experiment?
Go deeper into your why
Everyday life is antithetical to clarity. The rush and bustle of meetings, deliverables, and demands on our time never stop. And even at night, most of us are thinking about the next onslaught of tasks and obligations.
I don’t talk about this often, but for years, I was a daily meditator. Pre-parenthood, obviously.
It started as an alternative to prayer when my father was handed a stage IV cancer diagnosis in 2017. I knew I couldn’t do it all by myself and sought our practices and community that I knew would fortify me to be a supportive long-distance caregiver.
I dropped the “sitting down on the floor every day” practice when it began to feel like yet another obligation. However, the repetition early on allowed me to integrate mindfulness into daily life.
I read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, a. book I mentioned in a previous newsletter, at the recommendation of my colleague Sarah Schumacher, who reads it every year.
It’s practically philosophical in nature, claiming that once we give up the idea that we can do all of the things we are trying to do, we’re now more free to choose what really matters.
Everyone who has been around leadership or self-development in the last decade or two has heard about starting or finding out your why. It’s now become a cliche.
Instead, framing it as cutting away at all of the minutiae of living and understanding if I could only do 2-3 things in a lifetime, what would they be? Part of being neurodivergent is collecting passions and hobbies, so this was especially hard.
Every day life is going to happen. It will still be there. But carving out time for creation, deep thought, community building: this is the work of becoming a legacy.
What is the core message I want to spread?
It wouldn’t be me if I didn’t bring up messaging or storytelling. As we do with every aspect of our creative work and our businesses, the urge to refine can lead to paralysis.
This was especially true for me with my business model/offerings, but I see this a lot with clients and their taglines and elevator pitches.
I see it a lot at the many networking events that I attend. In our fear or anxiety of being misunderstood, we overexplain and, through that, bury the lede (as journalists say).
But here’s the thing— it’s through overexplaining, journaling, and having conversations with customers (and a messaging mentor like me) that you find all of the little narrative threads that make your work unique, compelling, and engaging.
I found a Brand Clarity workbook I wrote for several weeks that I’d love to recommend but I don’t think it’s publicly available. Reply to me and I’ll send it.
In writing, I’ve heard this called “throat clearing.” I talked about it in a LinkedIn post, but it’s very common for writers to write a few paragraphs that are never fully intended to see the light of day. We’re explaining the story and what we’re trying to say to ourselves first.
Have you ever read a novel or book that spent so much time explaining the setting and backstory that it took you out of the action? It interrupted the pacing. Like a novel, our goal is to keep people reading and asking questions.
Look through:
- Questions you ask and answer regularly
- Your website copy and landing pages
- Client testimonials and notes from conversations with clients/leads
- Your framework or process (core components or steps?)
- If you’ve worked with someone for your branding/marketing before, the questionnaires/exercises you completed (if you haven’t done any, this article on positioning is a good start)
I print it out, or I use Google Drive, and I take a highlighter for keywords, powerful phrases, emotions, and outcomes that are recurring themes.What do these things have in common? How do I center what’s relevant to the listener/my ideal customer?
And finally, how can I simplify my story as much as possible? How can I pique curiosity and strategically leave things out for further inquiries?
Cocooning isn’t where I thought I’d be in 2024, but it brought me back to the core of what matters and gave me the confidence I needed to move forward. It’s not the choice for everyone, and I’m still playing catch up in a lot of ways, but with this clarity, it feels like momentum isn’t something to lose or gain, but an intentional switch to flip once the season calls for it.
Thanks for being here.
Interested in working together?
I have the capacity for 2-3 clients and would. love to discuss how we can infuse your unique voice and story through your marketing content. While I'm changing up the offers I'm creating, hop on a call and we can talk about your needs.
|
|
|
