I am not new to this world.

I enrolled in a high-ticket mastermind in 2009, was hired as the supporting coach for my coach’s next group in the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. And I offered my own mastermind group in 2010, though at $8,000 for the year, it was not exactly in the league of the going rates of $25,000, $40,000 a year or more.

When I first stepped into this world of high-end offers, and high-ticket masterminds, it was a giddy experience. I had plugged away for 11 years and built a nice, solid private practice including private clients and small group trainings. I had developed rock solid content and an original approach to messaging that was a welcome antidote to the traditional marketing messaging. I knew what I was offering, but I had no idea how to jump from $75,000 and into six figures (funny now, it seems like such a small step).

Like the good student I was, I bought into the high-end mastermind mystique. Staying at luxury hotels for our in-person retreats. Bonding with the other group members as we dreamed bigger and bigger about who we could be and what we could create. Expanding my sense of possibility. I watched my group mentor sell over a million from the stage in one afternoon at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

I imagined becoming like the women in this world. Thin and beautifully groomed. Shining on stage. Sharing their voices. Wanting people to be look up to me. Imagining how good it would feel if more people invested in me at those high levels.

I went full in. I raised the price of my introductory course, and gave everyone a short window to buy at the old price, telling them it was the last one I would be offering. I offered a six-month mastermind to my favorite private clients. I turned my four-week introductory course into an information product (remember those?) and launched that. I planned a live three-day event where I proudly offered my $8,000 mastermind.

I did end breaking six figures ($137,000 to be exact).

Some of what I did was hugely successful. But a lot of it wasn’t.

I made the most I had ever made from my introductory course, but the info product bombed, selling only five copies. I got six people for my six-month mastermind, but I struggled to sell spots in my live event, and ended up with nine people, including the people I’d comped from my six-month group and others who came in on a bring-a-friend ticket. We were a tiny pod in the huge ballroom I had rented.

I would have lost my shirt except I had the good fortune of having signed a contract with the hotel where I paid per person, with no minimum, instead of a flat fee for the conference room and for the meals they provided.

That fall, I was calling regularly to check my credit card balances to see if I had enough to pay for things as small as my airport shuttle.

But the live event helped me get five people into my year-long mastermind group, and I was okay.

I spent 2009 and some of 2010 traveling once a month or more, barely spending time with my eight-year old son. I was spending big on event tickets, and travel and lodging, and buying info products to help me learn to sell from the stage or charge what I was worth. I just knew that everything I spent would come back to me in greater revenue and greater success.

Many of the folks in the mastermind I was a member of ended the year disappointed, never having gotten clear enough on what they were offering to put together new programs of their own.

In January of 2010, the members of the mastermind I was the support coach for revolted and all but the two who had paid in full quit.

I loved the folks in my own mastermind group, and offered them my insights on how they could position themselves and what they could offer. What their powerful message could be. But somehow they weren’t able to get off the ground and launch their own offers and make the kind of better money I had implied they would.

I was exhausted and financially stretched. Despite having nearly doubled by income, I had tanked my profitability with all this optimistic spending on products and programs I didn’t even have the bandwidth to implement well.

Not only that, I had made most of my money with offers I didn’t want to continue offering. I didn’t have a sustainable business model. Fortunately, I love creating programs, offered a few new ones, and finally came back to the training I’d been offering before that was at the heart of my work.

By mid-2010, the bubble had burst for me.

I realized this world of high-ticket offer was a fairyland.

An illusory world where everything spins faster and faster and everyone reassures themselves and each other that it’s totally normal to charge $1000 an hour, if you can get it. That you’re doing people a favor by inviting them to take on credit card debt or take a mortgage on their homes in order to seize the opportunity to be part of the dazzling group you are assembling and work with you as their mentor. To live in a world where you don’t ask “what is the track record of this program?” or “what percent of people in your program get that result?”

Where skepticism is a sign of having a poor mindset or poverty mentality.

Where you hear glowing testimonials from the people who’ve succeeded, but you don’t ever get to hear from those who didn’t. Or know the proportions of each.

Where you don’t test and refine your programs, you build them while you offer them and hope they work out.

Where you have to keep up appearances because part of what you are selling is the fantasy of how great your life is.

It finally dawned on me that this wasn’t a world that reflected my values.

Those beautiful ladies on stage? They weren’t my role models. I heard more and more stories about the ugliness behind the pretty pictures. The failures. The anger. The burnout. This was no longer what I aspired to be.

I started to look for mentors who sold with less ick. Who valued creativity and originality and treated those who didn’t invest in their high-end programs with as much care and respect as those who did. Business owners who talked about humility, something I didn’t see much of in that high-ticket world. Who talked about the risk of charging more and not finding the clients you needed to fill your practice.

I slowed down.

I let go of trying to be a shiny lady on stage and focused instead on doing my best work in my small training and coaching groups. On doing my best work with my clients.

