How to Translate Your Life Wisdom into Fresh ... - Soundbite Shaman

Finally Understood:

How to Translate Your Life Wisdom into Fresh, Authentic Language and Marketable Value

Copyright © 2010 - 2014 Isabel Parlett, Inc. All rights reserved

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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE How to Step Out Into the World with Your Life Wisdom We’re here to talk about something that I think is incredibly important, which is: How do we find a way to take all of the rich and juicy goodness that we’ve learned in our lives, all that wisdom that’s been developed in us through our life experience, and translate it into simple, clear language that lets us step out into the world, engage with other people, and develop services and programs that reflect the best of what we can offer?

How do we find a way to take all of the rich and juicy goodness that we’ve learned in our lives and translate it into simple, clear language that lets us step out into the world? I think this question matters because that translation process is the key to generating income by sharing the wisdom you’ve developed with the world. You may worry that who you are and what you want to offer isn’t marketable. You may be concerned that you are too complex, or that your ideas are too far out there to gain acceptance. You may think to yourself that it’s just too hard to put your concepts and ideas into words. But I want to assure you that no matter who you are, how far “out there” you are, or how complex, ground-breaking, or esoteric your work is, there is a way to capture your concepts and ideas and find clear, simple language to make what you offer understood (In fact, getting clear on the concept and ideas is a big part of what lets you find that clear, simple language). I’m going to guess that most of you have found that following your standard marketing formulas doesn’t really answer this question. It doesn’t help you capture that distinctive voice that you have and bring it forward in a way that it sounds like what you’re offering is tangible, real, and compelling enough that people become willing to part with their hard-earned cash in order to receive the benefits of that wisdom. Why I Am Talking to You Today My name is Isabel Parlett. My company is The Soundbite Shaman, and in some circles I’m known as the Message Whisperer. Whether I realized it or not, most of my life, I’ve been looking at the question, “How do we communicate the value that we bring to the table? How do we communicate in a way that creates connection?” I started out in 1994 as an early adopter of coaching. I started out coaching a huge variety of clients, from artists to new coaches, to people working at quite high levels of management in corporate America. As my business grew and as


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE I worked with these diverse clients, I saw that we all are tasked with being able to name and bring forward what is inside of us, to bring forward what we believe, what we’re passionate about, and what we understand about how the world works.

We all are tasked with being able to name and bring forward what is inside of us, to bring forward what we believe, what we’re passionate about, and what we understand about how the world works. About 10 years ago, I began to focus my practice exclusively on helping small business owners — those in the business of transformation — find that clear, simple language that lets them fulfill their purpose through their work. My goal isn’t just to help them find language to get their audience to buy or say yes, but to help them bring forward the language that is really, truly in alignment with who they are and what they’re here to do. Because I’ve seen over and over again over the last 20 years that when we use language that is not true to who we are, it tends not to work very well. Even if you do get clients with that out-of-alignment language, you may find that you don’t like so much the clients that you’re getting. Or you find you can make money with that language, but your soul goes dead. A lot of people find that until they do that deeper work to bring forward their own original language and voice, that they simply struggle to find and connect with the people who really want and need their services. I’ve dedicated the last 10 years to helping people navigate this question and helping people find their voice and bring their voice out in the world.

Until you do that deeper work to bring forward your own original language and voice, you struggle to find and connect with the people who really want and need your services.

Learning Through Stories In this free report I’ll be sharing some key ingredients that are key to finding your right language. I’ll be bringing those insights to life through the stories of some of the wonderful people I’ve worked with, and what happened for them as they took on the work of finding the words to finally be understood. Through these stories, you’ll get a much deeper understanding of what’s actually involved because translating your life wisdom into marketable value requires a certain kind of discipline. It’s a big piece of life work and it’s a big piece of business work. It requires a high level of commitment


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE to take on that work and to see that work through to a point that you actually have the outcome you want — language you can use to make the distinctive value you offer finally understood. What’s exciting is that as we go along, you’ll hear real examples of the exact language people developed working with me, and hear what the impact was of developing and using that language. I think you’re going to appreciate the willingness that all the people in the stories showed to peel back the curtain and let you kind of see something about them that they might not normally share or they might not normally make a part of their conversation with the public. As you hear these stories, I want to invite you to ask yourself the question, “How does this apply to me? What is that am I hearing in this person’s story that might suggest a different way for me to approach things, a different way to look at things, a different way of finding my own way through this question, through this challenge?”

The First Ingredient in Finally Being Understood: Recognize What You Bring to the Table The first step to finally being understood is to recognize the value that you bring to the table. Seeing with fresh eyes what you bring to the table that’s different, that’s powerful, that’s compelling because until you recognize what you bring to the table, it’s obviously hard to communicate it or convey it to anyone else. Let’s repeat that because it’s crucial.

Until you recognize what you bring to the table, it’s really hard to communicate it or convey it to anyone else.

Susanna’s Story: ReWeaving the World This first story is about the wonderful things that can happen when you risk offering something that you aren’t sure will be marketable. Because that’s the big fear, isn’t it? That if we follow our heart, we’ll end with something to offer that no one will want to buy. Susanna Maida calls herself a visionary business weaver, and I love that title for her because I think it describes who she is and what she does much better than if she used a conventional title like business coach. One of the ways she describes herself in the bio that she uses out in the world is:


