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Authentic Outreach: What It Is and Why It’s Important

Authentic Outreach: What It Is and Why It’s Important

by | Apr 14, 2019 | Connection

“Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.”

~ Rumi

In this post I want to share with you a key way to grow your service-based, purpose-driven business in a sustainable and conscious way.

Alongside content creation, authentic outreach is something you should be practicing daily in your business if you want it to grow and thrive.

So what is authentic outreach? Well in the context of growing your business, essentially it means connecting with people in your community and beyond in a direct, personal and meaningful way. By outreach, what I’m talking about is intentionally reaching out to people with the dual purpose of connecting on a deeper level and doing what you can to be of service.

If it’s still not entirely clear what I mean, It might be helpful to also tell you what authentic outreach is not.

It’s not:

  • Marketing to your audience.
  • Spamming people.
  • Pitching your products and services.
  • Posting on social media.
  • Blogging.
  • Email marketing.
  • Newsletters.
  • Networking.

For sure you’ve heard that “networking” is good for business and at first glance it’s easy to mistake outreach for networking but there is a fundamental difference between the two. The difference is in the intention. With networking the intention is to get more business, in other words to get something from the other person. With outreach, the intention is to build and deepen genuine and mutually beneficial relationships, meaning that you give something to the other person.

What’s the purpose of that, you might ask, if it’s not to get more business?

Well because for conscious business owners, who do what they do for more than just money, there are a whole host of benefits to having meaningful connections with your community and audience. As well as the fact that it just feels good to be connected, doing it consciously brings about more opportunities to collaborate, help and serve people and learn more about what people might need from you.

As well as this, often, because people feel that we are not trying to sell to them, new business comes as a result. If you’re not convinced (or even if you are), I highly recommend this wonderful video by Coach, John P Morgan who artfully makes the case for taking time to connect with people in our network.

So what does outreach look like in practice? below I share a number of ways you can reach out to people.

  • You could take the time to send a personal 1:1 email to a subscriber of yours. I like to go through my list of email subscribers occasionally and when I come across someone whose name I don’t recognise but who is regularly opening and reading my emails, I love to drop them a little note to say hello and to see if there is anything in particular they are struggling with that I might be able to help them with. Sometimes this results in me offering a complimentary coaching session to go deeper on something they need help with.
  • When someone friend requests you on social media, rather than mindlessly accept the request, you could write a personal message asking them what inspired them to connect and try to find out more about who they are and what they are up to in the world.
  • When someone takes the time to comment on or share your post on social media, don’t just like their comment or share, write something meaningful in response. Tell them how much you appreciate their gesture and find out more about what they got from your content.
  • You could reach out to your former clients to say hello and see how they are. I like to do this at least every 6 months (more often with clients who I’ve stayed in close contact with) and sometimes, I’ll gift them a complimentary coaching session if they indicate they could use some support.
  • If you do your work through 1:1 sessions, you could reach out to people who have been impacted by your work (perhaps a former client or just someone who has had a session with you before) and ask them if they know anyone who would benefit from a complimentary session with you and invite them to share a session with you as a gift from them to their contact. It’s a lovely way to have more people experience your work, it allows you to be of service and has the person gifting the session feel great too.
  • You could send a message to someone who you don’t know who has inspired you and tell them so. Let me give you an example of what that can look like. Years ago, I was featured on this website (because of a lovely connection I’d made with the founder) and a few weeks later, so was the wonderful Eli Trier, I loved her piece and felt we had a lot in common (plus I loved her art) so I wrote her an email simply telling her that. We’ve been in touch ever since and this month, she’s featuring me in her wonderful community project Redefining Community and next month she’s teaching a class inside my Female Business Academy aptly called Mastering The Art of Connection. So much amazingness has come from a simple and genuine impulse to connect. We’ve both got so much out of the connection, yet neither of us have ever tried to sell each other one thing.

As you reach out to people, be sure to do so with an intention to serve, ask how they are, listen deeply to what they are telling you and ask yourself if there is anything you could share that might help them. Perhaps there is a book or article you would recommend, or some other resource that could be useful but even if you do have something you think could help the other person, always be sure to ask permission to send it before you do. 

