Changing your life | The School of Visibility

What are they coming to you for? (Introducing the enneagram part 2)

A lot of marketing people talk about the importance, when selling, to focus on results. And yes, of course people want results. But results look different to different people. For some people a ‘result’ is finding connection. For others it’s learning something. For others it’s having an experience. Marketers talk about results because from an enneagram perspective, sales and marketing is a three world. And guess what threes value above all else? Results!

But you’re not always selling to threes.

A five’s ‘result’ might be learning something new. A seven’s ‘result’ might be having a great experience. A one’s ‘result’ might be reducing carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

Understanding the kind of result people are looking for, is critical to building a successful business.

Here’s one place to start; start with what they want from you. You might run the exact same business as 5,000 other people but what differentiates … [Read More...]

Blocks to creating a visibility strategy

Before you read on, you should know that this article is part of a series on developing a visibility strategy. This is chapter 3 in that series.

Pick up all the chapters here.

Thus far in the series we’ve considered your deeper why for creating a visibility strategy, as well as the resource commitment you’re willing to make when it comes to implementing your visibility strategy. Before we dive into the various visibility opportunities there are, and which suits you best, let’s address the elephant in many a room; visibility blocks.

Visibility blocks can show up at many different stages in the planning and implementation of a visibility strategy. So when we take our students through our visibility planning process in detail, we include block clearing at multiple stages.

For now, it’s important to take some time to review some of the stories you have about visibility that might be … [Read More...]

Entrepreneurial visibility has a flavour all of its own

Visibility challenges are not all created equal.

Here’s one big difference; what it takes to speak up and feel confident talking about things you don’t have a personal investment in, versus speaking up about your own work (programs, services, products that you’ve created and nurtured into being).

If you’re an entrepreneur you’ll know what I mean. There’s a level of courage and vulnerability that’s needed to put your work into the world, to declare it worthy of consideration – not because someone gave you a seal of approval but because you know it to be so. There’s a level of confidence that’s needed to continue to tell more and more people about your work and not feel like you’re harassing them, or ‘being a bother’, or being scammy.

Entrepreneurial visibility requires a type of courage that – as women – we’re not conditioned to feel comfortable with.

As a gender … [Read More...]

What is patriarchal conditioning?

This is all about patriarchal conditioning and how it might be affecting you as a woman, particularly with regard to speaking up and being seen and heard in the world. NB: The topic of patriarchal conditioning could be a whole book or PhD in and of itself so consider this just a short introduction.

To begin to understand patriarchal conditioning, it’s easiest to think about social conditioning and the ways you’re affected by the society you live in.

Start with the community you grew up in. It had a set of rules and expectations about how you behave, show up for one another, who gets a say, who doesn’t, who’s valued and who’s not. Most children absorb all of that without anyone critiquing it for them, which means they simply take on those ideas as ‘normal’ and assume that’s just the way life is.

If you don’t ever take the … [Read More...]

Judging my entrepreneurial self

I’ve spent so much time finding and releasing limiting beliefs over the years, it amazes me that it took me this long to see this huge block to business growth. It’s this; my own judgment of entrepreneurship.

I had judgment coming in from every angle;

My social justice self thought it was too commercial, too immersed in capitalism.
My spiritual self thought it was too materialistic to earn money by selling things (what was being sold didn’t seem to matter, it was the fact of selling that was the problem).
My middle class self thought it was crass to sell things for a living when I’d already acquired a good education and really, should go and work for a big corporation or a government agency (that being a more respectable way to earn a living apparently).
As a feminist I felt guilty about selling to other women, knowing that

… [Read More...]