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Susanna is a wild woman alchemist who surprised herself and everyone else who knew her by falling in love with the entrepreneurial spirit. She’s passionate about giving evolutionary women and men who care deeply about the fate of our world the soul-satisfying sense of alignment that comes from growing, thriving, worldchanging business doing their great work. Isn’t that a bold statement? What you may recognize is that each of these stories is a kind of hero’s journey of finding yourself in a difficult place, having to really kind of get down into the muck, kind of flail around a little bit to discover something that you can then carry back out into the world. A lot of people who come to me are like Susanna in that they’re very expansive in their expression. In a lot of places, people are smacked down and told that that’s not okay. What I love is to give people room to unfold a lot of stuff and then work with them to find a more streamlined expression. Before Susanna stepped into business coaching, she was doing leadership coaching, she was leading retreats in nature, using the medicine wheel. She was good at what she did, but not very successful in it as a business. In 2010, she made the decision to step into a high-ticket training so that she could learn how to be a business coach and she set all the work she had been doing aside. That training was incredibly valuable in the sense that Susanna was given a system for coaching so that she didn’t have to piece together on her own. But, this is important, as she describes in her own words: I lost myself in the process. I lost my own voice, I lost my own aliveness and I didn’t even know what my message was because I put the message that I really was passionate about aside in order to be marketable. Or at least what she thought was marketable. What she told herself was: No one walks around in the middle of the night thinking I have to unfold myself as a leader. If you are reading this, I want you to pause for a moment: Has someone told you that the heart and the essence of what you want to offer isn’t marketable? Because unfortunately, it happens a lot and it can be quite devastating. You take that on for yourself, and it can keep you from actually naming and claiming what it is you are here to do. Even though the marketing people who say this may mean well, it can come out in really harsh terms like, “Nobody cares about that,” and you feel like you’ve been smacked down.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE The truth is, and I want you to remember this, is that when a marketing person says that what you do, or what you want to do, isn’t marketable, it only means that THEY don’t know how to help you market it! Coming off that training, being in the world of high-end coaching, feeling like she had to do it right, to present herself in the right way, Susanna described it like this: I felt dried up and parched. I had this image of myself and my message like a well that had stopped working. Not only was there no water coming out of it but it had been caked over with mud and I didn’t know how to access the message that had been in me before. I didn’t know if my voice would ever come back. How did that impact her ability to be out in the world marketing and growing your business? I’d say I wasn’t putting myself out there. I had no website, I had no newsletter. I didn’t know what I would say. I had been parroting someone else’s system that didn’t have a lot of me in it and the words I used started to feel kind of generic. I knew that I didn’t want to write a bunch of newsletter articles about five tips to make more money so I didn’t just say anything. I wasn’t speaking, I wasn’t writing, nothing. That’s where I was at. And in that place, how did she feel about the future of her business? Pretty crappy. I didn’t feel very hopeful. The interesting thing that was there is this notion you should be doing these things. I had that perpetual feeling of like you should be doing a newsletter, you should have your website, you should be speaking, and yet I couldn’t. There was that sort of self-judging on top of it. So, it was at that point that Susanna came to me for help with her communication. Susanna admitted that one of her biggest concerns was that if she poked around at trying to find her voice, she might discover that it was actually gone. She described it: Like a plant that you forgot to water for so long. That no matter how much water I put on it, it might not come back. She was afraid (and I hear this quite often) that if she kept exploring and looking for her voice, for her message, she might discover that there’s nothing there anymore, which would have been even more painful than to not know what the message was. Can you relate? Susanna’s not alone, that sometimes the fear of going in and really excavating your message is the fear of, “What if there’s nothing there,” or “What if what’s there is totally lame?” Where we start the message development process, whether I work with you one-on-one or in a group setting, is by defining what I call the True Spirit of Your Work.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE The True Spirit of your Work is the specific outcome you love to deliver that’s been a theme throughout your life. It’s about going beyond marketing speech and trying to get to the spiritual truth about why you’re here and what you’re here to do. It gives you permission to say what’s really in your heart instead of trying to sound marketable. Until you put aside being marketable, just for a little while, you risk circling around and never really landing on the story you are here to tell. Here’s what Susanna said happened for her as she started to wrap her arms around defining the True Spirit of her Work: I realized how much I had bought into that idea that in order to be a business coach. I had to inhabit this really tight terrain and I could only say things like how much money you can make and how many clients you can get. How fully I had bought into the idea that people just want to be told how to do things, to be given tips. And that’s not me. Underneath it all, business coaching is just a strategy that I use for helping people bring their calling and their great work out into the world. That’s really what I do, and it just happens to be that I now know how to help them build a business to do that. So when we began, Susanna wasn’t quite ready to say: My work is about helping people do their great work in the world, and the business stuff is just a tool. For all of you who have been certified in someone else’s system, trained in someone else’s methodology, this is a really common challenge, which is we start to think the tool is the message, as opposed to it being a means for you to do what it is you’re really here to do. Susanna went on to say: I mentioned the leadership and vision quest work I had been doing before. I had been carrying around this belief that it was either/or: either I could do that work and struggle or I could do the business coaching and make money. I was hoping that through working with you, it could at least be a both/and, that I could somehow be both. What I discovered, much to my delight, was that there was actually more of a seamless integration between those two worlds of work, and that was more than I could have ever imagine or had hoped for. So picture this for a moment, Susanna was this kind of wild woman, rafting guide, vision questing, out there in nature, who now had all these business coaching training and business building tools.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE What Susanna realized is that she had left the evolutionary thinker part of who she was off the table, the part she’d been told wasn’t marketable, then surprise, she found that she had nothing to say. And, in a sense, what she realized is that she couldn’t have the impact she wanted on her clients without including this bigger perspective about what she wanted for the world and what she saw was really happening in the world of business. Another notion that emerged in this exploration of her True Spirit was this idea of restoring the sacred to business. That has become key theme in her work as well as the idea of being in “right relationship.” That was signature language that wasn’t fully in focus, or at least not being used publicly, before we did our work. Susanna wrote a True Spirit that captures the bigger scope of her work, and my goal was to not only give her permission, but even to kick her butt a little, to get out of conventional business coaching language to name that bigger thing that she is here to do. So remember, the True Spirit of your Life, or your Life’s Work, is not your elevator speech. This is not necessarily your sound bite or your public language. It’s language that captures the spiritual truth about what you are here to do in this lifetime. And that’s one of the things that makes my approach to message work different is that I actually make this distinction between your foundational language, the language you write to bring yourself into focus, and your public language. Because what I’ve found is, that if you don’t separate the two, you actually end up in the dilemma that Susanna was in, that in trying to come up with marketing language, you risk leaving out the most important part of your story! The True Spirit of Susanna’s Work So, this is what Susanna developed as the big picture True Spirit of her Work: The True Spirit of my work is to bring a sense of hope, love, respect and joy to Gaia, the world, by reweaving humanity back into the fabric of nature and the wildness of the more than human world. Recovering our innately indigenous way of being in relationship with life and allowing that to find creative, new expression in our contemporary time. Calling forth the feminine and masculine polarities and uniting them in sacred marriage with each other in all manners of contacts.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Fostering an evolutionary perspective that inspires humanity to see how life is wanting to evolve itself to the particular calling of each person. Restoring the sacred to the practice of business so we can come into right relationship with the sacred cycle of giving and receiving and co-creating a new, life-affirming economy based on love. Also, that humanity can successfully navigate the perilous initiation it’s struggling with and cross the threshold into adulthood as a species, allowing us to come into right relationship with the myriad complex, interweaving threads of life, because it’s become broken and tangled. Through this, reweave our precious world at this time in a great journey. So, I invite you to pause for a moment and take in what Susanna is saying. I want you to imagine the kind of courage it takes to actually say something like this and put it in writing and make it available, if not to the whole world, to me and to the other people in the group she was in, and to actually have the courage to say, “This is what I stand for.” Particularly when you’ve been getting message after message saying, “Nobody cares about that, nobody wants to hear that, that’s not marketable.” People just want to hear how to put up their websites, right? In this language, you start to hear who Susanna is and what she’s here to stand for, and you start to hear what really makes her not just a business coach, but something much, much more. The Power of Claiming the Truer Message Here’s what Susanna said about what happened for her as a result of putting this True Spirit together. I felt an enormous sense of relief. First of all, it was actually there, I had a message. I hadn’t killed it off. I felt a kind of a sense of astonishment that it felt really big, and here’s the interesting thing. It felt much more right, much more of a fit than the smaller things I have been tossing around in the business coaching. I stepped into the rightness of what I’m here to do. It’s funny how the smaller things I said I did in my business coaching, I’d get all freaked out and question myself: “Really, how will you do that?” This is so much bigger but I feel like, “Oh, yes, of course, I can do that.” You might think that claiming something this big would scare the crap out of you, and yet Susanna felt an ease with it that she didn’t have when she was trying to be someone she wasn’t.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Freeing Up the Writing Flow Once we developed this True Spirit, and began translating this into the public language (elevator speech, web copy, free report, etc.), a number of things began to shift for Susanna. Here’s how she describes it: First thing I did was I started writing. I wrote a beautiful website giveaway on Sacred Selling and then I wrote the copy for my website. Then I started publishing a newsletter and actually really enjoying it. I started getting these comments from people, outstanding comments like, “Susanna, this is the most beautiful, touching, inspiring and motivating thing I’ve ever read.” I couldn’t believe it. Then I started speaking. The first thing I spoke of was Sacred Selling and I wove in all that stuff about the sacred in business and the right relationship and reciprocity. People loved it and what I discovered was, you know what, that while there is truth to the fact that people want to be told what to do, more than that, people want to be inspired. What I learned through freeing up my language, I learned how to inspire. I remember as Susanna went through the training, I keep niggling at her to keep bringing in this big picture stuff, to keep tying the practical stuff she was writing about back to the bigger scope and meaning, because that’s what makes her program different from any other selling class. Susanna says: Now, I can really hold a much bigger container and create the much bigger picture around sacred in business, both from a paradigm shift and also like practical. I take them to both end and fuse them together. Part of what we see in Susanna is this courage to step out with a bigger message, with these themes of restoring the sacred to business and being in business while being in right relationship. The willingness to do all the work to present yourself and your ideas grows when you are madly in love with what you’re offering.