I had to put down so much of what I was taught in all those live events and information products so I could find my way to be in the world with integrity. So I could feel good about the work I did and about how I engaged with people before, during, or after they bought from me.

And it’s still taken me years to let go of some of the embedded values of that world: the exhausting, relentless pursuit of personal wealth, the urgency to produce and the urgency pushed on potential clients to buy, the worship of who makes the most money, the demand for more and more productivity. The insistence on monetizing anything and everything at your disposal. The refusal to look at collective or community impact.

As many of you know, life also gave me a lot of other things to focus on instead: my mom’s health, my son’s health, my own health. So I had a lot of time to reflect and almost no capacity to do much beyond serve my beloved private clients once I stopped leading groups.

I was drawn to this week’s virtual bootcamp because the promise was a new way to do a high-ticket group, one that created true connection and community. That was something I could get behind.

During the virtual bootcamp, I worked with one of the volunteer coaches on the pitch for a potential high-ticket program I might offer. I shared “I am starting an intimate group of fierce women coaches and consultants 45 and up, who are ready to ditch colonialist and capitalist values so they can step into being powerful, original thought leaders and share their voice with greater impact and reward.”

Guess which part of the pitch she didn’t like?

Yeah, she said I lost her at the “ditching of colonialist and capitalist values” and that I should just take that out.

But the truth is THAT is what I think liberates us to create our True work in the world. To do our Life’s Work in a nourishing and sustainable way. To be brave enough to reject models and systems that don’t work for us and don’t reflect our values.

And it’s hard because in that world it can feel like what they are teaching is the only way to succeed.

But it’s not.

You can make money in innovative ways with integrity.

I promise you.

To be continued . . .

Your copy – the words on your web page, your emails, or your social media posts – don’t just convey information about your offer.

Nope.

Those words are telling the world:

• Where you feel strong and where you feel weak
• How confident you are about what you bring to the table
• What brings you alive
• What you believe
• What you value
• Where you are confused
• What you are ready to own and claim about your work
• and where you are trying to people-please or fit in

Any piece of writing you put in the world potentially reveals what you are most passionate about and where doubt or fear may be clouding your communication.

The words, all together, convey energy. They convey your spirit.

Most copy writing training focuses on things like how juicy your headlines are, or if you can write “magic bullets”, or having good calls to action, and so on. Those are useful but they don’t really cut to the heart of your presence out in the world.

If your copy isn’t connecting with your audience the way you would like, there may be something off in your presence, in your energy, that is clouding the communication of the magic of your work.

When we look at the big picture of Trueing – of figuring out who we are at our core and designing our lives and businesses around that – we get pulled off our True by many things: confusion about our value, fear about whether the heart of who we are will be recognized and wanted, cultural pressure, and the pull to conform.

The same is true about our copy.

All those same forces can take the beautiful, fierce, and alive story we want to tell the world about what we do and clutter it up so that original energy gets clouded and lost.

That can look like:

• softening our message so it’s more palatable
• choosing a message that we think is more marketable but not really the message we want to share
• not having confidence in our message so trying to pile five or seven different messages into one piece of copy
• not recognizing which bits of what we are sharing are most potent and most alive

So what to do?

You don’t have to become an amazing copy writer overnight. Or spend six months developing and refining your message (though that is great work in the right context).

I have a quick and easy solution for you if you sense something is off in your expression in the world but you can’t quite put your finger on it.

Use my eyes and my heart and my sense of all things True.

I offer an Online Message Review where I’ll take your writing and do a deep and thorough analysis of what is working and what feels off.

This won’t be your typical copy writing feedback. It will focus on the power and clarity of your and your energy coming through on the page.

My goal (and my gift) is to help you see quickly what is already working, so you can do more of that. And lovingly point out where you might be holding back or not letting the full force of the power of your being out, so you can correct that.

My goal is to give you input that lets you quickly adjust your copy so more of you comes out on the page, and more of your right people can feel your spirit, and respond accordingly.

It’s not a copy course where you have to go through lessons, and complete assignments. It’s faster and easier than that.

The Online Message Review is just $300.

Consider it a loving kick in the pants and call to action for you to show up bigger and brighter and bolder than you are now.

You’ll get a detailed written report, a video summary of what I saw, and a 15-minute Zoom with me to ask any questions about both of those.

https://isabelparlett.com/online-message-review

If your online presence isn’t feeling like you, if it’s not showing the world all of you are, get your Online Message Review today and get on track to your bigger expression in the world.

Mark Silver called me last fall to ask for my help in solving a challenge with his messaging.

Now, if you don’t know him, Mark has a wonderful business that teaches heart-centered entrepreneurs kind and loving ways to work with themselves and to market to their clients. His work combines his training as a Sufi healer with his knowledge about building simple but effective systems to help businesses grow.

His company, Heart of Business, is well-established (multiple six-figures), and, as I like to joke, when it comes to communication, Mark is nearly as smart as I am! So why would he need my help with his messaging?

