Why You Want a Message-Driven Business as a Solopreneur.
Having a message that comes through your business is important. It’s how you anchor what makes you and your work unique.
It’s how you show up to your ideas and stand in the power of the impact you want to make. It unites your community, who grows to trust you enough to work with you or buy your offerings.⠀
And these days, it’s really hard to grow a business if you’re not clear about what you have to say about this work you do. Not the modality, the authentic message that expresses what matters to you.
Figuring out what your message is can be tricky, even though ultimately it’s an expression of something that feels near and dear to you. With clients, I spend a lot of time helping them uncover and understand their message because everything about how they then craft their business comes out of that.
Everything.
Your message helps you understand the role you fill in your community. It’s the change you want to make. Through your message, you carve out a little space in the universe and say, “I care about this. I speak to this, I help with this. Be part of my world. Let me tell you how my ideas might help you.”⠀
This message of yours then guides you as you create your business; it reveals your niche, your marketing, your products and even the very structure of the work you do.
There’s an evolution of your business.
I think most of us start out talking about our modality. Your marketing efforts then revolve around talking about the tools you use to create some kind of change, and how that modality itself works. You speak to why people want that “thing.”
That’s a safe approach. You can say you bring a particular skill to the table. You might even talk about your personal history with said modality. But you don’t have to put your core values and ideas on the line.
Eventually, there comes a point where you realize that people out there in the world are so inundated with people speaking about Reiki or coaching or what-not, that you get lost in the noise. To help them actually hear you, you must shift gears.
A deeper message is needed to actually be saying something people resonate with.
If you’re one who focuses on your modality, you might get a little annoyed by someone like me saying most people don’t really care about that. Other practitioners might because they’re coming to the work with their own ideas of what they’ll get out of it. But to grow your business, you’ll need to speak to a larger audience who aren’t really shopping for your modality. They’re looking for a change in how they feel, who they know themselves to be or how to do something better.
And they want to know you, and what you know of that change, to know if you’re the one who can help.
Making the leap into a message-focused business is where you get brave.
I say that a lot, but it’s true. Because this message of yours is about two things:
- How you want to show up in your life and your world.
- What you honestly believe.
Both of those expose the real you. It’s easy to want to protect that and stay safe, never be judged for your ideas. But these days, your business can not survive without a clear, authentic message; a platform that matters to you.
There will always be certain kinds of businesses that have a built-in message. It comes with the product. But as a soulpreneur, you are your business. Your business is an expression of you. So you need to show up to what feels important to say about what you want to have an effect on.
I personally also believe that until you do, your business will never fully thrive because the universe is waiting for you to step up so it can recognize that this business of yours is yours, and shuttle some extra energy into it.
So how do you find your message?
You go inward, at first. You uncover what you need to say; maybe what you’ve been afraid to say.
I get clients thinking in broad terms at first, not even about what their business is about. It begins with you. Then, as you understand the ideas that are an innate part of who you are and what’s important to you, you can begin to see how your work and this message intersect.
A few tips:
1. Ask yourself what ideas you naturally gravitate to.
Maybe you need to flip that and ask what bothers you about the world or your “work-sphere.” But think about it. What do you want to see happen more or happen less? Why? Why does this thing bother you? Why does it inspire you?
What do you then know about yourself? What do you value and what do you believe? Who do you know yourself to be because this particular thing matters to you?
2. Then think about the things that have had the biggest impact on you in your life.
Write down the big ones that come to mind. What journey did you go on as you experienced that? What did you learn about yourself? Is there some lesson or way of seeing the world (or yourself) that you can see that ties into what you care about — what you want to see more or less of?
3. And then step back and look at the people you serve.
Do THEY need to experience more or less of what you see in the world? Do they get stuck in the journey you somehow made in your life — they ones that informed you the most about who you are and what you value?
What can you tell them, then, about what’s important to you and would also be important to them about the journey you see them needing to make?
These questions are the first steps on the journey my clients make to understand their message.
From there we start to get specific about how their work ties into this. But it also leads us into what their niche might be, what their target market might be, and what their core marketing messages might be. It even helps us come to know the energy of their business and what kinds of products they can offer and how they want to set that up.
Every part of your business comes down to what matters to you, and how you must express that through your soulful business.
But it begins first by going inward and excavating what is important and true for you. There’s a journey to take, where you let go of the fear and the shame you may have around what is important to you. You work through the doubts that anyone will care what you have to say.
The evolution of your business around your message eventually lands you in a place of personal power. You begin to see your value and the value of your work in new ways.
Speaking your message helps with this. It really does. It shifts you into seeing yourself as filling a gap in this world where who you are and what you have to say fits right in.
And, there are a whole lot of people who need to enter into this little nook in the universe that you set up where you speak this truth of yours. So, maybe now’s the time on your journey to shift gears and find your message.
Originally published at https://stacyvajta.com on October 31, 2019.