The willingness to do all the work to present yourself and your ideas grows when you are madly in love with what you’re offering. A New Relationship with Clients Susanna also noticed a difference in the way new clients would come to her: Some of the early clients I got, I could help them, but it was kind of like having a job like, “Okay, what do you need help with?” What I find now is the clients who come to me, they love my energy and they love it because I’m expressing it. I’m no longer like a cardboard cutout. You know, the cardboard cutout that looks good and looks shiny, but isn’t actually a full three-dimensional person.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Now I’m getting clients that really resonate with my message, and I’m loving them. I’m just loving them. One of my clients said to me, “You’re my person. I’ve been around different experts but I want to work with you for the long haul.” How cool is that? You see, being in business is not just about getting clients. It’s really getting those clients who respond to us on such a deep level that there is a deeper commitment to working with us because of what we have the courage to bring forward. Developing the Capacity to Write and Speak More Easily for the Long Haul Susanna: In addition to all of the beautiful words that I created and language that came forth in me in working with you, I now have the capacity to just generate as much of that as I want. As I continue to evolve and my business continues to evolve, that will come out more and more. You haven’t just handed me a pile of fish, you’ve taught me how to fish. Now, I can do that forever. I’m deeply grateful for you and your genius and the fact that you said yes to it, and I love you. Don’t you hate it when you hear business and marketing experts say that people don’t want to learn how to fish? My goal isn’t just to say to someone, “here’s some good language. Go and use it.” Most of my clients are these wild spirits who are constantly evolving so I want you to actually better understand how words go together. I want you to have the capacity to keep evolving and keep developing new language.