When you’re newer in business, you feel as if everything will be great once you are making regular money. But the truth is, as your business grows, so does your desire to make sure that your business is truly a reflection of the biggest, deepest message you are here to share. It’s no longer a question of how to get clients, but how to get the right clients and create the opportunity to do the right work.

What Mark told me was: “After being in business for ten years, I had a solid tag line (When you want to make a difference, but need to make a profit.), but the spiritual component of what we do was hidden. People had to really look deeper to figure it out. Even though the tagline and message were taking a stand, it felt like the current language was hampering us. The shiny-ness, relevance, and impact that I wanted to have weren’t there.”

He reported that it felt like his team was working harder to get the same results each year, and that it was hard for even happy clients to talk about them clearly and spread the word. Without the clarity in his message, he felt stuck in his decision-making and strategic implementation. Without the ability to name his essential message, he couldn’t move forward with the rebranding and website overhaul he wanted and he was reluctant to bring on team to support the effort without the confidence that he could communicate what the business was all about.

Jokingly, Mark said at the beginning of our session, “I’m hoping you can solve my challenge in about five minutes.” We laughed, though the truth is, the clearer the intention my client brings to the session, the more likely they get what they want. So, I asked him to tell me he wanted to convey that wasn’t yet being said.

The bottom line was, he wanted to be more explicit about the spiritual aspect of what he offered and the potential for people to engage in business in a way that is sacred. I listened carefully and, between knowing his work from the many calls we’ve done together, and reading his beautiful book “Unveiling the Heart of Your Business,” within about ten minutes I was able to reflect back what I was hearing and say, “so basically what you’re saying is that every act of business is an act of love.” Or rather, as we clarified, not that every act of business is an act of love but that “every act of business can be an act of love.”

Bingo! Mark knew immediately that we’d hit on it. Of course, I wanted to do my due diligence and asked a bunch of questions to make sure there wasn’t something more that needed to be said. I was impressed that when I asked Mark if his message was that if you are more spiritually connected, you have a greater chance of being successful with your business, he gave me a pretty emphatic “no!” He said it was a spiritually inaccurate message, as attractive as it might be to the audience.

Mark left the call elated that we had found the words to capture his core message. About a month later, he reported that bringing his message into focus had made a huge difference.

He was in love with the message (and the tagline that came out of it), and his team was as well. Soon after our session, he had brought on a designer and got moving with his web redesign because he could finally communicate the heart of his story. He felt the clarity and crispness of his message had improved, that his blog posts were having more impact, and that he was more on point when interviewed. He felt like he was planting a flag, saying “this is what I stand for,” without needing to hide behind other capabilities.

Curious, I later asked Mark why he’d chosen to work with me, given how well connected he is, and how many talented branding/marketing/copywriting people he knows. What he told me was that “the intersection of spirit and business isn’t easy to talk about. I appreciate your complex understanding of language and how language is used. You aren’t just about coming up with phrases, but getting to what it is we are trying to say. I knew that you could help me have a spiritual message that was also grounded and practical.”

Mark introduced his new website this fall, to rave reviews and enthusiastic comments, including for his new tag line. In fact, Mark wrote about our work together and his choice of a “rule-breaking” tagline in a recent post.

If your business has hit the wall, or you just feel ready to bust loose with a bigger, bolder expression of your work in the world, a good place to start is with your core message. Clarity is a funny thing. When you can name your bigger, deeper message, you unleash powerful energy that propels you out into the world.

Every single business owner needs to be able to use written words to tell the story of what they offer and why it’s important. It doesn’t even matter so much that story is being told on a flier, on a webpage, or in a promotional email. Regardless of where those written words are showing up, telling a compelling story (not your personal rags-to-riches story, but a clear flow of ideas) is key to promoting and selling your programs, products, and services.

The biggest underlying reason I see business owners struggle with copy is that they haven’t actually worked out yet what they are trying to say. That’s why I encourage all my clients to take the time to write that basic story about what they offer, before worrying about what the program or product is, or what the details of the offer are, or where the words are going to appear.

And, once you invest the time in writing your basic story, then most of your copy is already written, you just need to add:
• Headlines and sub-heads
• Bullet points
• Offer details
• And a strong call to action

Here’s the thing, all marketing pieces, have an underlying structure. And what is really cool is that if you understand that structure, then writing your story becomes much, much easier.

So, the simple formula for creating your basic story, the formula that underlies pretty much every effective marketing piece is The Love + The Hope + The Plan. What you have to say about these three things will be fundamentally the same for most of your offers. So when you write this “story” in a way that satisfies you, you’ll be able to write copy with more fluidity and ease.

Let’s talk a bit about each of these sections:

The Love

So the Love is where you write a little bit about what you know and love about your prospective client.

This can include talking about their pain: not a whipped-up exaggerated pain that wasn’t there before. But a compassionate acknowledgment of all they may be dealing with.