Sometimes, people use the idea of “being of service” as a strategy to sell or self-promote and it always feels icky. Here’s an example that demonstrates how not to do this. Several months ago a woman reached out to me on LinkedIn, I accepted her invitation and within seconds she had sent me an message that contained the line “I would love to give you a free copy of my…” It was a guide on how to get started with WordPress (one look at my website and she would have known that I offer website design so I’m not likely to need her guide) and when I clicked the link it didn’t take me to the “free” guide, she said she was gifting me, it took me to an email opt-in, so not so free after all.

Imagine if she’d just tried to get to know me on a deeper level? If she’d just tried to genuinely connect. Or if she had asked my permission to send me the guide, asked if it would be useful for me? Perhaps later down the line, once a relationship was formed, maybe I’d share that guide with my audience. Maybe I might have even referred clients to her. But I guess we’ll never know, because I knew as quickly as it took her to cut and paste her generic message, that she wasn’t someone I had any interest in getting to know better.

As you get into a rhythm of outreach, you will inevitably encounter people who could benefit from your services. If you have formed a relationship rooted in integrity and caring, they are highly likely to hire you, if it’s a fit for them to do so. Or they’ll recommend you to people they know who would benefit from working with you. This is a beautiful and very fulfilling side benefit of connecting with people and what has always left me speechless is when someone with whom I’ve formed a relationship with over a number of years suddenly, and to my complete surprise, declares that they are ready to hire me as their coach. Believe it or not, this is the way a large proportion of my clients have been created.

I’m a huge fan of intentional and authentic outreach. Connection and Service just so happen to be two of my highest personal and professional values. Practicing outreach allows me to live in alignment with those values in a fun and fulfilling way. How about you? Have you tried using outreach in your business? Is it something that you think you might try after reading this post? Either way, let me know in the comments below. 

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The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

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Are These Two Things Aligned in Your Business?

Are These Two Things Aligned in Your Business?

by | Apr 13, 2019 | Strategy

“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

~ Michael Porter

In this post, I want to discuss the importance of alignment with you. It’s a topic that comes up often in coaching sessions and one that I feel deserves a closer look. I’d love you to take a moment now to consider if these two things are aligned for you in your business. 

1. What you are trying to achieve – the desired result.

and

2. The methods or strategy you are employing to achieve it.

I see it often, I’m in a coaching session with someone and in one breathe they share with me something that they deeply desire for their business and in the next they reveal actions they are taking that, at best won’t have any positive impact on their ability to achieve their desire, and at worst will take them in the opposite direction.

An example:

Desire: I want to build an online business so I can run my business from anywhere.

Action: I spend a lot of time going to local networking events.

Can you see how these two are not completely aligned? Creating local contacts is not necessarily going to support you to build an online business. It may not do any harm but it’s probably a waste of time if what you really desire is to work with people online.

A better action would be doing work online that increases your visibility and expands your reach online. Actions such as creating valuable content and sharing it on social media or reaching out to people online to create deeper connections.

Another example:

Desire: I want to create more clients.

Action: I spend countless hours working on my website copy.

Similar to the first example, the action is not really aligned to the desire. Sure, lots of web designers and brand strategists will tell you that having a beautifully designed and fully optimised website is the way to get more clients but I’m here to tell you that for conscious, service-based businesses like ours, it’s rare that our clients are created because of a website.

A better action would be to reach out to all of your former clients and ask if they know anyone who could benefit from your services and if so, would they be willing to put you in touch (also known as referral marketing which you can read about more in this post). Then show up and give be of service to those people, coach them, offer them a complimentary session, get on a call to find out how you can help them. Trust me, an hour doing this is far more impactful than an hour of tweaking your web copy or design.

The problem here is that we don’t always know if the action we are taking is completely aligned with the goals we have set for ourself but if we don’t, at least, place our conscious attention on trying to figure this out, we’re potentially missing a trick.

So let me ask you this:

Are the actions you’re planning to take today (or this week, month or year) going to move you significantly closer to the thing you desire?

If the answer is anything less than an affirmative yes, then I would encourage you to spend some time today thinking about what actions might be more closely aligned with getting you closer to the achievement of your goals.

I share this because I don’t want to see you wasting your time on actions that don’t 100% support you to achieve your goals and desires. If you’re struggling to know what the most aligned strategy or action to take is, you may want to have a read of another post I wrote titled: The Most Important Action Many New Business Owners Fail to Take.