Why Copywriting Skills (or Even a Copywriter) May Not Solve Your Communication Challenge If you’ve been struggling with your communication, you might have had the thought, “Oh, I need a copywriter.” The thing that I’ve witnessed is that copywriting generally teaches you a structure, an order and a style for presenting what you have to say. Most copywriting training does not teach you how to really go deep and get to the essence of what it is you’re here to say. They don’t help you personally figure out what it is you are here to say. Copywriting is really all about what you do once you know what you have to say, copy writing helps you give what you say more style and more flair. To be clear, the art of copywriting is a great skill for a business owner to have, and there are times it makes a lot of sense to bring someone on to help you with your copy, but it doesn’t help you figure out what is my story? What is my message?


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE The Second Ingredient: Putting Words to What Makes You Different Once you start to recognize the value you bring to the table, then you can start to work with your language in a new way. Often we worry that we’ll be seen as “just another ___”, another coach, another body worker, another business consultant. But, when we trust in the substance of what we bring to the table, and take the time and discipline to work with our language, then it’s not difficult to make the distinctive perspective we bring to the table more immediately visible. We start to unearth what I call signature language.

When we trust in the substance of what we bring to the table, and take the time and discipline to work with our language, then it’s not difficult to make the distinctive perspective we bring to the table more immediately visible.

Connie’s Story: Joyous Family Connie Allen works as a family coach, and she has this amazing perspective on how parents can be not only be more effective with their kids, but can also build a closer, more joyful, more loving connection with their children that allows them to have more impact. Connie came to me early on in the stage of going out in the world as a coach. She was pretty new to having her own business. When Connie began, she described herself as having no idea what to say or how to describe what made her different. She felt that when people would talk about elevator speeches or branding, she thought, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Struggling With What to Say Before Connie started working with me, she felt like she didn’t fit. The parents she spoke with didn’t necessarily get what she had to share, especially since some of the information she had to share was challenging to some parents’ beliefs about how to be a good parent. It’s that feeling of “I know there’s something to what I have to offer, I know there’s some value there but I cannot put it into words so that people go, ‘Wow or that’s amazing’ or ‘that’s what I want.’” This is especially true if some of what you have to say is potentially challenging or controversial. Connie had a real concern about, “How do I say stuff without making people angry, pissing them off, driving them away?”


