Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/237
Today I'm answering one of your listener questions, and this question comes from the fabulous Justine.
We're going to be talking about what to do when people say they cannot afford to work with you, and addressing the value proposition of your work.
Super juicy topic, amazing quality question.
Today's listener question comes from the fabulous Justine Dean. You can find out more about her at justinedean.com or on Instagram at @justinedeanofficial.
Justine writes in and says:
"Tash, what do I do when people say they love what I'm writing and they need what I do, but they cannot afford it? I'm guessing my value proposition isn't clear?"
This is such a great conversation for us to have, and thank you so much for writing in with your question.
Quick note: If you also have a question you'd like me to answer here on the podcast (and I'll give you a shout out as well), then just go to tashcorbin.com/question, pop your question in there and all of your details, and I'll answer your question on a future episode.
1. What to do when people say they cannot afford to work with you
2. Looking at your value proposition
I've got three areas that I want us to explore in answering this question.
If you are having a conversation with someone, and they love what you're writing about and your work, but then you start talking about how you can work together and they say that it sounds great but they can't afford it, first of all, always respect that 'no' when you get it, but also make sure that you don't pitch until you know it is a good fit and you have clarified the value proposition.
In the sales call process, I'm not starting the process by straight-up saying how much it is to work with me. I am starting the conversation by clarifying and qualifying: Is this what the person actually wants?
In the qualifying process, I ask lots of questions about:
Then before I go into any pitching, I use a confirmation statement.
I will say something like 'It sounds to me that if we could do ..., then that would address ...', or 'What I'm hearing you say is if we could do ..., then you would feel .... Have I got that right?'
For you Justine (Justine is a relationship specialist), you might say 'It sounds to me like if we could address all of the baggage and the stuff that you feel like you're carrying, then you would feel more confident to step back into the dating circles. Have a got that right?' Just get really clear and specific about what they are needing.
By doing that qualifying - asking the questions and finding out what the priority is for the person individually - and then making that statement of confirmation and making sure that you're both on the same page before you prescribe what you think the solution would be for them and whether that is working with you or not, you've already confirmed the value proposition.
The value proposition isn't just more stuff. So many people think that they improve the value of their products and services by adding more sessions, more bonuses, extra access to them, unlimited voxer support or unlimited email support in order to try and improve the value proposition.
But ultimately, the value of your work isn't just the process, it's also linked to the outcome.
What we want to make sure we're doing is confirming for your audience the value proposition of the before and after that you are facilitating.
This brings me to the second part of what I want to talk about, and that is really looking at your sales process and whether it's giving you the insight and information that you need to really scale and grow your business.
We can work on our messaging, value proposition, how we sell our products and services, our packaging on a broadcast level, (ie. putting it up on social media, talking about it consistently, sharing it with your audience, posting offers into groups or on your social media page, you can post great content that has a call to action to talk to you about whether you should be working together or not), but at the end of the day, if you're getting mostly crickets and people commenting saying that it sounds really great but they can't afford it right now, then you're not actually confirming or qualifying:
One of the things that I'd really recommend for anyone who's experiencing lots of comments saying that it's great but they can't afford it, is to actually set a goal for yourself to have as many conversations with people who might be your ideal clients as possible.
The more of those conversations you have, the more opportunity you have to qualify, practise that confirmation statement and really confirm and understand how your ideal client expresses the value that they are looking for in terms of before and after.
One of the things I want to say here is that even for myself, as I am scaling beyond the half-a-million-dollar mark in my business and I'm now having six-figure launches of my group program, I still have lots of sales conversations.
The reason why I continue to do that is not just because it massively improves my conversion rates, but also because it gives me really beautiful and powerful insight into the value proposition that my audience is looking for, and how to articulate and express that from multiple angles.
Even in the last launch of the Take Off program (which was not quite six figures - it was $99,000), out of the 45 people who joined the Take Off program, I had email conversations with about 20 people, and I had 15-minute chats with about 6 or 7 of those people as well.
I don't see that as a chore because I have to put more work into making that sale, I see that as an opportunity to find out what didn't hit the nail on the head with my value proposition for this person. Of course I want to make the sale if it's the right fit for this person, but I love to talk with them and find out what's missing in my messaging and what their concern is.
When you're working on your value proposition, you really want to make sure that you're having as many conversations as possible. It is through the conversation that you really clarify that value proposition - not through throwing spaghetti at the wall with messaging.
The other thing I want to say with value proposition is, as I said before, it's not about having more things in order to improve the value proposition, it's actually to improve the priority level that this person places on that outcome. The way that you do that is not by telling someone that this should be a bigger priority for them.
A great example of that would be if you worked in the health and wellbeing space.
I see this all the time. I understand you're really passionate about health and wellbeing, but when you just keep yelling at the internet that people should prioritise their health and wellbeing, you're not actually connecting with your ideal client where they are, and you're also not connecting to their priorities.
If they put their health and wellbeing at the bottom of the priority list all of the time, it's going to be really difficult for you to shift those priorities simply through broadcast marketing and content.
For you Justine, if getting back into the dating space and having a great experience of dating could link to your ideal client's current priority (which might be to have a really enjoyable lifestyle and travel a lot), then you're going to help improve the value proposition of that outcome that you are offering to people.
The other thing I love is for a lot of people when they're going through relationship work or getting themselves ready for dating or getting back into the dating space, it's a real journey of self-development and growth, and often, it's an opportunity to practise manifesting what they want in every area of their life.
I know that there are relationship coaches out there who link:
By linking those things together and actually showing and demonstrating that by addressing one certain thing, you're also going to address this other thing, it actually improves the priority and therefore value proposition of working with you.
For different people, the link between the work that they do in terms of dating and relationships and another area of their life is going to be quite different.
That is why I absolutely adore having conversations with people.
When I'm talking to people about making more money in their business, I don't just talk about making more money in their business for the sake of making more money in their business.
I ask people:
Why do you want to make more money in your business?
What would this mean to you?
How would that impact other areas of your life?
What's your priority other than making money?
If someone's talking about the fact that they could have more time with their children and they can have that more spacious lifestyle, I'm always sure to talk about that in my confirmation statement. I would say something like, 'It sounds to me, if we could get you hitting that $10,000 a month mark without having to do more than the 25 hours a week that you're doing right now, then that's not just going to help with the growth of your business, it's also going to allow you to have the lifestyle and the time with your children that's really important to you. Am I getting this right?'
Whilst we can make sweeping generalisations and make statements about what we think is going to be the priority for our ideal clients, that is most powerfully linked in a one-to-one sales conversation.
There are definitely lots of conversations to practise when it comes to value proposition.
This is a really out there point, but I think this is a really important one when it comes to value proposition and particularly having lots of people following you saying how lovely your work sounds but it's not a priority for them right now.
I know for a lot of people when it comes to building and growing their business on broadcast channels, and wanting to get those sales, we can start to feel like to improve our value proposition, we need to look more expensive, valuable and professional.