If you can talk about those challenges and demonstrate that you have some understanding and intimacy of who they are and what they’re up against,you earn the right to make an offer.

This is where you’re creating connection with your audience. Tihis is where you demonstrate the Love you have for them.

The Hope

This is where you want to paint a vivid and compelling picture of how great life can be when someone takes the leap of faith and experiences the transformation you have to offer.

A very simple way to think about this is the Love is the before, and the Hope is the after. The Hope is the relieving of the challenges described in the Love.

So the Hope section will be a blend of the outcomes, solutions, and experiences your audience knows they’re looking for (even before they know you exist) with the concepts and ideas that you hold most dear. When you blend them together, it really makes your story very compelling.

If I were writing the story for my business, using this principle, I might write about practical outcomes that result from working with me, like having a successful business, getting more clients, making more money, but I would also write about the things that are meaningful to me, like connecting with the deepest message you’re here to share, and the satisfaction of knowing that you’re fulfilling what you were called here to do. I would write about both of those.

Within this section, you can go back and forth between the practical outcomes and the deeper meaning. If you had to put it in order, I often recommend you talk about the practical benefits first and then unfold in to the deeper meaning.

So, if use an example about a woman going through a divorce; it would sound like: “When you connect with and recognize your own beauty, then this is what becomes possible. You move out in to the world with more confidence. You engage in relationships from a different place. You have more courage and confidence to create new friendships or even new romantic relationships.”

The most touching, moving writing has a well-developed Hope section. Copy that feels more flat or superficial, or hype-y, tends to not have a well-developed Hope section.

The other thing that will happen is this section will go flat if you’re only focusing on the concrete, tangible outcomes, and you’re not including your deeper meaning. And then it’ll sound more like, “Oh, are you having trouble finding words and communicating what you do? Well, I can help you get more clients and make more money and it’s going to be great.”

It actually will feel disconnected. It will feel like, well, wait, we were just talking about one struggle, and now you’re talking about a solution. But there is nothing in between to help your reader shift from one to the other.

The Plan

The final part in our formula is the Plan.

In finished copy, the plan can be as simple as the next step your reader needs to take to move towards a solution of their challenge, or as complex as you walking them through your process. It’s either “here’s what you need to do next,” the call to action, or a longer description: “Let me walk you through how I help you to go from the before to the after.”

So what that will sound like is something like, “So what I do is teach you the five steps of shifting your beliefs so that you can earn more money.” Or, “What I do is guide you through the four phases of loving your life as a single woman.” Or, “What I do is take you through four steps to aligning with our deeper message and bringing that out in your business communication.”

To have credibility, you want to give it structure. I recommend you have a defined number of ingredients or elements or components. And you want to craft that phrase that says, “So what I do is…” and then you have some kind of verb. It can be “Teach you,” or “Guide you through,” or “Support you with,” and then you want the number of things, and then that last piece is about the outcome.

“What I do is teach you the five steps of shifting your beliefs on a deep level so you can earn more money. ”

So if you’re writing a longer written piece, like a web sales page, after you say that first line, like “The five steps of shifting your belief,” you would actually want to list what the five steps were, and you might actually write a paragraph or have a bullet list under each of those five steps. That would be the long version.

In a free report, you might say, “I like to guide you through the four phases of loving your life as a single woman.” In that report, you might write about each of those four phases.

In a promotional email, again, if you said “I have five steps to better business results,” you might bullet list the five steps and then have the call to action. Or you might say: “I want to teach you my five steps to better business results,” and then you might have a link to a register for a free teleclass where you actually then give all five steps and talk a little bit about each.

The great thing that you’re demonstrating is that when you know your basic story, and you’ve written it, you can use it in a longer piece, you can use it in a shorter piece, you can use parts of it. It gives you so much flexibility.

Clients just have told me over and over that once they’ve written this basic story, they are so much more clear and confident about the value that they have to offer. They are finally focused on the story they’re here to tell. They’re not trying to tell ten different stories.

My clients use this basic story as a reference piece in their library so that whenever they have to write a new marketing piece, they go back to this and they pull from it. They spend much less time writing than they did before when they had to write everything from scratch.

An Action You Can Take Now

Set a timer for five minutes. Quickly brain dump some ideas and bullet points for each of the three sections above. Great! You now have a clearer idea of what you already know to say, and a sense of where there are gaps or holes you need to fill in.

This is Lesson Three in a series of six posts that preview just some of the content we’ll be working on in the Words on Fire Transformative Message Development training. 

In our previous lesson, we talked about getting someone’s attention using the “hey you” principle. But it’s equally important to know what to say after you’ve gotten someone’s attention to move them from being interested to actually saying yes to working with you.

A lot of people have been told by well meaning marketing people “No one cares about your process.” But it’s not really true. It’s not that people don’t care about your process, it’s that you need to know when they are ready to hear about it.