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Connie had been a public school teacher. She had her experience being a mom and working in a school system in various capacities, including as a counselor. She just had no way to talk about her work that she could coherently express. Connie was struggling with the question: What’s the heart? What’s the essence of what it is am I wanting to communicate? The True Spirit of Connie’s Work What we discovered as Connie and I began our work together is that the essence of her work was helping people to have the skills to create powerful, empowering connections with their children. She wanted to answer the question of how you create a connection with a child that really empowers them and helps them bring their best forward. And we captured that in the True Spirit of her Work. The True Spirit of my Work is to nurture in kids An ongoing discovery of their own natural brilliance, moment after moment, relishing their own inner beauty and ability to be IN LIFE, comfortable in their own skin and open and available to life and to others, so that the world becomes a more loving place where more people show up fully for those they love the most and freely contribute their gifts and joys. Building on the True Spirit of Your Work Once people have that True Spirit of their Work, one of the next things we do together is develop what I call their True Wisdom. The True Wisdom is your answer to how you deliver on the promise of your True Spirit. So for Connie, it’s being able to answer the question, “Connie, if you’re telling me you can help me have this amazing connection with my child that will empower them, how the heck do I do that?” Sometimes, this is taught out there in the world as signature system, but I tend to look at it from this a deeper perspective. It’s not just steps, it’s not a simplistic formula, you really want to be able to capture the full scope of what your life has taught you makes the outcome you promise possible.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Connie’s first step was to just brain dump all this information. When we put together the structure, the map of your key ideas and concepts this way, you aren’t just parroting back what you learned in a class somewhere. For Connie, that meant looking at “What was my experience as a mom? What was my experience as a teacher? What were those things that I was doing?” For Connie, what was new was allowing this structure to come from within. She needed to listen deeply to herself and bring forward what is it that she sees are the essential components to creating this amazing relationship with your amazing child. Connie loved being able to dump a whole bunch of stuff in front of me and then I could give her feedback and say, “Oh, here’s a really rich piece. Here’s what’s emerging,” so that she didn’t actually have to do all of that by herself. In the feedback process, when I would mirror back to her what I had heard her say and she would say, “Yeah, that’s what I was saying.” Or ask, “Wow, that’s amazing? Did I say that?” She did have a moment of panic of, “Okay, now I’ve got pages and pages. What do I do?” She knew she had to winnow it down. What I’ve seen is that if you don’t get too freaked out by the messiness of dumping everything out, and you look at it with curiosity, some kind of structure does seem to emerge, and this way, rather than forcing yourself into steps, allows something richer to emerge. Connie said: It just seemed like it came from within me in a way that I had not expected. Connie’s Seven Essential Ingredients Would you like to hear what Connie came up with? This is a great way to see what this structure can look like. So remember that the outcome Connie promises is to help people build an amazing, empowering connection and relationship with their child. And here’s what she realized she knows will help people to have that; 1. Focus on nurturing your emotional connection with your child. 2. Focus on yourself first. Most of the time, parents are focusing on their child. There’s a lot to be discovered by exploring yourself and who you bring to the relationship. 3. Follow your own inner guidance and feelings. This gets people out of their belief systems and their fears, and they start listening more deeply to themselves.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE 4. Recognize, appreciate and trust your child. 5. Set effective boundaries, limits and structure for your child and for yourself. (Connie’s work isn’t just about being fluffy and permissive, she really is now able to bring this complexity to her work of focusing on connection and trusting and respecting your child, and yet not forgetting about the importance of boundaries and structure.) 6. Create win-win agreements with your child. After you’ve done all these other things, you’ve really got a foundation for creating win-win agreements. 7. Say yes to your child. (I probably would even add to yourself, in as many ways as you can. With this structure, Connie can really feel the substance and specificity of what she has to offer. She can also now say in simple, clear langauge what makes her different! And she now has the foundation to create new programs and offers. Creating Programs Using your True Wisdom Connie described it this way: Having these ingredients is essential, they’re foundational to everything I do so any time I’m creating something, I always incorporate some, maybe not all of them, but some of them. I’ve been able to create everything from $5,000 private coaching programs to really easily, affordable programs for parents that go deep. Shortly after finishing the message development process with me, Connie put together a training based on the seven concepts, and was able to just fill three or four nice-sized groups of parents. She’s created low-cost, video-based programs for people. She’s created comprehensive trainings and she’s created high-end private programs, all of which are based on those seven ingredients. New Confidence in What You Offer Internally, what changed for Connie was finding a new commitment and passion for taking her work out in the world. As she described it: I have a new love and commitment and appreciation of what I’m here to share, and real confidence about how important it is, and fearlessness to speak what I know to be true. It’s just been huge, to be willing to have the unique perspective, because all of this is my stuff. It’s given me courage. To believe in what I’m doing, to keep putting it out there because I love it and people get great results.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Getting Across Controversial Material Another technique I work with is how to address misconceptions about what you do. Sometimes we’re afraid or frustrated when we perceive that the general public doesn’t understand what we do, or misunderstands the issue we work with. But actually, when the public has misconceptions, it can be a great platform for showcasing what you know and what you believe. Connie and I worked on how to address misconceptions about parenting head on, but in a way that was still diplomatic, so she could make the case of why people should work with her. One of the misconception messages we put together went like this: You may believe your child having tantrums and emotional upsets is normal. What I found is that just because something is normal, it doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Connie started to realize it was actually to her advantage that people had misconceptions because she could craft the message like you just heard. She can go on in this case and say you don’t need to panic if your kid is having tantrums, but that you can take it as a message that something is going on that you might want to address so you can nurture that incredible relationship with your child. Another misconception message we developed went like this: People come to me saying they wish they could get their child to behave. When I talk with them further, what emerges is that they really want to enjoy parenting and profoundly yearn to see their child grow and flourish. What I do is teach a way to find the joy with your child and to empower her to grow on her own without having to work so hard. You relax and have a lot more fun. You can hear how that creates the perfect opportunity for Connie to then go on and speak more about her distinctive approach to parenting coaching. Staying in the Game What Connie concluded about the message development was this: I could not have accomplished any of the things I’ve accomplished in my business without the message work I did with you. I don’t know if I would still be doing my business because without this I might have given up. This is the foundation on which everything else that I do is based. It’s huge, it’s huge, Isabel. The bones of your business are the key concepts and ideas you have to share, and the fresh, original language you use to share them.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Why Branding May Not Solve Your Communication Challenge In the midst of your communication challenge, you might have also had the thought, “Maybe I need to brand myself? If I define my brand, then I’ll be able to communicate what I do.” Branding is tricky, because it’s a word that’s used to describe a number of processes, from defining your core values, to crafting tag lines, to choosing colors and visuals to communicate what you stand for. Here’s what I think. A lot of people who offer branding focus on the outer expression of what you are here to do: qualities, colors, visuals, language. But what I’ve found is that until you have the language to describe with great clarity and specificity what your audience gets to feel and experience as a result of your presence in the world, any external expression of who you are risks being off the mark, or too vague to help you communicate. Branding in a way can be like a beautiful coat. And I am not sure it’s useful to put on a beautiful coat if the underlying clarity about what you have to offer hasn’t been worked out yet. I had a client who invested a substantial amount of money in doing a branding process. The key work they had come up with for her was “sparkle.” So her colors and language all needed to evoke that sense of sparkle. That’s fine, but you know what, as a result of the branding work, she still couldn’t say clearly what she offered and why it mattered.

