Formalising Thought Leadership and Refining Your Process
Over August, which I take off from publishing content and get busy creating content, I’ve been working on my thought leadership. Which I’m not sure is the terminology I love because it has certain connotations, but it feels the easiest term to use. When I say thought leadership, I am talking about what makes me unique, my methodology, and my process.
Working on these things hasn’t been something that I have ever really done consciously. I don’t want to say that to date I’ve been making things up as I’ve been going along because it has been a bit more directed than that. But I think it’s been fair to say I’ve been in a test and learn mode — being confronted with problems from clients and students and coming up with ways to help those problems, and those ways, when they work, become subsumed into the canon of things I know how to help with. I have had a few core principles and my why guiding me, but not a methodology that I know works — think of it as having a central farmhouse with a few animals randomly in the fields and scraping by, versus having that central farmhouse, but with all the fields joined up with a crop rotation plan and all the equipment readied to enact that plan. There were lots of useful elements, but no red threads joining them together — which often made me feel a little scattered when it came to creating new things.
This all came to a point this summer as I began working on my book proposal. Much like my work to date, I had a very strong why and the difference I wanted this book to make, but my ideas were all a little scattered. By the end of my first iteration of the proposal, I felt very strongly like I had lots of strong, interesting points grouped together underneath an exceptionally leaky umbrella — the parts didn’t add up to a strong whole. From what I was learning about the publishing industry, I knew that the idea, the marketable hook for the book was most important — and that was what I didn’t have. I also knew that I needed to communicate why it should be me, over all others, who should write this book — and I could think of one or two people who might be better options. So while I was committed to the why of the book, I knew there were some big structural problems.
As I was working on trying to fix the leaky umbrella, I realised that the key would be thought leadership. When I’d been planning the book I’d started with the individual points I wanted to make, and then tried to hang them together into a whole that made sense — the content didn’t emanate out from a fixed centre, which is why that all-important hook didn’t exist. If I could show that the book was based around a methodology that was unique to me, then that would also answer the “why me?” problem — because no one else can write a book based on my unique methodology.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that drawing all the bitty parts of my work together into a single methodology would be helpful in lots of other places too — it would help structure the direction of The Trail, it could form the basis of future workshops and courses. It would mean that rather than trying to reinvent the wheel every time I made something new, and worrying that I was repeating myself, I could simply look at new ways to go deeper into the methodology — because that, in itself, is unique enough.
One of the reasons I’ve avoided doing too much around thought leadership and methodologies in this way is because the term “thought leadership” is often lumped in with “own your space”. As anyone who has taken The Playbook knows (which, by the way, will be on sale again very soon — I’ll link the waitlist in the show notes), I don’t believe in “owning your space”. I believe in knowing who you are within a space and working on being magnetic at that, rather than spending your energy and time trying to stop anyone else into your space like a greedy dragon. So while I was thinking about my methodology, I had to make sure that I wasn’t thinking in terms of a space to call mine, but rather in terms of how I am unique within the space I operate.
Another point of resistance is also that my why is finding freedom without should do’s and more soul. I have spoken numerous times about the problem with educators sharing “simple formulas” to achieve things because what works for one person is impossible to replicate across hundreds of different businesses run by hundreds of different humans. To say “these are the five steps to guaranteed success” is, to me, a lie. So obviously, having a methodology of my own has not been a priority, and coming up with one that doesn’t contradict my values and beliefs about this issue is something that has been front of mind for me.
The key, for formulating the methodology in the first place and negotiating these blocks, has been the fact that I am not creating some methodology out of thin air but codifying what already exists. It takes me back to Politics A-Level and learning about the difference between constitutions — the USA has a codified constitution, which is a single document you can hold in your hands and say “here is the constitution”. The UK has an uncodified constitution, whereby it exists in the sum of historic laws and customs, some that are rolled up parchment scrolls in the bowels of Parliament and others that have been passed orally through parliamentary tradition. With my methodology, I wasn’t sitting like the Founding Fathers at a table to create a document out of what I thought; instead, I was taking all the bits and pieces of my uncodified way of working and turning them into something tangible.
In some ways I had already had a run at this with my Slow Marketing Workbook, which includes the Slow Marketing Manifesto — this is a big freebie that you get when you sign up to my email list so I’ll put the link below so you can see what it is if you’re not already signed up. This workbook covers all the principles I teach about marketing, the process that everyone, no matter where they are in their journey, can use to help marketing feel less overwhelming.
So the Slow Marketing Manifesto (or method) is:
1) Simplify everything — Do nothing only because you think you should — have a reason greater than someone else’s opinion.
2) Be purposeful — Operate from a place of ‘Why’ and lead from your values; stand for something bigger than a product.