And a prospect is ready to hear about your process once they feel they want what you offer and as they begin to make a decision about working with you. Once somebody knows that they want what you offer – their next question, whether it’s spoken out loud or it’s unconscious, is “can I trust you to deliver on that promise? Is it safe for me to go ahead and invest time and money with you?”

And how you answer that question, “Well, how do you do that?” “How do you produce that outcome?” either establishes you as being really credible, or raises fears and doubts that you’re promising more than you can deliver.

And that’s where this idea of True Wisdom comes in.

The structure that your True Wisdom provides makes what you do, which may be very experiential and intangible, feel real.

People find it easier to spend money on things that feel real to them.

True Wisdom is a little like the idea of Signature System, only it goes beyond that. The problem is that the way Signature System often gets taught, it can feel simplistic or shallow. You may feel pressured to make your process linear, when it’s not. Or to simplify what is a complex process to the point that it lacks real depth and substance.

You may be thinking “I don’t want to say I have a three-step formula for outrageous success.”

So sure, if you say you have a three-step-wham-bang-never-fails-absolutely-guaranteed-100%-chance-of-making-a-million-dollars-in-30-days signature system, and you and I both know that there is no three-step-no-fail-absolutely-guaranteed formula, then it would not only be superficial, it would be dishonest to present that.

But you could in good conscience say, “These are the three elements I’ve found open you up to a greater flow of income and abundance in your business.”

Giving your work structure is not about giving people quick fixes or easy answers!

It’s a way to give some shape and form to the journey that you’re going to invite people to take with you, because the more they can see the shape and form, the more confident and secure they can feel about stepping forward with you.

So, that description of the journey you go on together is what’s called your True Wisdom. You can also call it your logic, your process, or your methodology.

If I’m your prospect, your True Wisdom shows me how you think. It shows me how you think about the problem or challenge that I’m facing, and it helps me know if the way you think about it is illuminating for me, or if it feels like you’re covering territory I already understand.

It’s okay if your process is non-linear, or intuitive, or different for every person.

After nearly 10 years doing this work with people, I’ve found there is always a beautiful way to paint a picture of what you do with people, one that can is both accurate and flexible. If you’re not so linear, you might not have steps. You might use much looser structures like having “ingredients” or “components” or “principles.”

So if you say, “I help you build richer more fulfilling personal relationships,” you might see that there are five principles to a really healthy, happy relationship. When you work with people, it might not matter which one you start with, you might customize that for each client, or spend a different amount of time on each principle depending on who you are working with. But if you can at least describe what the five basic ingredients are, people will have a better sense of what they’ll get if they sign up to work with you.

And when you come up with a clear structure for describing how you work with people, it’s going to help you immeasurably if you want to create information product, write a book, or create programs because you’re going to need that structure to do all of those things.

Action You Can Take Now

First, Brain Dump

The first step to figuring out your True Wisdom is to do a brain dump in answer to the question “what is it I know about helping people experience the outcome I promise in my Core Message?”

You may want to do mind map by hand, or use mind mapping software. Meeting and facilitation types will have fun using post-its to capture their ideas. Keep following every line of thought and just writing each of those ideas down on a post-it or as one little piece of my mind map. Keep asking yourself, “Great, is there more?”

Or, if you are someone who has been trained in lots of techniques and processes, simply make a map of every tool, technique, and exercise you do with your clients.

Now, Create Clusters

Once you’ve gotten all the pieces out onto the table, you start to cluster. So you go, “Oh, all of these are about really discovering who you really are at your core.” And you put all the tools and exercises that go there.

You take another batch of little bits and pieces and you say, “All of these are about creating a safe space environment at work,” and as you pull the pieces together, you start to see that there are three or five or seven main themes.

As you cluster, you start to get the big hairy mass of stuff down in to a more manageable grouping.

As you are starting to group things together, you can start to play with names. Just try to find a name that helps you bring into focus why this piece of work matters.

Keep clustering until you have no more than seven chunks or pieces. Don’t worry if it takes you two or three passes to get it down.

Believe that there is a simpler structure there even if you don’t see it.

And that’s how you begin to create your True Wisdom, the one you love, and that invites people to work with you.

I offer the Words on Fire training once or twice a year. Read more about it here: http://isabelparlett.com/intimate-group.

This is Lesson Two in a series of six posts that preview just some of the content we’ll be working on in the Words on Fire Transformative Message Development training.

There’s no way around it. If you don’t know who you’re here to serve, who you’re talking to when you write your copy and craft your elevator speech, it’s hard to come up with any language that’s compelling.

And transformational types often suffer mightily with this question because their work can truly be of benefit to so many different types of people.

You see, one of the most powerful forces in marketing is what I call the “hey you” principle.

I like to explain the “hey, you” principle this way.

Sometimes, my husband Peter is in another room in the house and he starts talking to me. But I don’t usually listen and I don’t actually hear or take in what he’s saying.