This can actually veer you in the wrong direction when it comes to getting that connection and conversion in your business.
If you are someone who feels like they always have to use the same six perfect pictures in their posts on social media, and you're constantly doing pictures with words over them, and it always looks like you're writing ads, then that can actually be part of the disconnect for people (and I don't necessarily think this is you, Justine, but I just wanted to cover on this for everyone reading).
If you look all polished and professional and perfect, then it can imply to people (consciously or subconsciously), that in order for them to get the same outcome, they also need to be perfect, professional and polished.
I know for you, Justine, that's not what your core message is actually about. Your core message is about that beautiful journey of self-exploration and letting go of some of that baggage whilst still being human in the process.
We need to give our audience permission to be human. We need to give our audience the confidence to believe that even if they don't do it correctly, they'll still move closer to their goal. Even if they don't show up perfectly, they're still able to access the transformation that you facilitate.
In our marketing and messaging, and particularly when we're trying to encourage people to go over that tipping point of having a conversation with us and investing in getting this outcome, we need to make people feel like they can get that outcome and that it's totally accessible to them. They don't need to have some kind of magic formula or show up perfectly or be hyper-professional or any of those things in order to be able to get that outcome.
A little exercise that I would recommend that you do is:
I want you to go and look at the last 20 posts on your Facebook page, and I want you to assess how many of those posts invite people to connect and have a conversation with you in an unthreatening, no strings attached kind of way.
It's all well and good to say 'obligation-free chat', but that sounds so sales, that people gloss over the fact that it's obligation-free.
I want you to start looking at when you're doing your call to action, is it really conversational, connecting and unintimidating? Or is it really formal?
Have a look at that call to action. I want to know how many times you've had a call to action, and how conversational that call to action is on your Facebook page.
I also want you to have a look and see, when you look at this from an objective perspective, does your Facebook page look polished and manicured, and like you've got a series of ads (ads for your free content, ad-style tips, ads for your products and services, ads for your freebie)? Does it look like a sequence of ads? Or does it look like an engaging conversational, let's-all-be-human kind of space?
If you can improve that sense of connection, engagement and that feeling of being allowed to make mistakes on your social media platforms - not just your page but also when you're posting in communities - then you're going to make that resistance point to jumping in and working with you a little easier for people to overcome, because they don't have a perception that they need to have their ducks in a row before they even come to work with you.
They don't need to do the groundwork or do all the practise work before they're allowed to have this outcome and work with you as well.
Hopefully that's been really helpful for you Justine and everyone else reading along as well.
I would love to know what you think about qualifying in the sales process, dealing with people saying that they can't afford it, and also that value proposition and dialling up that value proposition for your audience.
Come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening to episode number 237 and let's continue the conversation over there.
I also want to encourage you if you have a question for me, go on over to tashcorbin.com/question, pop your details in there and ask me your question.
I would love to answer your question here on the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/236
In today's episode, I'm going to share my 5-minute post-call habit, and how this habit grows my business.
It's a really simple thing you can do that escalates and elevates your business results quickly.
We know as entrepreneurs that content is really powerful in:
We also know that messaging is one of the critical foundations that allows us to be deeply resonant in our posting and our presence online, helps us to connect to our ideal client and helps them understand our value proposition.
Messaging is such a big part of business because it covers so many different elements of what goes into our business model.
Our messaging shows up in our posts on social media, in our deeper content, on our sales pages and websites, and in our conversations that we have with our audiences.
Knowing that content is powerful and messaging is so critical to business growth and success, every group call that I facilitate and every VIP client call that I have is a goldmine.
Every single time I run a group call, every single time I run a VIP one-to-one call with anyone in my business, I take 5-minutes after that call. In that 5-minute post-call habit, I take that 5-minutes to note down three key things.
Whether the call was a large group coaching call for the Take Off program, or a very intimate one-to-one coaching client call, I take note of what challenges were brought to me on that call.
With the bigger group calls in the Take Off program, I'd probably note down three or four major challenges that were brought to me. In a VIP call, I'd note down one or two of the major challenges that were brought forward to me that someone wanted me to fix for them.
For your business, with your clients, your messaging, and your content, if you are working with a perfect ideal client and they come to a session with you and present you with the problem that they need you to fix, imagine how powerful that content is to then go out and find more people just like that one.
But how many of us jump from client session to client session, from call to call, and don't ever stop and take note of the exact thing that our ideal clients are asking us for when they have the opportunity to speak with us?
The first thing that I write down in that 5-minute post-call habit is what challenges were brought to me.
How did they describe:
That really helps me to refine my keywords, my key phrases, and the things I need to talk about in my content.
Being able to speak to my audience using words and phrases that THEY use to describe what's going on, is so powerful in my messaging.
It's all well and good for me to just diagnose their challenge as a niching issue, but if they think the issue is that they just don't know how to speak to their audience effectively, then I'm missing the mark with ships passing in the night if I don't use the words that they use to articulate that particular challenge or problem.
It is my job to help my audience bridge the gap between where they think the problem is, and what I can see the deep issue that may be causing all of that pain and strife that's coming up for them is.
If I could proactively go out and help 100 other people who had the same challenge, what would I need to say?
This is actually the basis of my content plan.
I talk about my 5-minute post-call habits so often in my client calls and in my group calls because it is such a useful way for people to refine their messaging and get clear on what content they need to be sharing.
Guess what question I get asked over and over and over again... How do you come up with content? What do I say on my blog? What do I post about on social media?
The answer is in tapping into the juicy resource that is the conversations you're already having.
If you're not having conversations with anyone just yet in your business:
a. Find ways to have those conversations
b. You will be very equipped from day one to know how to make sure that you maximise the return for your business from those conversations
Just to recap, my 5-minute post-call habit is to stop and write down:
1. What were the challenges that were brought to me in that call?
2. What are the keywords and phrases that my client used?
3. If I could proactively go out and help 100 other people who have the same problem, what would I need to say?
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I hope that's been a really helpful one for you.
If you aren't 100% sure on how to identify your niche, your target market or how to start having conversations with those people, then I would love for you to come and check out a new free resource that I have available.
It's based on a live training that I have run over six times in the last two years that I've now turned it into a self-study video training that you can access at any time.
All you need to do to access it is go and register here: tashcorbin.com/niche
As always, please come on over to the Heart-Centred, Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening along to podcast episode 236, and share what you thought about my 5-minute post-call habit. Let me know if you have any questions or aha's, and I'll see you over there.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found tashcorbin.com/235
This is a listener Q&A episode of the podcast, and the question comes from the amazing Claire, who wants to know how to scale her membership program to over 100 members.
If you've been thinking of starting a membership program, or you've got one that you'd love to scale to larger audiences, this is going to be a really helpful episode for you.
This listener question comes from Claire Riley. You can find out more about Claire on her website claireriley.co.
Claire asks:
"How do I scale my membership program?"
Claire has been running her membership program Batch It Crazy (yes, that sounds like something else but that's not what it is), for three years. She's got 35 active members as of when she submitted the question, and she's had over 70 members go through this membership in the time that she's been running it.
