|
Personal Core Beliefs about
Work, Money, and Success
Core beliefs, as you know, form the basis for your assumptions, attitudes and expectations
of what's possible, or impossible. A lot of us in the healing arts have core beliefs that we are in service to something
higher or more spiritual than profit, or that we shouldn't take advantage of people who are hurting.
Somehow those core beliefs often translate into not charging what we're worth,
not being confident in how we talk about our expertise, and even being afraid of success as if it were some kind of selling
out of our lofty principles.
Personal Inquiry:
Identify your core beliefs about work, money and success. What core beliefs do you hold about work in general, and about
your work in particular? What are your attitudes, assumptions, and expectations about success? If you become as
successful as you'd like, what would that mean about you and what you have had to do to get there? How will it change
your life? How do you feel about money? What does it represent to you? What resentments do you have about
money, or about how others spend it?
How do all these attitudes, assumptions and expectations that shape how you
feel about marketing? How do they contribute to your psychological and physical energy for marketing tasks?
Psychological and
Physical Energy
The activities of marketing are energy intensive.
They require an expenditure of focused thought, problem solving, and creativity that can be a drain on our psychological energy
reserves -- especially if in the background there is a constant nagging inner voice telling you that you really aren't good
enough to deserve success, or that no matter what you try you're going to fail. It takes a large amount of psychological energy
to ignore that voice, or work to transform it.
Those activities are also physically draining. Either they require
long hours at the computer writing and setting up online ways to attract clients to your business, or they have you running
on a certain level of "performance energy" at those networking breakfasts too early in the morning, or forcing yourself over
the hurdles of visiting potential referral sources, or being clever and magnetic when giving a signature talk.
Okay, that's not manual labor, but it's physically and energetically taxing all the same.
Personal Inquiry: How's your energy right now? How do you renew it? What drains
it? What type of marketing activity gives more energy to you than it takes from you? What types takes more than it
gives?
Emotional Wounds
Being a attractive magnet for bringing clients to your door requires
our own emotions to be in healthy shape. Unfortunately, a lot of us carry around some pretty heavy baggage from wounds
endured in our families of origin or from traumatic events we've suffered. If any of the following are in your emotional
energy field, they are no doubt impacting your ability to successfully market your practice:
~ shame
~ feeling not good enough
~ impaired sense of belonging
~ lack of self confidence
~ learned distaste for bragging about yourself
~ perfectionistic extremes
~ feeling unworthy or undeserving
~ fear of being visible
~ fear of taking risks
~ inability to ask for what you want
~ difficulty talking about money (fees)
~ poverty consciousness
~ victim consciousness
~ other?
Personal Inquiry: Take an honest
inventory of your baggage. What are your emotional wounds? How are these impacting your ability to market yourself
successfully?
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
Is it Laziness,
Fear or
Ignorance?
Too many times I've heard
people accuse themselves of being lazy, as in lacking discipline or persistence. I've even charged myself with this
false crime.
But I suggest today that
we are using the label of being lazy to cover a deeper wound -- feeling scared, or being embarrassed about not knowing something
(being ignorant).
Take a moment to really assess the ways you ARE already
consistent and disciplined. I bet you have many consistent habits or disciplined practices in your life, and probably
even some in how you approach your business or your marketing.
Make a list of the ways you are already consistent and
disciplined. It's good to have a baseline that reflects your actual reality. We can't know where to apply
remedies, or even which ones to select, if we don't know our usual range of normal.
Now see if you can identify the areas in which consistency
and discipline need to be improved. What's on that list? And how will you change what is to what needs to be?
Next, stop and consider right now how you might be simply
scared about doing your work or becoming successful. Look at how your fears are promoting self-defeating behaviors.
Find how your habits of inconsistency are rooted in being scared and trying not to feel or show it.
Now consider how you might be just lacking in the knowledge
that is needed. It's no shame to be ignorant in this sense. In fact, it's important to admit where you're ignorant
because that provides you with a road map for gaining the knowledge you need or problem solving the lack of knowledge by outsourcing
the task.
Make a list of your areas of ignorance. Where
does it point you? Who can help you learn or accomplish what's needed?
Email me
if
you need a
brief consult ~
just click on the
spinning star
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
