When you think about the career, business or organisation you’re building, do you consider yourself first and foremost a practitioner or a businesswoman? A CEO or a therapist? An artist or an entrepreneur?

And what does this have to do with your experience of visibility?

Everything my friend. Everything.

When I first started building my business I thought of myself exclusively as a yoga teacher, wellbeing practitioner, and blogger.

I knew I had to build a business to get the word out about my work but I didn’t think of myself as a business owner. At all. I didn’t even particularly like business. For me, it was a means to an end. That’s all.

Because I thought of myself as a teacher, practitioner, and blogger, guess what I did consistently?

Taught, worked with clients, and blogged.

And guess what I always put on the back burner? Sales and marketing. Promotion of the business. Actions that would scale my business.

In short, visibility related activities.

Who we say we are matters. What we identify with determines our priorities and the kinds of habits we build.

As human beings, we are continually taking action to reinforce the story we’ve told about who we are.

That story informs what challenges us from a visibility perspective and what doesn’t.

If you’re like me and have identified with professions and careers that aren’t business-related, you might well have dismissed or pushed aside activities that would grow your business.

The thing is, if you want to get your amazing work into the hands of more people, you have to put on that entrepreneurial hat at least some of the time. You have to expand your identity at least a bit to bring CEO, business owner, or entrepreneur into the mix.

When you do, you’ll make the time to prioritise business-related tasks like sales and marketing. You’ll develop entrepreneurial habits and you’ll stop fighting yourself when it comes to taking actions that will grow your business.

What do you think? Could you identify as CEO too?