She said that the members are engaged, they love the program, she loves the content and the delivery, and she also said the launches work both with time-sensitive launches AND evergreen funnels.
Claire wants to know how she can scale this to bring in more members and perhaps even have some more self-study content.
This is a really awesome question.
Before I get to the specifics of Claire's question, I want to start by saying that I think memberships are absolutely brilliant. I especially love Claire's membership which I've been a part of before.,
Memberships are great because:
Whenever it comes to getting more people into a program - whether it be a course, membership or a mastermind - my core marketing strategy comes down to the three core things: reach, conversion and mindset.
The really interesting thing about Claire's question is that she said when she launches it and when she sets up evergreen funnels, they both work.
It clearly looks to me like your membership is doing well, it has a great conversion rate when you put it in front of your audience, and people buy it - so why haven't you actually taken the action to scale your membership program?
If you know that you want to get to 100+ members, you know both launches and evergreen funnels work, to me it's a simple proposition of more reach at the top of your funnel equals more conversion into clients at the bottom of the funnel.
What I want you to do specifically darling Claire, is to get clear on what the negative consequences of having 100 members in this program are.
There may be a clue in the last part of your question, which was about creating some more pre-recorded self-study content.
That gives me a clue that potentially you're worried that if you have more members coming into your membership, you're not going to be able to handle all those extra members. You're feeling like maybe there's something that isn't scalable on the inside of the program. The marketing of your membership is completely scalable, so for me, the first thing to look at is not reach or conversion, it's actually mindset.
Is it because you feel too busy?
Is it because you feel like your marketing strategy is too busy right now?
Why haven't you put in some really strong scalable strategies to get your launches in front of more people?
The most simple and obvious way to scale this membership is to simply put more money into your ad spend when you are launching, or put more money into your ad spend on your evergreen funnels.
Your homework for this episode is to deal with those mindsets things, and have a think about what the negative consequences may be.
You might think that there aren't any negative consequences and you want 100 people in your membership, but there's a reason why you're not scaling it.
I find it's always best to spend some time getting really clear and honest with yourself, and allowing yourself time to really go there.
If you have a subconscious fear that more than 50 people in there at a time is going to burn you out, then that's going to stop you from bringing more people in.
If you have a subconscious fear that more than 50 people in there is going to mean that your older members are going to feel like they get less time with you and they're not going to love it as much so they're going to drop out, then that's something that you need to be conscious of.
We need to bring those thoughts and beliefs to the surface so we can address them - both from a mindset perspective but also from a practical perspective. Is there something you can do to give extra love to people who've been in your membership for over a year?
In the Heart-Centred Business Academy, when I used to run it, I had a VIP level of membership.
VIPs got an extra call every month, so that was how I could reward people for staying a little bit longer, and make sure that those longer-term clients would feel like they're getting that extra time and attention from me without me having to give extra calls to every single person who was inside the program.
Have a look at those negative consequences, deal with any of the mindset or the practical ways that you can address that, then get that ad spend up and let's get more people into Batch It Crazy.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, I hope it's been helpful for anyone listening along.
I'd love for you to come and have a chat in the group about this episode. If you're wanting to scale your membership program and yet you're not scaling it, or if you feel like you've hit your limit on how many people you can get in per launch, let's bring this conversation over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group and continue the conversation there. All you need to do is use the #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening episode number 235, and share your questions, comments, aha's, lightbulbs and discussion points about this juicy question that Claire has asked.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/234
In this episode, I'm going to hit you with a bit of a truth bomb, and that is that your ducks will never be in a row... so why wait to start your business?
If you are still waiting to launch your business or waiting to get something sorted before you're allowed to get started, then this is the episode for you.
When I talk to women in particular who want to start a business, I can get really frustrated because there are so many things that I hear these women say that they're waiting for.
Some of those things are valid, but most of them aren't.
What I wanted to do in this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, is break down some of those beliefs about what you need in order to be ready or allowed to start a business, and what else you could do instead.
Let's jump in and look at all of the things that people say they need before they're allowed to start a business.
This is the biggest one that I see.
People don't want to start their business yet because they haven't:
When I first started my business, I just picked a colour and I got started. I had some photos taken by a friend of mine who was a photographer, but to be honest with you, they were totally off-brand with what I was actually going for in the end because my business model and my branding developed over time.
It wasn't until I was several years into my business that I really felt like I found the right branding. In the meantime, I'd made hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Instead of waiting to find the perfect branding and then starting your business, what if you first started your business and got a deeper understanding of your niche and what you want your brand to stand for. Then go and create that branding with a great provider that you can pay for with the profits from your business, and who can give you great advice on how to really connect with your audience.
I have so many people that have already started their business, yet they're still not out there talking about their services. They're still not actually taking action and moving forward because they feel like their messaging is off, they need to find the perfect message first and THEN they'll be able to grow their business. They feel that they need to find those perfect words, that perfect catchphrase, have that perfect sales page or elevator pitch, and once they figure that out, then they're allowed to have a business.
Speaking purely from my own experience, I didn't know what my messaging was going to be when I first started my business. In fact, I had a very different niche and very different ideas about what I needed to say in order for people to understand my work and what would be of value to them.
The best way to make your messaging really resonant and stand out to your audience is to start talking to them sooner rather than later.
Instead of waiting to craft the perfect theoretical message, and then getting out and starting to talk to your audience, why don't you just go and start having conversations? This will help you to understand how your audience describes their challenge, what your audience is looking for, and how you can speak to them in a way that really resonates.
That's another way that you might be waiting for all your ducks to be in a row before you're allowed to start a business.
As you can see, you don't actually need it to be perfected before you get started.
I've even had members of my programs and VIP clients who have come back to me and told me that they haven't done certain things in their business because someone said that they need a website before their business can actually be legitimate. All of these beliefs that you have to have a website in order to seem legitimate or to be allowed to get your business off the ground and started are ridiculous.
I've been very open about my own journey with this, but it's not just my experience in relation to having a website.
One of the great examples I would give is a person who's in the Take Off program, who has now just surpassed a $15,000 month in her business. She's been in business for more than three years now and she still doesn't have a website. She simply has a Facebook page, a way for people to pay her and a way to reach her audience through Facebook.
You don't have to have a website in order to have a business.
Of course, a website is brilliant as a foundational part of your marketing, but wouldn't it be awesome if you could pay for that website out of the profits of your business? Wouldn't it be awesome if you created that website once you'd worked with a few clients, so you had absolute clarity about what you needed to say on that website, and what your content needed to include in order to really resonate with the right people?
My first website said nothing. It was pretty and it was very professional, but at the end of the day, it did nothing to get clients into my business. In fact, it took over a year for me to make a sale on my website. All of my sales in my first year of business came from social media and having conversations with people.
You don't need a website.
I see this one happen in so many different ways.