In my experience, more often than not, fear of taking the appropriate (often more vulnerable and brave) action is behind the misalignment between strategy and goal. Sometimes, we take the actions that we feel comfortable taking and avoid the ones that will really move the needle forward. Ask yourself if the reason you are tinkering on your website rather than getting out and connecting with people is because the latter feels more scary to you? This in itself could be a very eye opening exercise.

Be sure to let me know what comes up for you as you consider this question of alignment. Can you see places where you might be out of alignment when it comes to the activities you are engaging with or do you feel pretty confident that the way you spend your time in your business is what will bring the results you desire? I’d love to know either way, so do share in the comments below. 

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

What Are You Prepared to Endure?

What Are You Prepared to Endure?

by | Apr 12, 2019 | Mindset

“Everything sucks some of the time.”

~ Mark Manson

Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

Whilst I am fully aware of the truth that both of these quotes point to, I think the picture they paint is not a full one and the idea inherent in both has got a little misconstrued by many people.

The idea that once we find and begin to do work we love, our passion, our calling, if you will, then all will be well and everything will magically fall into place is such a dangerous and counterproductive one.

Add to this the countless social media posts out there these days portraying business owners supposedly making big bucks, whilst working on the beach for a tiny amount of time and it’s easy to see why some people begin to believe that building a sustainable business, that brings in good money, working a handful of hours a day should be a breeze.

Well guess what? It’s not.

Do I believe that it’s important to do work that you feel passionate about, that has meaning for you and others and that leaves you feeling fulfilled and like you’re having an impact? Hell Yes. Do I also believe that once you find and commit to doing this work for the long haul that it will be all rainbows, butterflies and plain sailing from there on out? Erm no. Not at all.

You see everything, even our calling and our greatest passion, has its downside, its struggle and those parts that, simply put, just suck. Nothing is easy and wonderful all the time and being your own boss is no different. As Mark Manson says:

“Everything sucks, some of the time. You just have to decide what sort of suckage you’re willing to deal with. The question is not so much ‘what are you passionate about?’ The real question is ‘what are you passionate enough about that you can endure the most disagreeable aspects of the work?’”

In my line of work I come across this a lot, people who want the rewards and benefits of working for themselves and none of the downsides. I always feel bad to be the one to break it to them, but neither life nor business works this way.

So the question then becomes, what are you willing to endure? Or to put it more bluntly as Manson does, “What’s your favourite flavor of shit sandwich?”

Because if everything has a shit sandwich i.e. an undesirable side: the frustrations, the irritations, the pain and the slog, then knowing which undesirable side you’re most willing to endure is really helpful.

And that’s what gets me through the down days as an entrepreneur. There are days where I feel like I’m slogging away and getting little in return or when I’m unable to take time off because I’ve got clients I can’t let down or when I’m working on a blog post at 11pm on a Friday night because of some challenge I’m running. That’s when I remember that even when it’s a struggle to do what I do, it absolutely is my favourite flavor of shit sandwich. I’d much rather suffer the downside of running my own business (the uncertainty, financial risk and sometimes hard slog of it all) than any alternative. As Elizabeth Gilbert says in a chapter, aptly named The Shit Sandwich, from her book Big Magic:

“If you love and want something enough––whatever it is––then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it. If you truly love having babies, for instance, then you don’t care about the morning sickness. If you truly want to be a minister, you don’t mind listening to other people’s problems. If you truly love performing, you will accept the discomforts of living on the road. If you truly want to see the world, you’ll risk getting pickpocketed on a train. If you truly want to practice your figure skating, you’ll get up before dawn on cold mornings to go to the ice rink and skate.” 

And so it is with me and my business. I’m absolutely willing to do what it takes to have this be the thing I get to do for the rest of my life. On the good days and the bad.

I’m curious, how about you? What comes up when you ask yourself what you are willing to endure? Let me know in the comments below.

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.

How to Stay Accountable as a Solopreneur

How to Stay Accountable as a Solopreneur

by | Apr 11, 2019 | Productivity

“At the end of the day we are accountable to ourselves – our success is a result of what we do.”