The Third Ingredient: Find the One Theme to Rule Them All Too many of us come to the table with so many different things we care about and we’re passionate about, and that we want for others. So, we want to talk about empowerment, and spiritual connection, and living your true life, and self-expression, and fulfillment. And while all of those might truly be part of what you bring to the table, as long as you’re trying to hold onto five or six or seven themes, it’s really hard to communicate. But when you find that central clarity that holds everything in your business together, you start to make sense to our audience, and you are able to sustainably grow that business.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Jeannie’s Story: Inner Confidence Coaching Jeannie Campanelli is the Inner Confidence Coach. Jeannie coaches naturally giving people who lose their connection to themselves by focusing on others. She helps these people to find that sense of wholeness, aliveness, and serenity that comes from deeply knowing themselves, fully accepting the lightness and darkness of being human. living truly from essence, which is what inner confidence is all about. Jeannie came to me for help in 2007, and she’s a great example of how doing foundational message work can play out in your business over time. When Jeannie first came to me, she was describing herself as a life coach. Jeannie had a webpage and she was actually getting traffic from her webpage, and she was getting prospective clients from the webpage. But Jeannie herself wasn’t satisfied. She said: I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t like the website. She’d been coaching for maybe five or six years and she really wanted to increase her client load. The True Spirit of Jeannie’s Work The first thing we did was define the True Spirit of her Work. In this process, Jeannie got in alignment with why she was here. She started to see the overarching theme of all the work she’s done in her lifetime, and she came up with a theme that was so true to her that it has been guiding her over the last six years in her business. She has this very different feeling about what it means to go out in the world and tell people what she does. In a funny way, Jeannie developed a new sense of inner confidence that really translated into some substantial growth in her business. Jeannie had been a teacher, a consultant, a university lecturer. She said: As a therapist, as a lecturer, consulting, working with teachers and parents, underneath, it was always about self-esteem. I hadn’t realized that before we worked together, not so clearly. So this is the True Spirit statement Jeannie put together: The true spirit of my work is to spark the hearts of individuals to experience the inner confidence; the sense of wholeness, vitality, and serenity that comes from deeply knowing oneself while accepting the lightness and darkness of being human, and living freely by standing in one’s truth.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE More Focus Means Less Stress and More Clients What Jeannie said happened for her as this new language came into focus was this: It was a release in a sense that getting really clear takes away a lot of stress. It became very easy for me to write my blog or send out a newsletter, come up with titles, to come up with a program. Everything’s centered around that focus. I felt really good about it. It just felt so clear that from that time on. Any time I had to fill out anything on the web, sending bios out, whatever. Because my message was so clear, I found that when clients phoned me, they had already hired me from seeing everything that I so clearly put out there. They knew what I was about. I really didn’t have the traditional consultation that people do to attract that client. I just didn’t have that. I really got my ideal clients. They knew who they were, and they were ready. I never had to talk them into it. They felt the already knew me and knew what I was about. That continues to this day, actually. That’s a huge thing for anyone who is a coach or a consultant. We often have people call us who want to find out if we can help them. How great is it when people who call you have already decided before they get on the phone with you that they want what you offer? She went on to say: Also, because it was so much my work, my own inner work, it was endlessly easy for me to relate to the clients, but also to write about- to come up with topics and so on. I knew this personally, so I could really put myself out there. I love what Jeannie shares here because her insight into self-esteem and inner confidence isn’t just something she was trained in or taught by somebody else, but was something that came so deeply from her own personal journey. One of the interesting things that Jeannie said is that once she got so clear on what her True Spirit was: It wouldn’t be real for me to not to go forward with it. I couldn’t not put it out there once I got that clarity. The truth is that until something comes fully into focus, you can feel lost and confused, it can be an intense place to be and it can make a huge difference to feel like someone’s holding your hand and guiding you. Saying “yes, yes, yes, you’ve got something.” So much of writing is about clear thinking and mental clarity. Usually, when we struggle with the writing, most of the time it’s not because we don’t know how to write. It’s because we aren’t clear what the theme and what the story is that wants to come through.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Usually, when we struggle with the writing, most of the time it’s not because we don’t know how to write. It’s because we aren’t clear what the theme and what the story is that wants to come through. Notice how much more specific Jeannie’s story got. Instead of saying, “I’m a life coach, and I’m going to help you live a better life,” or whatever those common phrases are that we hear, she can now say “I’m here to help people who lose connection to themselves by focusing on others live their own life and have that sense of wholeness, aliveness, and serenity that comes from deeply knowing themselves, and fully accepting the lightness and darkness of being human.” Jeannie’s True Wisdom It’s often not enough to go out in the world and say, “I help you have better self-esteem,” it doesn’t move people or inspire them until you get more specific. In the second stage of our work, Jeannie created what I call her True Wisdom. She developed six components that allow someone to have inner confidence. The six components that she articulated are: • • • • • •

Self-claiming Self-knowing Self-connectedness Self-embracing Relating from self Contributing from self

Notice that Jeannie doesn’t lump all these elements into one mushy ball. These are really different threads that play into inner confidence. And as we heard with Connie, Jeannie easily created a program based on this. She’s created an e-book based on this. She’s created workshops and retreats based on this content. She’s even considering doing a live event using this as the foundation. Over the years, she’s altered it slightly she continues to do more and more training on this idea of inner confidence. Using Your One Theme to Guide Your Continuing Education One of the interesting things that Jeannie has done is that she has used her True Spirit to guide her choice of training. She is continuously investing in learning new tools to go deeper and deeper into inner confidence, to be more able to help others develop this.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE That’s great because coaches can sometimes over-invest in training, or invest inappropriately in training. I love that Jeannie isn’t trying to become something different, but just continuously asks herself, “How can I do an even better job of delivering what I promise in my true spirit? How can I go deeper? How can I do a better job at this?” You can hear in most of the stories I am sharing here that the True Spirit Statements are pretty big. They’re ambitious. They describe the bigger things that we want for other people, and for ourselves. Sometimes clients will say to me, “Well gosh. I don’t know if I’m really up to the task. I don’t know if I can do that.” But what Jeannie really demonstrates is that she both knew that she was already doing this, she could do it, but she also set the bar for herself to continuously improve her toolkit and her skills for accomplishing this in her work. Sustainable Business Growth What were some of the nitty gritty results of Jeannie’s new clarity and new language? We’ve already talked about how she started attracting the perfect clients that she adores working with, that they come to her already knowing they want to work with her. Jeannie also developed all kinds of programs and products using the structure of her True Wisdom. And writing became so much easier for her. She said: I kept my binder. I still do, actually keep my binder with all my information that I created with you on my desk. But how did it affect the bottom line? When Jeannie came to work with me, she said she hoped to increase her client load. Within a year of doing this work, she more or less doubled her client load, increasing her income by more than 40%. At first, Jeannie admitted she was kind of surprised that it didn’t happen faster. She had that impatience of, okay, I’ve done all this work, where are the clients? But over the course of the year, she saw steady growth, growth that she has maintained. And of course, doubling your client load within a year, and maintaining that, is a pretty impressive shift.

Why Niche-ing May Not Solve Your Communication Challenge You may be thinking, “if only I could find my niche, then I could explain what I do?”


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Finding your niche is a big theme in small business marketing and small business development. But naming a niche may not be enough to help you communicate with the skills and grace you’ve heard in some of the stories I’ve shared. To be clear, I’m not saying don’t figure out your niche. But, I want you to understand what naming a niche will or won’t do for you. Someone who has approached me a while back about working with me, said to me, “Oh, I don’t need to work with you. I found my niche.” It was one of those moments where I went, “Well, I’m so happy you found your niche, but I’m not sure we’re actually talking about the same thing.” Briefly, niche is defined different ways. It’s certainly often defined as the audience you’re reaching out to, or the specialty that you offer. It’s how you define the very specific territory where your work lives that distinguishes you from other people. The problem I find is that niche is often about defining yourself externally. Defining yourself in terms of what others are doing. Defining yourself in terms of what is commonly known and understood. There is a time and a place to do that, but what I find is, it’s very hard to define what makes you different in terms of who you work with or what you offer if there isn’t first that deep internal sense of what it is you’re here to offer and language to describe that.