Some people say they need to get their list to 1000 people before they start promoting products or services. Some people say they need to have 1000 followers on their Facebook page, or that they're just going to do a bit of Instagramming and get their followers up first because that creates the social proof and then they can start selling things.
Basically what you're saying is that you need to have an audience before you're allowed to start your business.
That's not actually true.
You could build your audience with thousands of people who aren't your ideal client and who aren't ever going to buy from you if you don't actually get started building your audience through the lens of building your business.
If you separate those two things out, chances are, you're going to have an audience that loves you and loves what you share on social media, and you're going to have your niche - the people who are actually going to buy from you - and they're going to be two very different groups of people.
Instead of thinking you need to build the audience first, build it as you go.
Instead of thinking that you have to hit some certain number before you're allowed to grow your business and before you're allowed to start selling things, focus on what the audience is that you have access to today, and how you can sell to them.
One of the beautiful ways that you can do that is actually through existing communities.
I facilitate the Heart-Centred, Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, and in that community, there are over 33,000 women, and I openly encourage them to promote to that audience. You don't need your own audience, I'm going to let you have mine. I'm going to let you join the Heart-Centred community, become a member and contribute to that community, and you can promote to that audience.
You don't need to wait to get 1000 followers on your own Facebook page, you can promote to existing audiences when it's done really well.
This could look like needing:
This one doesn't happen as much these days. I think people are really starting to see that there are so many opportunities online. It's really easy to buy an audience and it's really easy to buy fame if you want to, and that doesn't necessarily mean you have a legitimate audience anyway.
I do see it a little bit more in the influencer space - attaching your success to someone else saying your product or service is a good thing. Some think that if that person would just endorse it, then everything would be okay.
Speaking from experience, both myself and many of my clients in the Take Off program have been endorsed, have had that media coverage or have had some level of fame that doesn't necessarily equate to business success.
Of course, there are ways to create momentum from that, but if you haven't been growing your business before you get that coverage, then chances are that when you do get the coverage, people are going to be seeing copy, messaging, imagery, and even products and services that don't necessarily resonate.
I always say that your audience will never be as small as it is today. Now is the time to get started on experimenting with your messaging, your content, and your products and services because when you test them on a smaller audience and then scale, you're scaling something that you know works.
I know that there is a lot of security and safety that comes from knowing you've got your expenses covered for six months before you start your business. I know there's a lot of security that comes from being able to invest in a $25,000 mastermind as your starting point into your business. And I know many people who are still saving so that they can start their business.
I totally understand where they're coming from, and I totally understand different people's needs for different levels of security. But I also know that for a lot of people that I speak to, that requirement for having savings in the bank, needing to have more money set aside, needing to have $25,000 to invest in a program because that's how they're going to succeed, is actually stopping them from taking the powerful action that would get them growth in the first place.
You might feel like you need to quit your job and just be in your business full time in order for it to be able to start, but most of the people that I've worked with actually started their business on the side of a job, or they started it during maternity leave, or whilst they were still working in a family business.
I know that that was because I come from a massive baseline level of privilege, in that I was university educated and I had a handsome six-figure salary. Even if I spent six months trying to grow my business and ended up $15,000 in debt having tried, my worst-case scenario was going back and getting another consulting job.
I had a lot of security, even though I didn't know what the job was that I would fall back on. Even though I didn't have savings, I still had a lot of privilege in that space to be able to do it.
I believe when you're first starting a business, even if you've just got an hour a week to put into it, there is always something that you can do.
The reason why I encourage people to just get started immediately is similar to the whole principle of investing. The best time to start investing was ages ago, the second-best time is right now.
It's exactly the same with starting a business. The best time to start an online business was probably five years ago, but the second-best time to start a business is today.
The reason why is because those actions that you take today, will have compound interest effects on your results in years to come.
Similarly to that compounding interest effect, it is so powerful to make small decisions and take small actions on a consistent and regular basis.
You're going to make more money from compounding interest, if you are investing $10 a week for years and years, then if you have a big chunk of money and you just have it sitting there and you never contribute again.
I'm not talking about giant big actions that you need to take. It can be as simple as opening up three spaces a week to work with clients, and investing an hour a week in marketing and admin.
It doesn't have to be massive.
Those little actions that you take now will have such a compounding interest effect on your business growth.
In the short term, you're bringing in clients so you've got income, you're testing your messaging, and you're working with people who can help you refine what it is that you offer.
In the long term, you're growing your audience, and nurturing and warming that audience up so that when you do decide to go more fully into your business or scale things up a little, you're not starting from scratch, you're starting from a really solid platform.
The whole reason for me doing this podcast episode is to encourage you to know that there is always something that you can do to get your business started sooner rather than later.
Join a couple of Facebook groups, do the bare minimum activities to try and make a couple of sales. Prove to yourself that this business is viable, that there is an audience for the work that you're doing and that you are someone who can do a little bit of work consistently to grow this business.
If you do want to get this business off the ground and you're done with waiting for your ducks to be in a row, I have a beautiful free resource for you.
It goes for just over an hour, and what I do in that is break down the myths about what you need in a lot more detail and give you a step by step strategy to actually get your business started the fast, simple, easy and lazy way.
Go and grab the free resource here: tashcorbin.com/fasttrack
As always, if you've got any questions or lightbulbs that have come up for you as a result of listening to this episode, head on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, and let me know you've been listening to episode number 234. If you're ready to stop waiting and you just want to get your business started and make a public declaration that today is the day, then go and use that #podcastaha in the Heart-Centred group and share your commitment with us.
There are thousands of women waiting to cheer you on and share your excitement for finally getting started.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
In this Spotlight episode of the podcast, I am interviewing the one and only Leonie Dawson.
Leonie Dawson was the second Australian woman that I ever discovered as an entrepreneur when I started my business. I started following Leonie back in 2014, and it has been an epic journey ever since.
In this interview, I get to peel back the curtain and ask some really juicy questions about the success of her multi-million dollar business over the years.
Leonie also shares her wide range of freebies which can be found here: leoniedawson.com/free
And if you want a quick summary, I’ve even popped some key points below. ENJOY!!!
Leonie has a wide range of free goodies on her website, from colouring pages to marketing workbooks and so much more.
You can find it all here: leoniedawson.com/free
Make sure you come and share your questions, comments and light-bulb moments over in the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs community using #podcastaha and the episode number (233).
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/232
In today's episode of the podcast, I'm going to help you identify your target market.
If you're really struggling with how to make the decision about where to niche or who your target market should be, this is going to be a great episode for you.
Before we jump into how to decide on your target market, let's get really clear on what your target market actually is.
Target market is another way of describing your niche. Your niche or your target market is the specific group of people you focus on when marketing your business.
They are focusing on all of the people they could help, or the people who could really benefit from their services. They're focusing on all the people who could experience a great shift if they were able to work with them.
At the end of the day, that is not a niche and it's not a target market. When we are growing our business online, we need to be very conscious and very selective about a specific group of people that we are going to focus our marketing activities towards.