Why? Because I don’t know if he’s talking to me.

He might be on the phone, he might be talking to himself, he might be talking to the dog.

He’s learned over our 15 years or more together that if he wants my attention, he has to start by saying “Hey, Isabel”.

That gets my attention, and then I can hear the rest of what he has to say.

If your marketing doesn’t in some fashion say “hey you” to your perfect people, the risk is high they simply won’t pause long enough to really listen to what you have to say.

And you can’t say “hey you” if you don’t know who you are talking to.

The good news is this: you don’t have to define your audience the way most marketers say you should. With demographics, an avatar. Knowing the problem you are solving. Or what keeps your people up at night.

You know how it is.

It’s Monday morning and you’re staring at your computer thinking:

Well, what should I be doing today?
What should I be offering?
Who should I be offering it to?
What can I write on my blog that will get me more clients?
What program can I offer that will be easy to sell?

And even if you do buckle down to get some work done, then the voices say:

Is this the right offer?
Is it called the right thing?
Am I marketing it the right way?
When is this going to get easier?

And if you’re smart and complicated, then you probably have even more questions.

The problem is that many business owners, maybe you, are not yet crystal clear why they are here. You kinda, sorta, maybe know why you are here.

But you can’t quite put it into words.

You struggle to commit, in writing, to the exact story you are here to tell.

And really, when you think about it, why shouldn’t you? It isn’t a simple or obvious skill to look at the richness and complexity of your life and find the simple, clear common thread that ties all the pieces together.

And from that lack of clarity spins many more kinds of confusion, until the uncertainty is almost overwhelming and you can’t sit down and write or pick up the phone because the chances are just too great that you might be off track. Because it’s too much work to start building what you want to say from scratch.

Without that unshakeable knowing of what is meant to come through you, and language to describe it, you don’t have a way to dramatically narrow down the options so it’s much more obvious what you need to be putting out into the world to make your money.

Sure, there are some folks in the world who don’t need that kind of clarity at the center of their business. Who can pick an audience and figure out what to offer them, and then make the big bucks offering it.

But if you’re reading this, you’re probably not one of them.

To be energized and motivated, you need to know that you’re doing your right work. That you’re on purpose and on message. You need to feel like you’re bringing something original to the table, something of real value.

So, where do you start?

You start by getting really clear what the message is that is meant to come through you. Not what “a” message is that you could share, but the message that is yours to share.

Because when you know that, all the other pieces of what you need to do start to fall into place:
• All your bits and pieces, your training, your knowledge, your skills, your passions start to come together in a way that makes sense.
• You start to find simple words to tell others what you can do for them.
• You see the outline of the basic story you need to tell whenever you have a platform to share what you do.
• The programs or products or services that makes sense for you to offer flow naturally out of your understanding.

Doesn’t that feel better?

When these basics have been answered, you have buckets more energy to handle the details and move your projects forward. While knowing why you’re here doesn’t answer every single question about what to do in your business, it does make it a lot quieter in there.

Putting that core message together, creating that clarity at the center of your business by sorting through your life stories is what we spend the first three weeks of the Put the Mojo in Your Message training doing. And when we do it, it sticks. I regularly have clients coming back to me five, six, seven years after we did this process to tell me the True Spirit we created still rings true.

An Action You Can Take Right Now

But today, before you get to work finding that message, I want you to do something else first, which is to forgive yourself for having struggled to figure this out up until now.

What I’ve found in talking to people all over the world, people in all kinds of businesses, is that so many of them tell me how frustrated they are, how confused they are, and how angry they are with themselves that they have not been able to find just the right words to communicate their value with the world.

What I know is that when we are unkind to ourselves, or when we are totally caught up in that frustration about how to communicate, it actually slows down the process of finding the words that we need to bring in to the world.

You may be taking marketing classes and learning that traditional way to communicate what you offer in business. And then when it doesn’t work for you and it doesn’t work for your particular business, you may be feeling like something is wrong with you. Or you may even be saying to yourself “Maybe the universe doesn’t want me to bring this work forward,” because then it wouldn’t be so hard. Or “Maybe if I can’t communicate this, I’m really not meant to do this work.”

And to help you forgive yourself, I want to offer a little prayer based on the Ho O Pono Pono Prayer practice. It’s a prayer to the part of yourself that struggles with message.

If you want to join in with me, put your hands on your heart, and say the following out loud:

I send the energy of love to the part of me that struggles to give voice to my message.

I send the energy of love to the part of me that tosses and turns in the night wondering if I have anything to offer the world; to the part of me that is afraid that even if I feel that there is so much richness and vastness and beauty inside of myself that wonders, and that worries, if anyone else will ever see it, or ever recognize it.

I send the energy of love to the part of myself that struggles and stumbles, and falters, and fumbles on the path to finding words to try to describe what it is I’m here to do.