3) Humans not numbers — Humans are what will make the difference — embrace your humanity, and speak to the humanity in others.
4) Be valuable — Give value freely and happily, creatively and differently — educate, entertain and inspire. You will be paid back in kind.
5) You are not a martyr — Keep hold of what fills you up and don’t compromise yourself to suit other people — there is no point if you’re not happy.
I absolutely still believe and teach these principles. But when thinking about my methodology, this felt like a branch, rather than the trunk, of the tree. There feels like there’s something greater, deeper than this. Yes everyone I work with goes through these principles, but they also go through a deeper change too, one where they ultimately find their version of fulfilment and freedom through the way they now think about their business. The Slow Marketing manifesto covers off the “How” part of my Why/How/What — it is my approach to marketing, but it’s not my mission.
So I needed to think about the tree trunk, the methodology that demonstrates how I enact my why.
In the last episode with Sara Tasker I spoke a little bit about Kate Northrup’s work — well since that episode I signed up to Kate’s membership programme a low and behold there was a lesson about finding your core methodology and owning your thought leadership. Sign from the universe, I thought. So as I tell you about how I began to codify my methodology, credit goes to Kate and her lessons for some of this process.
Kate said to first start by mapping out your journey, and/or the journey of clients, to ascertain where the main turning points are. So I set about writing down the key things like “knowing your purpose”, identifying values and creating a vision. At this point this is all the obvious stuff that I do and I ran the risk of creating the Slow Marketing Manifesto version two. So I just took a moment to think about what the end point really was — it wasn’t knowing how to market your business, it was feeling free and fulfilled every day. And when I treated that as the end point I realised that harnessing your strengths was important, learning to understand and work with your fears rather than wasting time trying to get over them, to shift your mindset from success being something you have one day to something you can have every day.
And then it all flowed. All those little bits and pieces, the random parchment scrolls in the recesses of my mind all came and fit together into groups that were easy to categorise and that made sense to me as being reflective of my own journey, and the journeys of people I’d worked with. It just felt — true. And The Inward Attainment Map was born. I’m not interested in helping you perpetually strive for growth that’s not towards something, I’m not interested in making you feel you need to hit external measures of success. I want to help you feel fulfilled every day internally; to reconnect you to your source of fulfilment wherever you are in your working life.
And that’s what the Inward Attainment Map does. It is a four stage cycle that helps you experience all the iterations of fulfilment in your life (because as we and our circumstances change, so too does what fulfilment feel like for us, hence why it’s a cycle).
Align
Characteristics: feeling lost and stuck, looking around for inspiration, not knowing what you want
Actions: identify values, identify inward and outward purpose, create emotive vision
Change: “what does fulfilment look like?” to “what does fulfilment feel like?”
Accept
Characteristics: full of excuses and reasons about why you can’t do something, feel overwhelmed by fears and blocks
Actions: question motivations and actions, understand roots of blocks to work with them
Change: “how do I overcome my blocks?”to “how do I work alongside my blocks?”
Apply
Characteristics: positive and inspired with a hundred different ideas but no clear direction
Actions: harness strengths, give yourself permission and create a values-led roadmap
Change: “what things can I do?” to “what things take me to my vision?”
Ascend
Characteristics: immersed in your vision and roadmap, seeking momentum and signs of change
Actions: regular intuition check-ins, consciously choosing and practicing the towards and within a mindset
Change: “how long until I get where I want to?” to “how can I experience my vision today?”
It doesn’t matter whether you are working a day job just beginning to contemplate something different or whether you’ve been running your business for ten years — in some way, you are at one of these stages in your current iteration of fulfilment. Within each one there is wriggle room and ways to find your own version of what works for you, and layering on other processes will be helpful — for example, using the Slow Marketing Manifesto to act as a bridge to get you from one stage to another. But for me, this feels like the tree trunk, like what everything else has, subconsciously come from. I hope that if we’ve worked together before then you can see a little something in here that you recognise.
This is something that I will be continuing to develop. Already the leaky umbrella book proposal has been turned around into something more focused and the Inward Fulfilment Map methodology has proved there that it all works in theory. I am also rejigging the content in The Trail with the participants currently in there, so when it reopens in November you will be able to very consciously work through this map as cornerstone content. And looking forwards, I will be beginning to apply it to some virtual day retreats and a mastermind I’m planning for 2021.
I’m not saying that you have to have a methodology, and personally, I think it can take some time for your methodology to really show itself to you. There’s no way I could have come up with this a year or even six months ago. But if you, like me, feel like you’re scrabbling around trying to fit parts together into a whole, or you feel like some of your offerings are just scratching the surface of what you really do, try thinking about whether having a central methodology based in your why will help to give you some direction.