The reason being is that we have never had the capacity to expose our businesses to as big an audience as we do today. Due to that and the fact that we're competing with a lot of noise on the internet, we need to be able to create deeply resonant messaging and offers that have people feeling so certain that that's what they need and that they want to work with you.
In order to achieve that, our messaging needs to be relevant, tangible, specific and deeply resonant.
There is a marketing phrase that says that if you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to nobody.
That is more true today than ever before.
In addition to that, if you try to speak to everybody, your messaging is very fluffy, it's usually very high level, the examples that you give could apply to anyone and therefore you are not stopping the scroll and your messaging just doesn't hit the mark for people.
When it comes to growing a business online, niching is a critical foundational decision. In fact, it's one of the first foundation decisions that we need to make, especially if you're going to market online.
If you are stuck in a geographic location and you're working with people who are physically located near you, then that is a niche decision that's kind of been made for you because you have a geographical location as part of your niching.
If you are able to work with anyone around the world, that is when it is even more critical for you to be very specific about who your niche will be.
With this episode today, I have a very special resource for you.
In that training, I walk you through in a little bit more detail why niching is so important, what a niche is, what a niche isn't, and the five most important niching decisions that you need to make when you are marketing online. It's specifically to marketing services online.
I won't repeat all of that training in this podcast episode, but I do want to encourage you if you've never watched my Nail Your Niche training before - or it's been a while since you've watched it - to watch that training specifically.
To add to that training and those five niching decisions, in this podcast I wanted to give you some prompts on how you can decide what your niche is.
It's all well and good to know what the decisions are that you need to make about your niche, but how do you actually make that decision?
I've got four things that I'm going to give you today that are going to help you to make that decision.
If you've been through the same journey that you are now facilitating as a business owner, then you when you were first starting through this journey could be what your niche is.
Let's say you were in chronic pain and you discover this beautiful healing modality. You taught it to yourself, you healed yourself and now you teach that modality to other people so they can heal themselves as well. That means that your niche and the decisions that you make about what your niche might look like, could be you before you discovered this particular modality.
That can absolutely be a way to make your niching decisions easier.
Just pick you from however many years ago, and look at what your situation was back then. That can definitely be one way of making a decision around your niche.
It's better to start with something than to start with nothing.
If that's a starting point and you end up refining it later, that's absolutely brilliant.
When I first started my business, I thought I was going to be career coach (but that didn't last very long), and then I knew I wanted to work in entrepreneurship, businesses and teaching people marketing online. I initially just looked around at who my friends were and what they had in common.
Something that I noticed, was that I absolutely adored creative people - artists, people who did handicrafts, sewing, making amazing mosaics, pottery, artworks, all those things.
In my friendship circles, the people I hung out with in my old job, and in my family, I connected with a lot of people over arts and crafts. I really adored crafting myself - I wasn't an artist but I was definitely a crafter.
I knew that that particular subset of people in my life really struggled with the business and marketing side of making a living out of their arts and their crafting.
That's the niche that I actually chose.
It wasn't a me five years ago thing, it was the people I absolutely adore hanging out with, and I knew that putting my skills with their amazing talents would create incredible results. That's how I made those niching decisions.
Look at people you adore and people you really want to hang out with. Why shouldn't your business be filled with people that you love hanging out with and spending time with?
I think that's a really beautiful thing.
I'm definitely this kind of person these days.
As soon as I started my own business, I was a convert. To every person I spoke to who was complaining about their work, I'd just tell them to quit and start a business. My friends would get so frustrated with me and I would get so frustrated with them while trying to tell them what they're missing out on and that they need to just start a business, forget working for someone else, screw the corporate structures and smash the patriarchy.
I would get so passionate about having a business and entrepreneurship.
Even now to this day, when I find out that someone is a business owner, an entrepreneur, or they're giving something a go themselves, I just love and adore them.
I went and had a blood test at the doctor's surgery a few days ago, and the nurse asked me what I did for my job, so I said that I work with people online, I have my own business, and I teach social media, marketing and sales strategies to people online.
I gave her the laypersons explanation of what I do, and she told me that she's just set up these Airbnb's in our local area, and maybe she should go and follow me because she doesn't know how to spread the word about them. And I got so excited for her that she was embarking on this opportunity to create some form of other income outside of her work and be in business for herself and she was wanting to learn about social media and marketing.
I had to bite on my tongue to not offer to have a coffee catch up with her where I could teach her everything I know over coffee because I'm just so passionate about that type of work.
You might find that there is a certain person or a certain type of thing that you get so passionate about that whenever anyone says any inkling of an idea that they might be interested in that as well, you just completely latch on to it and get really passionate and ranty.
That's definitely a space that you might want to be niching in.
At the end of the day, it is better to choose and pivot than to not choose and keep going round and round in circles and staying un-niched.
The longer you stay un-niched with your marketing and messaging online, the longer it's going to take for you to develop a bigger audience, get your conversion working and really get that resonant messaging so people want to buy from you.
Hopefully you've found these beautiful tips helpful for how to select and make those decisions around who your target market or your niche will be.
As I said, make sure if you haven't watched it before, come and check out my Nail Your Niche training.
If you have had any lightbulb moments or questions as a result of reading this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening to episode number 232 and tell me what your insights are, if you've got any follow up questions, or maybe if this has helped you to make that niching decision.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/231
Today's episode of the podcast is one of our Q&A episodes, and I have a brilliant question from Nicole, who's asking for help on pivoting her niche and what to do with her existing audience when she does so.
If you're doing any adjustments to your niche or messaging, this is going to be a great episode for you to read or listen along to.
This brilliant question comes from the fabulous Nicole Moorey, and you can find out more about Nicole at nicolemoorey.com.
Nicole asks:
"Hi Tash, I'm excited to be narrowing my niche to wellness entrepreneurs, etc. as per your recommendations. This new niche represents only a small portion of my existing vaguely niched email community. How do you recommend I pivot my messaging and marketing in a way that gently and kindly lets my existing community realise I'm pursuing a new direction - whilst also helping my new niche? Some of them have been loyal friends and followers for a few years, so I want to be sure to make this change in the best way possible for everyone."
First and foremost, I want to say to Nicole that that is so beautiful.
I think for most women entrepreneurs, our desire not to exclude anyone and our struggles with niching can sometimes come back to our feelings and experiences on the playground where we didn't get picked for something or we were excluded.
I think it's such a beautiful thing that you are thinking of your audience at this time, and you're wanting to bring them along on the journey with you if it's the right fit, or let them go gently if it's not.
I've got some ideas for you, Nicole, on how you can really make this transition as easy and gentle for your audience as possible, bringing along the right people and gently letting go of the people who may not be a fit anymore.
Before I jump into my advice and tips, I want to quickly clarify for anyone who hasn't heard my training about niching before, your niche is the specific group of people you focus on when you are marketing your business.
Your niche is not everyone you could help, your niche is everyone you want to help. Your niche is not even everyone you could market to, your niche is the specific group of people you focus on when you are marketing your products and services - when you are marketing in your business.
