Don't get Scared, Learn

Have you ever found yourself staring a new challenge or a new client in the face and thinking "I don't know if i'm up for this/can do that" and then maybe considering NOT taking on a new client or a new a challenge you'd actually really like for fear of not being enough? And potentially letting people down? Or as it presents itself in the Practitioner and Service Based Business World and Academia for that matter, not being "expert" enough? Wether you're a not long qualified Practitioner or Coach, a Practitioner considering a shift from one market or platform to another, or the CEO of a multiple million dollar company, it would seem none of us are quite immune to those moments, at any stage of the journey. No matter how "expert" we are, there'll always be a challenge, the calling to a new level of purpose that calls us beyond our comfort zone. This week's blog is about how to stay in the game at those moments when the fear part of us just wants to say no or refer to someone who we think CAN do a much better job than we, and how switching our focus from fear to learning can help with that.

3 Perspective Shifts and Activities that can help with this

Like our quote today says here, one key is to replace the fear with the opportunity to learn something new, that you can then offer in service. Flipping "no" or "i don't know if i can" into "actually, if i don't know i'll just learn how to do that and get help to be ABLE to do that," hence, "I can and I WILL totally give my absolute best to achieving that." Because there's nothing in the universe we can't learn how to do, wether through research, further study, or consulting with another professional, given enough time in which to do it.

Secondly, as i was saying to my Women in Wellness Leadership group earlier this week, it's really important to make time, both individually, and create inner business or personal circle opportunities to appraise at least weekly your recent and past wins and achievements, so that your conscious mind gets the download and is accurately appraising your ability to do things, not to mention what might be a comfortable stretch goal from a suicidal leap off a tall building minus a parachute, a set of workable wings, the material to build them or the mysterious, new-found ability to control the Matrix and Superman your way out of there. While entrepreneurship and A level Client Service DOES sometimes involve ingeniously engineering solutions out of thin ear, appraising often our wins, strengths and achievements helps us more accurately judge our future capabilities and thus be a little more optimistic and confident in taking them on.

Third, as one of my Female Mentors and former bosses ones said to me when i was first building my private Counselling Practice, suggesting potential referrals to them that had come to me and stuck in the comparing myself as inadequate to both my female bosses 14+ years additional experience to mine: It's worth remembering, any time we compare ourselves to others and find ourselves "lacking", to remember that there's a reason, a genuine soulful reason they (our clients) choose us of all people. With over 7 billion people on the planet, there's a pretty good chance that the current accumulation of our past life and work experience, plus knowledge base, is just perfect for a whole bunch of people out there, exactly where they're at in their journey right now. Who either haven't found the solutions to their problems that you have or found a pathway to the fulfilment of their goals and desires, that maybe you already have.



Research as our means of Learning within our Business

For business purposes, like selling an initial consult or session, or designing a program for the target market of your choosing, working out what that is, is part awareness and reflection on your knowledge and personal experience, part intuition, plus asking enough clever questions of the person or people in front of you until you are crystal clear what it is, so that you can be equally clear what support and solutions you can suggest.

Contrary to how many Facebook marketing ads might make it sound, when it comes to start up or the initial design of an online program, you're not meant to just know it all or intuitively work it out without feedback. Flushing out the solution and things that we personally did in solving or recovering from that problem and or achieving our goals, combined with our sense of what we think and feel our clients might need can make a great backbone. I see many business owners who've got this far, with great passion and excitement about launching their life's work, or who've put something out there based on this and are seeking help because it hasn't moved like they thought it would. This is the point in the process though where we need to practice letting go of the emotional attachment to our baby we've created, put on our Scientific observation hat and treat our initial idea/concept/prototype like our hypothesis to be researched and tested. To be Scientifically objective about it requires us to be open to whatever evidence we may gather in the following period of research with our target market, either refuting or supporting the validity of that hypothesis.

We say to ourselves "So i think this might work, but what do a sample size of 10, 50, 500, eventually 5000 find benefit from it too?" As you do sessions or organise to have interview style conversations with people from that market, you'll objectively gather data on what it is in their opinion that they truly need and what support and solutions they will most benefit from. Plus about if there's any additional challenges they're facing, additional aspirations they have, or support they need that you didn't initially think of or need personally.

As many of my Business, Sales and Marketing Mentors of the last few years had taught me, while doing our research, we also need to take note of what language our potential clients use to describe their problems too, relative to the often practitioner or specific industry terminology we might use to describe the same thing, that we can forget that the average person doesn't understand. More than that, we also need to take note of what problems and aspirations they know that they have, verses what problems and solutions we might know that they need and want to suggest and make sure we do start meeting them at their level of understanding, before guiding them towards the existence of ours and our solution. We also need to look at  how to communicate the knowledge we want to impart in ways that meet the needs of multiple different learning and communication styles. 

From there, you can start proposing a particular program or product outline, road-testing it with your market and gathering feedback (and ideally testimonials) as you go. Then you repeat and see what happens. And once you're starting to get results  you can replicate and repeat with others consistently, then you know you're onto a winner and can, in a more measured fashion, throw more resources and energy into marketing and expanding the reach of your creation, into launching your life's work via that book or in that program or product.

​For that which you move forward with, for having done that research, this too helps to erase some of that initial fear and doubt and replace it with the confidence and certainty that we absolutely have something of value to offer the world. Beyond all our awesome mindset work, the evidence, the results we see via doing the research and the work become the proof in the Practitioner Pudding. And the more we believe in our work, the more our market will too.

Nat xxoo