“Maybe I’d write more blog posts if I understood why I’m doing it, but I feel like I’m just putting stuff out there and it doesn’t make any difference.”
Raise your hand if the practitioner who said that is speaking for you, too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see your hand go up, because I think that most of us graduate from our training with one idea in the forefront of our minds…”I want to practice! I want to help people!”
What are you really doing?
The problem is that “practicing” and “helping” are so vague that nobody really knows what you’re really doing for your clients — maybe not even you!
Getting clear on what you really want to offer people is one of the most important things you can do to build your practice, because people will begin to associate you with that idea. When they think of you, they think of the idea. When they think of the idea, they think of you — and that’s why they open your newsletter!
Think of Julia Child, French cooking and “Bon Appetit!” or Carl Sagan, the universe and “billions and billions”! Or how about Quentin Tarantino — and movies with gratuitous violence! (That just goes to show that you need to make sure what you get known for is what you want to be known for!)
When your name brings to mind what you’re known for, and what you’re known for makes people think of you, you’re on the road to a bigger practice! And one of the key steps in making that happen is to figure out what you stand for so that you can articulate it clearly — when you can do that, it’s a whole lot easier to understand why you’re writing posts and to offer consistent value to your clients.
In no way does this mean that you have to restrict your practice! It means that you take the time to develop clarity about what you’re offering your clients … and that you can express it in a way that everyone can see the difference between you and other practitioners.
Start developing that clarity right now…
Take a little quiet time, while you think about these questions without funneling your thoughts into the usual noisy channels.
Who are the people who are experiencing the difficulty or challenges that you feel called to mitigate? You can probably feel this in your heart, or at the level of your soul. You already know them… it’s not “everybody” … and it’s deeper than you may have allowed yourself to look before.
How would you describe the difficulty or challenge they’re dealing with? It wouldn’t be unusual to feel yourself drawn to more than one challenge, so write down descriptions of them all. Then take some time to really contemplate how you could use your life to make the biggest impact possible on something that the world needs right now…
- What is that one thing that you feel most deeply compelled to address?
- What do those people go through?
- What is the impact of that suffering?
If you were speaking to a group of people who needed you for this reason, and if you could share only one thing — a key idea, a change in how they see themselves, a shift in perspective — one thing that they could begin to use to impact this incredible challenge in their lives…
What would you share? What is that one thing that is so central to everything you do that it applies to everyone you want to help?
If you have more than one, that’s great… write them all down. Then sit with them and take time to understand the importance of each one. Then, choose the one that is closest to your heart and soul… the one incredibly important message that only you can share.
Don’t wait to do this! When you have it, post a comment about what you discovered — because letting your light out into the world is one of the ways you get seen by your clients!
~~~~~
If you haven’t signed up for automatic email notification of new posts, do that now — just enter your email address below… because helping you reach more people is why I’m here, and I don’t want you to miss any of these posts!! 😉