With that in mind, I've got five tips for you, Nicole, on how you can start to refine that niche and bring your audience with you.
Those niche decisions that you make are behind the scenes decisions in your business.
You don't ever have to say to your audience, "I'm no longer working with everyone else, I'm only working with wellness entrepreneurs."
But as your business moves forward and you express examples and share content that's specifically tailored for wellness entrepreneurs, then that's going to deeply resonate with those wellness entrepreneurs. For some people, they may realise that that doesn't resonate for them, but for others, it may still be helpful.
Let's say you've got someone who has a photography business, and they've been on your list for years and they absolutely love and adore who you are and the work that you do. Just because your content is now targeted towards wellness entrepreneurs, doesn't mean that that person doesn't eventually want to work with you. It's totally up to you about whether you choose to work with that person or not.
It's not about who you serve, it's about who you focus on with your marketing activities.
You never need to come out of the closet and say that you're specifically working with a certain niche now, but because you incorporate those niching decisions into the way that you message and the way that you market, you are naturally going to start attracting more wellness entrepreneurs into your work.
Your messaging content and offers will simply move the right people closer and not move the wrong people any closer.
You don't need to ever reject anyone when you decide to refine your niche.
All you're going to do is know that you have a content ecosystem that is consistently moving people more and more towards the centre and getting warmer and warmer in your audience. The wellness entrepreneurs in your audience are going to move faster than the non-wellness entrepreneurs because your content isn't designed to move them any closer.
Without ever having to reject anyone, through your messaging, content and offers, you will naturally magnetise those people who fit within your niche, and you'll be less likely to magnetise those people who don't.
You don't ever have to reject anyone.
While someone might not fit that rigid niching that you've now selected (because I do recommend that you make that niching very tight, specific and clear), that doesn't mean that they decide that they can never get any value out of being on your mailing list, following you or even one day working with you.
I've got a great example of this to share with you. I specialise in helping women entrepreneurs who are wanting to start and scale their online business.
I do teach leveraging and launching in my Accelerator, and I teach startup in the Take Off program.
Recently I had a lady reach out to me who's been following me for two years and has a product-based business - she doesn't sell services.
I specifically share content and have courses that help people with that one-to-one service-based type business, and going into one-to-many service type business - selling digital products but not physical products.
But I had this lady reach out to me because she's got to the point in her business where she really wants to start scaling her marketing. Even though she sells high-end products, she reached out to me and asked if she could buy a VIP session with me - despite the fact that she knew I usually work with service-based businesses - so that I could have a look at her online messaging, marketing and channels, and to see if there's any advice that I have.
I had a look at her website, I had a look at what she was doing, and I told her that we should book in a VIP half day so that I could go through and give her product-based business all the help that I could.
If I had looked at her website and thought that I couldn't get her the return on investment because it wasn't where I specialised, I could have referred her on to someone else.
But based on what I saw of her business, I said yes and she's booked in to do a VIP day with me in a few weeks time, and we get to work together even though she doesn't specifically fit my niche.
They get to make the decision, you just want to empower them with all of the information that they need to make that decision.
If someone doesn't specifically fit your niche and they decide they still want to work with you in some way, or they want to pay you for your services, or they still want to be on your mailing list because they're getting little dribs and drabs of great information here and there - that's totally their decision.
I know that I have a lot of people on my mailing list and who listen to my podcast every single week who do not fit my niche. They made the decision that it was worth their time, energy and sometimes money to invest in learning from me because they got so much value out of it, even though maybe they don't necessarily fit my specific niche.
That's their decision.
That's not my decision to make for them.
You could decide to just keep staying un-niched for the next two years and continue going round and round in circles and not really resonating with anyone with your messaging. But you've made a decision that by getting specific, you are going to be able to sell more effectively and deliver more effectively for your clients.
I just wanted to do one tip in here to check-in and make sure you're viewing this as a positive thing, not only for you but also for your audience.
At the end of the day, your decision to niche is actually a decision to accelerate the growth of your business, but also be able to serve the people you do want to work with, much more deeply and much more effectively.
Because of that, it means that really at the end of the day, everyone is a winner.
If they are within your new refined niche, they're going to get much deeper, much more specific and much clearer support from you, as well as much higher quality content.
If they aren't in your niche, they get to make the decision of whether they stay for the content that you are delivering, or if they should unsubscribe and unfollow to save themselves some headspace.
It doesn't need to be a harsh decision, it doesn't need to be a big piece of rejection for people, it doesn't need to be a hair tossing storm on their way out, it can actually be a really beautiful thing and a positive move.
I want you to view this positively because I see it as a very positive move for your business.
Nicole, I know you've been to my niche training and know what I'm talking about when I say remember your golden nuggets.
I've got a resource for you below so you can go and watch it, but in summary, what I mean by gold nuggets is think about yourself when you're niching as really focusing on a very specific tunnel.
You're tunnelling really, really tightly with the smallest tunnel you can choose because that means you're going to move through that tunnel faster.
What happens when you're tunnelling and you've got a very specific niche, is that if you have someone who doesn't fit that niche ask to work with you (like my beautiful product based lady), that is like having a gold nugget fall out of the ceiling of your tunnel.
You're tunnelling through with this very specific niche, and a gold nugget falls from the ceiling and into your lap when someone who's not in the tunnel comes to you.
At that point in time, you get to decide: Am I going to keep this gold nugget? Am I going to say yes to this client and work with them? Or am I going to hand this golden nugget over to someone else?
Sometimes I have people who come to me who don't fit my niche and they ask me to help them, and I tell them that I don't think that I'm the best person for the job and I point them in the right direction of someone who could help them much better. I hand that golden nugget over to someone else and I keep tunnelling with my very specific niche.
If that tunnelling analogy has piqued your interest, I have a great free resource for you.
In this training, I:
You can find that beautiful Nail Your Niche training here: tashcorbin.com/webinar
Nicole, thank you so much for your question and thank you to everyone for reading along. I hope you found this episode really helpful as well.
If you'd like to submit a question for these Q&A podcast episodes, simply go to tashcorbin.com/question, pop all your details and your question in there and I will answer it on the podcast in coming episodes.
Please come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, using #podcastaha share your aha moments and any questions that you have about this episode of the podcast. Let me know you've been reading podcast episode 231 and we can talk about this further over there!
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
Show notes can be found at tashcorbin.com/230
In today's episode, I'm going to be sharing with you feminine time management strategies that boost your productivity.
Traditionally, when we think of things productivity and time management strategies, we can associate them with jamming more things in and really hustling. Getting up at 4am, getting stuff done before the kids wake up and the sun wakes up and even while the early birds are still sleeping. Do more!
Productivity was about jamming in as much as possible. It was about making sure that you extracted every possible inch out of every possible second.
Time management strategies were not about how to make things easier or more effective, time management was all about how to make sure you can do 100,000 things in four minutes a day, and jamming as many of those four minute increments in as you could.
