On the podcast this week I’m speaking with Women Speaking Up student and NGO founder Christey from Just People’s about the visibility shift she’s noticed lately vis-a-vis the way she shows up and speaks about her work. Not only has it brought more peace to her relationships, it’s had a positive impact on their fundraising efforts.

Here’s a snippet;

‘When we set up the organisation, we felt that everyone that we came into contact with needed to give us money and it became very awkward. We were carrying an energy of hustling and of neediness in every conversation that we were in. Even with long term friends from high school, we felt that we had an agenda and that made us feel awkward and our old friends started kind of being tentative around us and not wanting to ask, ‘How’s work?’ because they didn’t wanna be put in the position where maybe they need to say, ‘Oh, I’m going to donate or I’m going to fundraise’.

So we went through the process of refining our ideal customer and ideal audience and overcoming visibility blocks about how we saw our work and how we spoke about our work. By doing this, we removed the anxious energy that we carried around it.

There was also an element of thinking that charity work isn’t ‘real’ work. That it’s volunteering, it’s goodwill stuff, so you need to do it for free. There were a lot of stories that we carried about charity work when we got into this work that negatively impacted how we showed up and how we spoke to people and how we spoke about our work.

But recently I realise that I’ve gradually been dropping these stories and I’ve become more comfortable talking about my work, and if someone asks me what I do, I tell them what I do. With no stories. I don’t have an agenda that I need them to donate, cause I don’t, and I don’t have a story that I’m ‘only’ doing charity work.

I talk about my work in the same way as the people that I’m talking to – whether they’re teachers, lawyers or diplomats – talk about their work in this matter of fact way.

And it feels absolutely clean and clear.

This has resulted in some of my friends in Tokyo where I live in fact, last week, two people came up to me separately and said that they wanted to, host fundraising events. One of them is a Christmas cocktail event, which is happening in December, and another one is a giant clothes swap, which is happening in January, and this giant clothes swap is something I wanted to do two or three years ago.’

For the rest of the episode, jump on over here and subscribe to the show.