~ Catherine Pulsifer

Whenever I get on a call with someone I’ve never coached before, I always ask them what they think coaching is and what they are hoping to get from it? Pretty often the answer that comes back, includes within it something about accountability. Most people seeking out my services are doing so because they know that on some level they need someone to help them stay accountable. Whilst a pretty common reason for hiring a business coach, when someone says this to me, it does ring an alarm bell. Why?

Because if I become the source of someone else’s accountability, what happens when the coaching program ends?

Don’t get me wrong, I can totally see why accountability is something that many solopreneurs feel that they are lacking and why wouldn’t they when throughout life, we pretty much always have something or someone external to ourselves to be accountable to. Be that our parents or caregivers when we’re young, our teaches and the education system as we grow and our employers and the jobs we take on as adolescents and adults. With all of these, there are built-in consequences should we fail to do what we say we will. If we stay out later than our curfew, we’ll likely be punished by our parents, if we fail to study, we’ll likely fail our exams and in some cases get kicked out of school and if we fail to show up for our jobs, our employers will ultimately have no option but to fire us.

But where is this accountability when you’re running your own business? Suddenly as solopreneurs it’s all on us and many of us find this tough.

I’m fortunate enough to be pretty self-motivated and have a history of setting myself crazy goals and stubbornly realising them. I’ve been described by many who know me as a determined person so you might assume that self accountability comes naturally to me but when it came to building my own business, I too struggled. Having had a successful career in project and program management for many years, I was used to having strict deadlines imposed on my work by the needs of my employer.

Suddenly I found myself as both the employer and the employee, I was the person who created and set the deadlines as well as the one who had to meet them. It’s easy in this scenario to become the kind of boss who lets things slide and as a result become the kind of employee who doesn’t worry too much about sticking to the plan. Of course when there are no obvious, immediate consequences this makes perfect sense, but what I soon came to realise is that there are huge consequences. Money has to come from somewhere so if my business fails, I have to go get a job. This looming consequence, no matter how far in the future was enough for me to get my act together. That and the kick I got from my then Business Coach (of course!).

It was 2014 and I had just started working with my Coach when I made the mistake of telling him that I really wanted to write a guest post for a high profile, high traffic blog. “No matter how much I want it, I just can’t find the motivation to sit down and write it!” I complained. “That’s pretty easy to fix”, he said and then challenged me to write to the editor with the title and topic of the blog post I wanted to write and the date by which I would send it over to him. I could see exactly what he was doing. By having me make a promise to the editor of the website, I’d finally have the accountability I had thus far been lacking. It was genius and I did exactly what he told me to do and the editor replied saying it sounded like a great piece and that he was looking forward to receiving it. There was no way I was going to fail on my promise and just like that I wrote and submitted the guest post I’d been trying to write for months (he loved it and published it in case you were wondering!)

That was when I realised how to stay accountable as a solopreneur. Here are just some of the ways I’ve implemented that lesson in my business over the years.

  • Launching several courses and programs before I completed the content, meaning I then had paid up customers who I simply couldn’t let down.
  • Making the announcement of forthcoming creations (products, programs, events etc) one of the first things I do – it’s so easy to hold off on making the announcement until you feel you have everything ready but then the date just keeps getting pushed back and back.
  • Sharing my ambitious goals with the world, much like I did with my #contentcreationapril challenge, when I shared publicly that I was going to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. No backing out now!

I often call this strategy of announcing what I’m going to do before I’ve done it front-loading the fear. Meaning that we get the scary part out of the way, right up front. We’re often so terrified of making the announcement because then we know it’s really happening that we put off the announcement and get lost in procrastination and perfectionism telling ourselves I’ll announce it when everything is ready. This is a classic mistake because we never feel like our work is ready, there is always more we want to do, so without the accountability of a publicly promised deadline, we start a gazillion new things that end up never finished. Sound familiar?

Can you relate to what I’ve shared in this post? Can you see how hard it is for us to stay accountable when we can’t see the consequences of not following through? I’d love to know if you like the approach I outline in this post and if you think you might use it in your business. If you’d like an extra bit of accountability why not share with us in the comments below what you plan to do differently as a result of reading this post. 

This post is part of my personal challenge to create 30 blog posts in 30 days during #contentcreationapril to be sure to get all 30 posts, you can either sign up for my weekly e-letter or join my free Facebook Group, The Conscious Business Collective. If you want to join in and set a content creation goal for yourself, simply hit the button below to join the community.