What I have discovered, and something that I've had to detox myself from, is just how masculine dominated those productivity and time management strategies are, and how much they can really drain my energy and end up being really ineffective for me.
It is by embracing a more feminine energy orientation towards time management, productivity, and getting results in my business.
I believe that we are a balance of masculine and feminine energy, and I 100% believe that we want to keep those things in balance.
I'm not saying it's all just the feminine energy or it's all just the masculine energy, but for myself, I know that with the corporate background that I have, my experience of my education - being in high school and particularly in university - I have been really focused on those masculine dominated time management strategies.
I do need to detox from some of that programming that says that the masculine orientation is the best way to do it because I know for myself that that just isn't the case.
My question to you is: What if you could achieve more and have better outcomes, but do it in less time and with less work?
One of the big things I want to say before I even jump into my time management strategies with you, is to just notice how you feel when I say a word like 'easy'. How much have we been told that easy equals wrong? That easy is the cheat's way?
What about how you feel when I say the word 'lazy'?
What about the word 'fun'? Can growing a business, being productive, getting work done and getting results be fun?
They are the three words that I focus on whenever I'm going for a big goal.
Easy, lazy, fun.
ELF is my little acronym for it.
With ELF, I'm able to pay attention to my thoughts and feelings about those words and look for ways where I'm making things hard, where I feel like I need to look like I'm really diligent, and where I'm sucking the joy out of the thing that I'm doing.
I've got five tips for you on how to really embrace more feminine time management strategies and boost your productivity.
I don't know how many times I was told this and how many times I brushed it aside because I believed that I was a really productive person so I could have a longer list.
I know from experience that having a longer list overwhelms.
Having a longer list makes you less productive.
Think about it: If you are looking at your to-do list and there are 100 things on it, and you get 6 done for the day, do you feel like you've totally smashed it and nailed it for the day? Or do you feel like you've only done 6% of your tasks and that's not very good?
On the other hand, if you had a list of three things to get done for the day and you get them all done, how do you feel at the end of the day? How does that translate into your energy the next day?
Often we have a very short term focus when it comes to our to-do lists, and we overestimate what we can achieve in the short term, and underestimate what we can achieve in the long term.
This is because we have giant to-do lists in front of us and we only ever make tiny, incremental progress in those giant lists, comparative to the number of tasks that we've given ourselves.
Go through that list of things that you have been transcribing from page to page to page in your to-do planner, and start crossing some of those things out.
Which of those things are just not a priority right now?
Some of those things might need to be put somewhere else. You can outsource them to someone else, or you can put them in your toy box to play with later because it's not a priority for you right now.
Some things you might need to have on your urgent to-do list and get them done.
But I challenge you to get really honest with yourself about how critical it is for that thing to get done today.
What are the chances you are going to have a successful day and tick it all off? What are the chances that there's still going to be something left at the end of the day?
Every day when I write down my to-do list for the day, I write a to-do list that I have 100% confidence that I will absolutely smash. Usually it's three or four things.
If I finish it early and I want to go and play with some other things, I've got plenty of options lurking away in my toy box and in other spaces. I can also take things from the next day or from future plans and get some things done early.
But when I keep my to-do list small, I absolutely nail the productivity thing because I am in momentum. I feel successful and that feeling creates a snowball effect of its own.
If I'm not experiencing that feeling that I nailed it today at least four days a week, then I end up feeling like I'm behind and like there's so much to do.
That feeling creates more of it, and it snowballs its own feeling.
Make your to-do list smaller and start saying no to things.
Sure it might be nice for you to jump on and do that free interview, but it's not a priority for you right now. Yeah, it would be great for you to create a new freebie and a welcome sequence and an upsell, but right now your focus is on getting sales conversations and having connected conversations with people.
The other thing that I see when people have their to-do list far too big, is that they choose the things that aren't actually going to move them forward.
When I challenge you to get to the four most important things you need to focus on, then you are going to have to focus on the things that are going to move you forward.
You can't get distracted by those one percenters. You have a very small number of things that you're able to write onto your to-do list, so you have to pick the ones that are going to have the biggest impact. You're also less likely to avoid those things by distracting yourself with the other less important things that are on that ginormous list.
Make a smaller list and say no to things.
Give yourself space to:
One of my experiences in the corporate world that I had, was when I was in a consulting role and one of the things I had to do for each project was an end of project report.
In most cases, we would be allocated two days of time (16 hours) to do that end of project report. I actually ended up getting in the habit of taking those two days as work from home days when I knew I had that report to work on, and I would get that report done in two or three hours.
But it was two or three hours at the end of each day.
I'd do my work from home day, and I would batch cook up some beautiful food, get my laundry done, tidy the house and do some painting, and then I'd sit down for a couple of hours at the end of the day and really smash out that report.
With that space of playfulness, tidying and moving my body, I was actually getting that report clear in my mind.
I am a very spatial bodily thinker and processor. By doing that, I was able to craft an end of project report that would normally take two days of sitting at my desk staring at my screen, in two or three hours.
The reason why I started doing this at home was because when I was in the office and I was on my two days of report writing, I would get in so much trouble because I would be distracting people, and I'd be staring out the window telling people to look at something outside because I wasn't actually in the right space and I hadn't done my processing to write out the report.
If I sat there and forced myself to stare at the computer screen, I couldn't do it.
I'd get in trouble sitting at my desk distracting everyone - helping someone with something, going and tidying the kitchen and coming up with ideas for a social event for the workplace - so my boss would have to tell me that I had to stop talking to other people. She actually moved my desk so that I would sit and I wouldn't talk to anyone else. (Even though talking to other people was mostly helping them... well sometimes I was distracting them). I would sit staring at the computer screen with this blinking cursor, and I'd just be looking at a white page. I would be staring and I could not get it clear.
When I decided that I'd work from home instead and I gave myself that freedom and that space, rest and creativity, then the two hours that I did put into report writing were effortless.
I know that I'm the same with my business.
For three hours before I sat down to record this podcast and a couple of others that I've recorded before this one, I was out walking in town, having lunch, and just giving myself some spaciousness. I knew which podcast episodes I was going to be recording, and the spaciousness allowed me to remember of the story of being at my desk in my consulting role, and that's how I decided I'd share that in my podcast today.
I know for myself that if I give myself spaciousness before a big task, I get that task done more efficiently and more effectively.
These days, I record my podcasts in a single take mostly off the cuff with a couple of points that I have on my screen. But I can only do that if I've had space.
If I force myself to try and record podcasts between busy, busy, busy, busy, I stumble over my words, I can't process it properly, and I can't string my two sentences together without making lots of mistakes.
Give yourself rest, playfulness and creativity.
I have another cool story for you on this one, and this came out of a conversation I had with an amazing lady called Aesha Kennedy. If you don't follow Aesha, please do go and follow her, she's brilliant.
I was talking to her about creative outlets because in 2017 when I did a big review of my business, I had 37 different products and services that people could buy.