The Fourth Ingredient: Get Specific About What Your Words Really Mean When we write and speak about what we do, especially if what we do is personal or spiritual, it’s easy to fall into a kind of short hand, or to use jargon. We use key phrases and terms, and we don’t always challenge ourselves to define what those terms mean. When we’re vague about what we offer, what we mean by the language we choose, it’s no surprise that our audience feels vague, and even confused, about the story we are trying to tell. One of the great challenges when you do any kind of transformational work is that there isn’t an easy vocabulary to describe things like the true self or the authentic self, or living your best life, or getting from here to the next level. There are these phrases we use over and over again. Sometimes, they get so overused that they cease to have meaning. What you can hear in all of the stories, including the story with Deirdre, is that if we don’t let ourselves off the hook, and when we dig a little deeper into what we mean by the words we use, that’s sometimes how we find the language that makes this intangible thing that we do come alive.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Deirdre’s Story: InMotion Coaching and Consulting Deirdre Danahar is the founder or In Motion Coaching and Consulting. Deirdre has developed herself as a specialist in helping busy professionals go from chaos to calm by getting more of the right things done. What’s really emerging now is Deirdre’s message that it’s not enough for busy, ambitious professionals to make a living if they’re not also making time for what Deirdre calls the real material of their lives. When Deirdre came to me around 2011, she was positioning herself more or less as a life coach. She loved to talk to people about the importance of knowing their priorities and value. It was fine and it was good, but in her heart she could see that it wasn’t getting the response that she wanted. Here’s how Deirdre described the situation: I have a pretty in-depth professional history in social services and public health, and providing training and technical assistance. I’ve done that with a variety of audiences in a variety of geographic settings. In a tenyear period, I received my coaching training, and I had gone from living in two major cities, one being in New Orleans and the next one to Boston, to finally resettling with my husband in Jackson, Mississippi where we currently reside. I landed, after this long journey, in a fairly traditional and conservative community. Here I am, this outlier, outsider individual, saying, “Hi, I’m your life coach!” It wasn’t going to work. For me, intrinsically, as a human being, it’s been very important to be perceived as being polished and professional, if for no other reason than that I’m that kid you remember from school that was kind of brainy and had a bunch of quirks. I think if I had stayed in Boston or some other environment where the work I want to bring to forth to the world would have been more readily acceptable, I wouldn’t perhaps have pushed myself to say, “you’ve got to find some language that is richer and better and more coherent.” So, Deirdre wanted to be perceived as polished, professional, and credible while still being able to talk about things that were maybe a little off the beaten path. Finding a way to really bridge both the more quirky aspects and the more straight-laced aspects of what she brought to the table through her professional writing was a challenge. To complicate things, Deirdre is dyslexic, so working with language in and of itself was hard for her.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE On top of all that, Deirdre was uncomfortable with marketing. One of Deirdre’s guiding values is modesty. And in her head, she felt like it would be immodest if you were marketing. Even though part of her knew that’s not the case. The way she described it was: Hard-core marketing makes me cringe. Deirdre was so clear that she never ever could be somebody who did really high-pressure hoopla, crazy hardcore hard sales marketing, but she knew she had to step up the energy that she brought into inviting people to experience her work. Why Does This Have to Take So Long? Deirdre admitted that when she came to me, she was concerned about the amount of time it would take to go through the full message development process that I offer in my small group communication. Here’s what she described as the “whine” in her head: I just want this done. I’ve been trying to build this business pretty darn actively for eight years. Where is the magic fairy wand? But she went on to say: Once I got past the whine, I said, all right, if I’m really serious about this, then it is worth spending six months, slowly but steadily, doing this. You know darn well, Deirdre, that when you had dedicated yourself to stuff like this in the past, it has paid off. Are you willing to invest the time? Once I decided I was willing to invest the time, I was then willing to invest the money, which felt, at that time, considerable, in part because of all of the moves that my husband and I had made. I had to ask myself, “Am I really willing to roll up the sleeves, break out the pencil and the eraser, and sit down and do the work that might feel hard at times?” Digging Deeper into What You Mean We heard in Susanna’s story that she was concerned she might dig deep and find out there was nothing in her to be expressed. Deirdre’s concern was that she might do all this digging and end up sounding just like everybody else. I mentioned earlier that Deirdre is dyslexic. She found that what made a huge difference for her was receiving a lot of direct feedback on her writing as she went along. Everything from, “I’m not sure that that is actually a sentence,” to “I really liked the language that you’re pulling out here, the metaphors that you’re playing with.”