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The Secret to Easeful Productivity

The Secret to Easeful Productivity

by | Apr 10, 2019 | Productivity

“In the relentless busyness of modern life, we have lost the rhythm between work and rest.⁣⁣”

~ Wayne Muller

I don’t know about you but I’ve never felt comfortable with the term productivity. It all too often felt like a standard I could never quite reach and to do so would require me to be almost robotic like in my work habits. Inherent in the term, for me, was this idea of doing more which for someone who already does a lot felt punishing.

Over the last year, my views on productivity have shifted. After a tricky year beset with illness and, dare I say it, a certain level of burnout in 2018, I realised that my habit of putting my head down and soldiering on wasn’t really working for me. Working harder wasn’t bringing me greater results, if anything it felt like they were declining.

In my search for a more easeful way to balance being a full-time business owner and Mama to an energetic toddler, I came across a number of books that turned my ideas about productivity on their head.These books include:

  1. Joyful Productivity by George Kao
  2. Deep Work by Cal Newport
  3. Sabbath by Wayne Muller

As I read these books, I realised that they all kept pointing to the same thing. They all argue the case for rest. Rest you might think is the enemy of productivity but here’s where I had a real epiphany. It absolutely isn’t.

Because guess what? (you might already know this) we cannot do our best work if we don’t get sufficient rest. Not just that, but being productive – because as creative business owners, we absolutely do want to produce things of value for our audience – is not about working harder and working more. It’s about having the time that we do work be truly focused and deep. Which we are only capable of when we’ve taken sufficient time to rest and renew.

“Position yourself to succeed by doing the other things in your life that rejuvenate you. Exhaustion affects your quality and productivity.”

~ Jeff VanderMeer

When we’re busy, which as entrepreneurs is much of the time, it can feel so counter-intuitive to take a break, to put down what we’re working on and walk away but in doing so, when we return to the task at hand we have renewed energy and focus. This in turn makes us more productive than we would have been without the break.

Before my epiphany about productivity, I never really took breaks. I sat hunched over my keyboard for hours at a time and basically wore myself out. These days I work very differently but it’s not always easy to do.

If you are anything like me, even knowing that taking time to rest is good for you, doesn’t mean it’s easy for you to. These days to help with that, I have a solid schedule for my week. I’m a big believer in scheduling all of my business activities. I have no doubt, however, that some people would take one look at my colour co-ordinated calendar and feel intimated by the fact that every space between 7.30am and 6.30pm is filled with an activity.

However, a big chunk of my time is scheduled for rest.

Between 7.30-9.00am I have my morning routine (shower, breakfast etc), at 10.30am and 4.30pm each day I have a 30 minute break, between 12.30-3.00pm I have a very long lunch (which is the Spanish way) and between 3.00-3.30pm I go on a walk in nature. I’ve also recently (thanks to this article) started using an app that beeps every 30 minutes to remind me to get up and walk away from my desk for one minute – I usually use the time to stretch or look out the window at the mountains.

What this means is that of the 11 hours I schedule in my calendar each day, that’s a whopping 5.5 hours (50%) that I’m not working and am in fact mostly resting. On top of that I keep Wednesday (as much as possible) totally free from client calls or client work. I dedicate the morning to free time, meaning I can work on anything I feel like and I take the afternoon off, which means even more time off work (although in full disclosure, I don’t always manage to take this).

Having a schedule for your day is just as important for protecting your work time as it is for protecting your down time. The more years I spend running my own business, the more crucial I believe this to be. Do I stick to my schedule like glue? Hell no! But having it there helps me to easily re-organize and re-prioritize as necessary.

So if you’ve been wondering how to be more productive without burning yourself out in the process, could it be that you need to take more breaks? I’d love to know what you think so please do share your thoughts on what I’ve shared here in the comments below and if you know someone who needs to take more breaks, do feel free to share this with them.  

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Once a week, in the form of an e-letter, I share the best of what I know about building a business with integrity for conscious business owners.

The intention behind these letters is to be a voice for integrity within your (undoubtedly) cluttered inbox. To be the one email you can count on to contain strategic and soulful advice for building a business without selling your soul.

If you want to receive the Soulful Strategies Weekly, simply share with me your name and email address below and you’ll start recieving emails right away.