Through a conversation I had with Aesha about this, I recognised and realised that what I was doing was funnelling all of my creative energy straight into my business, and in doing so, I actually broke my business.
If I had given myself a creative outlet outside of my business during the two years before 2017, I have no doubt that I wouldn't have tried to get that creative energy from my business, and I wouldn't have tried to use my business as my only creative outlet, thus feeling like I'm constantly in this space of needing to create things for my business.
The reason why this was something that happened for me was because at the time in 2016 and 2017 in particular, I had huge goals for my business, and I wanted to be the most productive that I could be.
If I was to decide that I'd spend three hours playing with some paints and mucking around, I couldn't justify that time.
But it's easy to justify creative time in your business because it could make you money, it could get you followers, and it could grow your business.
There's using your business as a creative outlet, and then there is using your business as your only creative outlet.
By giving yourself space, having rest, and especially by having creative outlets and social outlets other than your business, the time that you spend on your business can be focused, much more effective and more likely to get you results.
I speak to so many creative entrepreneurs and so many women who talk about the fact that they need to create six different programs because they need to express their creativity. They need to write a book, they have to have events, they have to do this and that, and they label themselves as multi-passionate.
I honestly believe if you want your business to grow exponentially, quickly, easily and effortlessly, you need to be really specific, narrow and hyper-focused.
For many people, the best gift you can give your business is getting your creative outlet in other spaces, so that your focus in your business can be refined.
Many of the behaviours and habits that we get into in our business come from programming.
I know that if I work on my business and do some social media stuff sitting on the couch, I feel like it's not as productive as when I'm doing it at my desk. But sometimes I do just need to go and sit on the couch.
When I am working on web pages, design or those sorts of things, my favourite way to do that is in the recliner, legs up, with my little lap table and just playing with things in that position. That is actually a really productive time for me to be doing creative things.
I love getting down on the floor and working as well. Sometimes I'll feel guilty for sitting on the floor and working, and it's because of this programming telling me that I need to be sitting at my desk and working in a certain way for it to be productive time.
If you've got someone else in your home or someone else who's witnessing you, and you are doing something that doesn't look like you're being productive, sometimes we can do productive things to keep up appearances.
Something that I like to do every single day is to step outside, get my feet in the grass and play with Munchkin, and I noticed - especially at first - my thoughts about worrying that someone would see and think I'm bunking off and not being productive in my business.
It was so fascinating to just pay attention to those thoughts, concerns and worries that I had about productivity, time management and what I should achieve in a day.
I'd tell myself that I couldn't take time off because I was launching, or I couldn't go to the movies during the day because I needed to be really focused on a certain income goal. But in fact, the opposite is true for me. If I go to the movies during the day, I have a really productive morning and a really productive afternoon because I know I'm going to the movies in the middle of the day.
A project will expand to take up the time that you give it, and 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort.
When you have limited time to work on your business, and you have a four dot point to-do list, that means you're going to focus on the 20% of things that get you 80% of your results, and you're going to get them done really quickly because your project can only expand to the time that you give it.
For me, I know that if I'm out walking every day, looking after my body, taking time to go to the movies, and finishing early three days a week to spend time with my partner, I'm actually more productive. I'm more effective.
The measure that I have for my business success is not focused on how many things I can get done and tick off my to-do list, the measure of success in my business ultimately is: How much money does my business generate, and how many people can I serve?
If I can do that in an hour a day, why not do it in an hour day?
Why is it more worthwhile if I've worked hard for it?
That is all programming and we need to pay attention to those thoughts and feelings.
This is probably the big one for me with productivity.
When I had big projects to achieve in corporate and when I had big deadlines coming up, I would eat terrible food, work long hours, give up my exercise, sleep less, drink less water and drink more coffee and alcohol.
At the time, it was very short term focused - I just had to get the thing done and smash it out. But I have no doubt upon reflection, that if I'd kept my boundaries about my work time, if I had looked after my health and wellbeing, if I drank lots of water, not resorted to coffee and alcohol, and not skipped the exercise, I would have actually still been able to meet those deadlines.
I would have still been able to achieve those goals.
Again, it's this programming of 'If something requires my effort, energy and attention, I need to stop looking after myself. I need to sacrifice some things.'
For me, the things that I cannot sacrifice anymore and I refuse to sacrifice because I know that if I do, it actually makes me less productive are:
Those things are just non-negotiable for me now because I know that when I get those things and when I really look after myself, that's when I get the best out of myself anyway.
When I'm launching, I go for two walks a day instead of just the one. I ramp up the nourishment, the timeout and the fun, because that gets me better results.
The outcome that you're striving for is not working 16 hour days - that's not why you started a business.
You did not sign up for this so that you could work really long hours and burn yourself out.
Why did you decide to start this business? Why are you going for the goals that are going for right now? What is the outcome that you are chasing?
The fastest, most effective and productive way for you to achieve that outcome is not burning yourself out, it is by really making sure that your time management and productivity strategies are a balance of the masculine and the feminine.
For 90% of the people I talk to, the thing that they need to work on is bringing up the feminine and reducing some of the masculine. Whipping yourself into shape doesn't create sustainable long term productivity outcomes.
I was talking to someone a couple of days ago, and she had set herself a goal of a $10,000 month. When she'd set that goal, she'd mapped it all out specifically with what clients she was going to get, how she was going to sell her course for $150 and do this launch, and on the second last day of the month, she had someone getting in touch with her who was interested in getting her services with some consulting and doing a VIP package with her. They wanted to get her doing two months of some very specific work absolutely in her zone of genius, and their budget was $10,000.
We were having a conversation about it because she said for two days, she was ummming and ahhing about whether to take on the project or not, not because she wasn't really sure if she wanted to do the project, but because she already had a plan of where that money should have come from. She didn't realise that what she was doing was trying to stick to the process, instead of just being clear on the outcome.
In the end, she was so excited to take it on, but initially she was resisting it because it wasn't the hard work that she had thought she was going to be putting into place.
If your goal is to bring in $10,000 and someone decides that they want to gift you $10,000, do you brush it aside and say that it doesn't count because you want it to come from a certain thing?
For most people, when it comes to productivity and time management, they're not focused on the outcomes they want to achieve, they're focused on the hours that they want to work. They're focused how many hours they want to work and what they want to get done in a certian amount of time.
They're focused on the inputs and the outputs, and they're not actually focused on the outcome itself.
Get clear on the outcome because at the end of the day, if you can get to that outcome the easy, lazy and fun way, then why wouldn't you?
To recap, my time management strategies and tips are:
1. Create a smaller to-do list and say no to some things
2. Give yourself lots of space for rest, creativity and processing
3. Pay attention to those thoughts and feelings, and notice where your programming is telling you that you need to work harder
4. Nourish yourself
5. Get clear on the outcome that you are aiming for
This is going to be a really juicy conversation for us, so I'd love for you to come over to the Heart-Centred, Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let me know you've been listening to episode number 230 and share with me any lightbulb moments or questions that you have about feminine time management strategies and boosting your productivity.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.