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE She found it freeing to be able to throw a bunch of stuff out there, and then get that feedback. The way she described it was: Most trainings, they give you the formula and you fill out the formula. That’s it. There’s no room to just download what’s there. When she came to me, Deirdre already knew her work had a lot to do with priorities and value. And my challenge to her was to ask “What does that really mean?” I also asked the question, “Why is that important? Why is it important people know what their priorities are? “ As a result of the exploration we did, Deirdre was able to say the following, spontaneously, without any notes or preparation: What I’ve come to discover, and this continues to unfold for me the deeper I go into this work, is that our priorities are the symptoms of what’s going on in our life. We don’t necessarily take time to lean consistently into the reasons we do what we do. This reason is what I would call your big why. It’s the reason you get out of bed in the morning beyond the paycheck. It’s got to be clear enough and strong enough and personal enough. It has to sing, so that it can become an internal true North for you so that when you’re presented with choices, you can say, “the real material of my life, the people, the experiences, the things that matter most, show up on my to-do list.” By drilling down into your own personal big why, you no longer get hooked into doing the right thing, which might be what other people want you to do, or what circumstances tell you you ought to do. Really, what in God’s honest truth do you want to do? If you’re able to then shift to this place where you’re actually getting the right thing done when you put your time and your energy and your talent and your wonderful, unique constellation of strength towards these things that are supporting the real material of your life, it gets better. Whether that happens in your personal life, or your professional life. They come together much more seamlessly. Let’s face it. We live in a time where not only are more and more people stopping and saying, “Enough. I’m not necessarily into having the big, shiny new house. I’m much more interested in being fulfilled,” The boundaries between our professional lives and the rest of our lives are increasingly blurred. It becomes exquisitely important for us to have really sophisticated skills that allow us to do well at our work without giving up our lives. So, couldn’t you just sit at her feet and listen to her speak for hours? You can hear in the words above that Deirdre has found her voice. You hear she’s not using jargon. You can hear and feel that she knows exactly what she’s wants to communicate.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE Part of what I’m always driving for when I work with clients is to give them a place where they can download a lot in a raw, messy way, so I can feed back to them what they’re saying that really matters, but also, as we just heard with Deirdre, to get them to a place where with the right questions they tap into that vein of rich, powerful concepts and ideas that they are here to share with people. You can really feel the difference between what Deirdre said above and saying, “I help you define your priorities.” You can hear how she’s gone to this whole new level of being able to express what she is here to offer. Attracting Higher Caliber Clients with Better Language What Deirdre found is that as she got more and more articulate about why priorities matters, she’s expanding her reach to a new caliber of client. She’s not just reaching individuals who work in companies, and wanted a life coach to help them balance the demands of work and personal life. With her new language, she is now attracting entrepreneurs and organizations who hear that she can help both the leaders, and the people in the organization to be more productive and more fulfilled. She is working with a rising graphic design firm in her local area. She is doing corporate level work with a very successful local company that’s got multiple restaurants underneath its umbrella. She is working with an up-and-coming young lawyer who had been in the State Attorney’s Office who has gone out on his own. She continues to create opportunities to take her work into new organizations. Testing Your New Language One of the things Deirdre did really well is that as new language started to come forward, she would test it. She would go on Facebook and try out these new phrases and notice the response. She would note how many likes she got and how many people commented. So, in the message development process, Deirdre did both the work of excavating the deep internal material that was in her, but also did this work of testing to see how her new language would land. Deirdre said she knew when people started saying, “I hadn’t thought about that. That really resonated. That was right on, perfect timing for me,” that she was starting to speak about much more potent, rich material. Again, I think for anyone here who is a coach, or who does any kind of personal guidance work, the difference between growing a business and not is being able to speak about what we do in a way that creates that emotional connection.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE The difference between growing a business and not is being able to speak about what we do in a way that creates that emotional connection. Changing How It Feels To Market You remember how we talked about how uncomfortable Deirdre was with marketing? Here’s how she describes her feelings about marketing now: It’s much more comfortable for me to market now. I really am thinking about sales or transactions as an agreement that there is something good between us. It’s my responsibility to extend the invitation. You can either choose to accept it or not. And, as a mark of how she is perceived in her conservative community, she was recently named amongst the 50 leading businesswomen in Mississippi, the only coach who has received that honor, as far as she can tell.

Now It’s Your Turn You’ve had a chance to hear four stories from real women, passionate women, who knew they had something important to offer the world, but who in different ways and for different reasons could not find the language to take that story out into the world in a way that worked. Whether it was because of internal judgment about what was acceptable to share, whether it was having the more generic language but not the really specific language, whether it was simply not knowing how to manage the scope or complexity of all the different things they bring to the table. A lot of the stories we heard today really emphasized this idea of needing to be at a place where you really are willing to roll up your sleeves and do some hard work. Being willing to invest time and energy in finding language to bring the gorgeous work that you offer forward. All of the women whose stories you heard invested considerable time, considerable money, considerable energy to get to the kind of potent language you heard them share. Was it worth it? You heard in their own words what they took away from the process – from inner confidence, conviction to keep going, to more ease getting new clients, more ease writing, more ease developing new offers, and ultimately more income.


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HOW TO TRANSLATE YOUR LIFE WISDOM INTO FRESH, AUTHENTIC LANGUAGE AND MARKETABLE VALUE How I Can Help If you are tired of struggling to find the right words, I’d love to help. Together we will unfold your story, and develop the signature language and vocabulary that makes the value you offer abundantly clear to the world. If that’s the kind of support you have been hungering for, you have the option of: • Working with me in my intimate Put the Mojo in Your Message done-with-you communication training. New groups start in February and October. • Working with me one-on-one to do all or part of the message development process at your own pace. • Working through my home-study program: How to Say What You Do, When What You Do is Deep, Powerful, and Hard to Describe. An easy first step to figure out how I might help move you forward is an Online Message Review. For just $97, I’ll do an audit of several of your web pages, or other business writing, and give you comprehensive feedback on what you are saying that works and what can be improved. I will also share my intuitive hit about what might be keeping you from being fully on message. Order your Online Message Review here: http://soundbiteshaman.com/online-message-review My deepest wish is for you to be out there expressing yourself with the full force and power of your being, knowing that you are not holding back on what you are here to say. I want YOUR voice, YOUR message to ring clear and true, without compromise, without cliche, without clutter. If you’re raring to go, our next step would be to schedule a time to speak together about where you are in your business, where you want to go, and how I can help. Go here to fill in the form, and we’ll take it from there: http://soundbiteshaman.com/hire-me If you’re not quite there yet, no worries. I’ll continue to share more inspiring stories and useful tips to help you step into your Expressive Power and share your voice with the world.


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