I send the energy of love to the part of myself that just cringes in horror when I say something to a prospective client and they look like a deer in the headlights. And I just know I haven’t connected.

I send the energy of love to all the memories past, present, and future of all the times I’ve struggled to find words; of all the times I’ve used words that didn’t reflect my deepest message; of all the times that I used words that sounded like somebody else, but didn’t really reflect who I was.

And I send the energy of love to all the parts of myself that have felt sorrow, have felt pain, have felt shame, and have felt doubt in this process.

I’m so sorry; I’m so sorry for any way I have blamed you, or found fault in you for not doing this at some level beyond what I already knew how to do.

I am so sorry for any way I added to the pain through self criticism and self judgment.

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention for healing and transformation.

Maybe you can breathe a little easier now.

Be kind, and it will be easier to remember why you’re really here.

Some business owners just want to know what to say to get more clients. And there’s lots of people who can teach you how to do that.

The problem is, you may end up getting clients but feeling like you don’t like the work so much.

More often, those “sure-fire” techniques end up not working so well for you for some reason.

If you want to do your authentic work in the world, it starts with knowing this. Knowing what it is you want people to feel and experience as a result of your work. Being able to write it and say it somewhere without compromise so it becomes real to you.

Being able to name it in a single sentence, so it’s a few key themes, not five or ten or twenty ideas.

From there, it’s not so hard to figure out how to express the heart of what you do so you connect with the ones who’ve been yearning for what you offer.

It’s not so hard to translate that into benefit-rich language or name your audience or describe the compelling circumstances that would move someone to work with you. (You didn’t think you were going to skip that part, did you?)

It’s just hard to do all those things if you are still struggling to name what it is you truly have to offer.

As I mentioned in the last post, what makes the True Spirit work different from most branding and message work, what makes it stick, is that it draws not on what you’re doing now, but on everything you’ve been doing up until and including now.

It grounds your expression of what you are here to do in the real life stories you’ve lived. It goes deep into the intangible, into stuff which is hard to fit into typical business speak, so mostly doesn’t get mentioned, but which needs to be named if your work is going to have any real power.

If you’re wondering what that actually sounds like, listen in as I take Marta through the process of naming the True Spirit of her Work.

It’s an excerpt of our first call together (she went on to do both Levels I and II of my full Message Development Process.) It’s about 30 minutes out of a 45-minute session of the kind of deep level conversation that allows this work to be so powerful and produce out-of-the-ordinary results.

http://giveheravoice.podbean.com/2010/11/02/listen-marta-luzim-and-isabel-parlett-2/

On the audio, you’ll hear Marta describe:

• Her initial take on what she’s here to do
• A story about her first job as a teacher
• A story about writing a play about the different voices of a woman
• A story about working as a therapist with a deeply traumatized client

And then me pulling the themes and threads into a first draft of her True Spirit statement, which went like this:

The True Spirit of my Work is to invite fierce women with the courage to be afraid
To experience the dangerous excitement of actually being alive
That comes from stripping themselves to their own vulnerability
Opening to the darkness and wildness at the core of their being
And accepting the invitation to express without knowing the outcome.

It’s a great example of the kind of work I can do with clients who are passionate, who have lots to say, but who are struggling to find the clarity they need to communicate with more power. It showcases how I pull different themes and threads together in unexpected ways that you might not think of doing for yourself.

Here’s what Marta had to say about going through the full Message Development process:

For years I struggled to language the mission and purpose of my work. I worked with dozens of business coaches and was not able to find the way to brand and focus in on my niche.

Isabel Parlett is magical, inspirational and embodies a talent and gift for language that helped me to fine tune, enhance and electrify the exact core of my work in helping women find their creative and spiritual voice.

She listens deeply and weaves your words into the core of your soul’s mission and vision. Since I have worked with her I am able to easily find the language in my life’s work with confidence and excitement.

I have managed to attract the right clients, build new business and create new visions. I no longer stumble with my elevator speech, writing web text or workshop flyers…I have even now created an exact program that outlines the unique process I take women through…

She is indeed a shaman and an authentically caring individual who will help you make your dreams come to fruition. I am more alive than ever working with Isabel’s guidance and insight.

Thank you Isabel for changing my life’s work into gold…

Marta J. Luzim
http://www.martaluzim.com

There are many wonderful tools and processes to help you get more clarity about who you are and to find words to share that with others. You can work on your niche, juice up your elevator speech, write red-hot copy, define your unique selling proposition, and many more.

But sometimes that work doesn’t stick. It ends up feeling . . . not right. It bores you, or it makes the wrong promise. Or you change directions and have to start over.

I think there are reasons that people come back to me after 8 years and say that their True Spirit statements are still on target, still bring them back home to themselves, still guide their choices, still inform their language.

There’s a reason that people change their game when the True Spirit comes into focus.

Reason #1: The True Spirit statement is based on you, not your product, your service, or your audience.

If you are going to engage with the world from a place of integrity, you need to know on a deep level who you are and what you’re here to do. You need to have a way to stand on that, even when the world shows up with, as poet David Whyte says, “its harsh need to change you.”

As critical as it is to know who your audience is and what they want, it’s also easy to lose the fierceness in the presence of someone else’s need and desire.

That’s why you need to first know who you are before you start asking how you can be of service. Before you start solving other people’s problems.

If a core message is really core, then what it describes should be essential, unchanging. And you won’t find what’s at your core by looking out in the marketplace.

Reason #2: The True Spirit is an expression of the themes and threads you’ve been working with throughout your life, not just what you are doing now.

We all know that business changes at the speed of light. Trends come and go. New markets are born and die. Money shifts to different sectors. Fortunes are made and lost.

So the nature of what we offer, the form it takes, what we call it, all can change in the blink of an eye.

But if we know what doesn’t change, what’s always been true, what continues to be true, then when our business changes, the actual message changes just a little. Because we are still the ones delivering the message. And the things that matter to us, the things we care about, the things we want the most for others stay in place.

So, how do we do that? We look at your life, the key moments and experiences, and we actually look away for a moment from what you do now to get the seeds, and themes and threads that have been at work in you all this time.

Reason #3: The True Spirit is written to resonate with you, not to please other people.

Business is funny. If we don’t please other people, we don’t make money.

But ironically, nothing pleases people more than to hear something they weren’t expecting, to be taken someplace they hadn’t thought they could go, or to be invited into a world they never imagined.

And you can’t create any of those things if you aren’t connected to what brings you alive. That’s why with the True Spirit, I look to find words and phrases that resonate deeply for you, that connect you so strongly to yourself that the best and brightest parts of you come to life.

You see, if your True Spirit brings you to life, it’s very little additional work to make it come alive for others.

Reason #4: The True Spirit is based on the notion that you have a unique access to universal wisdom.

Another way to say this is: your True Spirit is your best expression of your meaning of life, the answer to the big question, “why are you here on the planet?”

If you believe you’ve been brought here for a reason, and not a random accident, the True Spirit captures why you’ve been brought here. It describes the small slice of human experience that you understand more deeply, love more strongly than most other people.

And when you know that it gives you fire to go out into the world. And it’s a wonderful place to engage your audience from.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “spiritual” marketing. (And I do believe that marketing can be a deeply spiritual practice.) But, often, when you look below the surface, what’s being taught is not very deeply spiritual. The underlying message can be “give up who you are to be what others want you to be,” or “follow my guidance, don’t trust your own” or “that won’t work no matter how much you’re guided to do it.”

To me, spiritual practice requires faith in the unseen and the unknown. It requires believing that you were created for a reason and trusting what is meant to come through you, and to not lose that faith or that commitment to what comes through you for all the trinkets and temptations in the world.

And every time I step out and let my freak flag fly, good things seem to happen.

The nice thing about admitting that you have a funky, maverick business is that you get to breathe again. You take back the power to say “that doesn’t work for me,” or “I wonder how I can adapt that advice to fit MY business” or “Are you freakin’ kidding me?”

So what does it mean to be a funky, maverick business owner?

It means:

1. You believe the only business worth creating is the one that feeds your soul – that allows you to express your soul’s calling through your work.

2. Your funky, maverick business is the expression of your unique access to universal wisdom meeting your understanding of and compassion for your audience.

3. Your funky, maverick business only comes to life if you’re willing to stay in “what if” long enough to let your vision come into full form.

4. Designing your funky, maverick business requires drawing on both your expressive and strategic energies.

5. Claiming your funky, maverick business means healing everything that keeps you from reaching for your ideal work or from speaking anything less than your most personal, radical, spiritual message. Healing things like your relationship to money, your willingness to take up space in the world, and your need to please.

6. Nurturing your funky, maverick business requires finding the courage to move out into the world, making your voice heard, inviting people to experience what you have to offer, and allowing whatever transpires, good or bad, to move you forward.

So, all of this starts with knowing why you’re here, and what you have to share.

To be able to name and describe that clearly enough that you can hold onto it when things get turbulent. So you can come back to it when you wander off track.

I recently re-listened to some informational interviews I did early this year.

In my imagination, what I’d heard was that people weren’t really looking for help with their message.

What I actually heard was people saying that being able to put words to why they were here, and what they had to offer, was foundational.

That without it, they couldn’t move forward as easily, make strategic decisions, draw on the advice or guidance from other experts, launch new programs, rebrand, or bring on the team to expand their vision.

That with the True Spirit in focus, they were giving better interviews, writing more powerful blog posts, touching people more deeply, connecting more strongly and more quickly with their ideal clients. That they were energized and excited and more focused as a result.

That knowing their True Spirit changed the game, and their vision of what they were here to create.

Oh.

Read more about my journey coming back to the work I love most here.