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.

But make sure when you talk to your audience about their problems that you are talking about the right problems.

Not the ones that “wake them up at 3 in the morning” or that you think are the ones they’ll respond to the most. Or that will move them to make the biggest investment in your services.

Talk about the problems they might have that you are amazing and unmatched at solving.

Talk about the problems you can’t wait to get your fingers into, the problems that addressing makes your heart sing.

Tell the story through your own distinctive lens about what it means to be human, and what you know about how we move towards a better life. In that very particular and specific way you’ve been gifted to perceive and understand.

Find your words and metaphors and expressions and rhythms that make the story of that change, that new path, come alive. Your living Book of Language.

It’s not the goal to be interesting, but when you do this, you’ll write and speak about more interesting problems. Not the ones that everyone else is promising to solve. You won’t sound like everyone else. You’ll tell a better story.

And when you tell a better story, people listen. Your words land differently. They land with power and wisdom, in the solar plexus of your people. Not in their brains.

How do you name those problems, the ones worth talking about?

Look in your True Spirit. In the description of what you want other humans to feel and experience as a result of your presence and efforts.

The challenges that keep them from feeling and experiencing what you want them to feel and experience. (And truth be told, those feelings and experiences are actually the heart of your story, not the problems themselves).

Look in your True Wisdom. In the nuances of what life has taught you is the path for people to move towards what they desire and you desire for them.

If you don’t know your True Spirit and True Wisdom, take time to figure it out. Get help figuring it out. When you recognize what is here to come through you, when you name it, when you can describe it, everything changes about how you show up in the world.

Everything you say and do has more power and zing and life and intensity.

Only in the deep dive to the core of your Transcendent Message, and in the struggle to articulate it as cleanly and clearly as you possibly can, do you find the fire that your people will warm to.

Growing a business (or advocating for justice, or making art, or leading a team) isn’t easy work. It requires that you show up with the full force and power of your being. Unquestionably present. Able to open your mouth in a moment and speak to the heart of what matters. Able to sit down and put words on paper that come alive. That tell a specific story. A story that people aren’t used to hearing.

Every human, and I mean every human, including you, has a stunning voice. Something to say. And a language all their own to say it.

Finding that voice and developing your language is a kind of hard work. But it’s worth it.

Expressing yourself fully, clearly, as you move through the world can be your greatest source of joy and your greatest path to power.

Accept nothing less for yourself.

It was confusing because her other mentor challenged my client’s desire to focus her work on helping women live radiant lives – “helping wild women who want to dance through life with a sense of ease and grace despite the challenges that can sometimes trip them up and block them from living their most authentic and fully expressed lives.”

The mentor wasn’t sure that “radiance” was something people wanted, would pay money to get. She worried that my client would have to explain what radiance is, and that that would cost her clients.

A fundamental precept of more traditional marketing is “buyers invest in programs that address urgent needs or problems they have in their lives or businesses”. Sometimes it is said that people buy in order to solve problems that wake them up at 3 a.m — ”How do I make more money? Will I ever find true love?”

It’s not wrong, but I think it’s an incomplete or limited view of how humans are and what has them spend money.

It’s one reason, but not the only reason. And when you think it’s the only reason, you limit the possibilities for yourself and for your clients.

After all, why do we buy a novel? Or pick up a new necklace? Or quit a job and move across the country? Or go bungee jumping? Or take a personal growth workshop?

None of those purchases solve urgent problems. Rather they speak to more nebulous, maybe even unarticulated, yearnings.

I see the power in naming and making real for people the POSSIBILITY of having a feeling and experience which they may not have ever put into words for themselves but recognize when you speak it, when you embody it.

It is absolutely a process of trial and error to figure out what we truly can offer and to find a way to talk about it that moves people to invest their time and money with us.

It takes time. It’s more work than offering something that has a lower-common-denominator appeal. (Make more money! Grow more hair! Lose weight! Find love!)

For many of my clients, it’s also a process of developing themselves so it’s not just words, so they embody what they offer. So that when they write and speak people get it, not just intellectually, not just in terms of the words and the information those words convey, but as a full body, resonant “yes” that what they say makes sense because of the energy they transmit when they show up in the world.

I can’t tell you how many of my clients tried to follow the rules of traditional marketing, and made offers that seemed like they would appeal to a lot of people, that fell flat because what they offered was a complete mismatch with who they were, what their real gifts were, and what they cared about.

If you step forward and offer the work you believe you are here to offer, and the right people, your “Thrilled Beyond Belief” Clients, aren’t responding, you do want to keep tweaking and adjusting to find the words that create connection, that create understanding.

But you never want to give up on or compromise the heart of what you are here to offer. You owe it to yourself to give yourself a chance to bring in the work that lets you do what you love most.

As I shared my input with her, and we talked about her work, it was clear that she was being called in a certain direction. That her heart and soul wanted her to step out of her old, safe identity as a corporate coach who improves productivity, and into being more of what I now call a firebrand – into being a passionate advocate for calling out the maverick energy of people working within corporations.

“Gosh, Isabel,” she said as we wrapped up this single session, “you are better at branding than most people I’ve met who say they do branding.”I’ve never called what I do branding. I’ve thought about it, I’ve had a few URLs that testify to that. But I’ve resisted, and I continue to resist it.

Here’s why.

Branding to me is a loaded concept.

Branding, as I see it, is the art of choosing how we publicly present ourselves to the world. The art of shaping how we are perceived by our choice of words, images, fonts and colors when we put up a web site, send a letter, or design a business card.But before we can make thoughtful, conscious choices about how we present ourselves, there is a much more vital bit of work that needs to happen.

And that’s to see ourselves, to recognize the magnificence of who we are, and to more fully own what it is that wants to come through us into the world.

And when we are in too big a rush to refine the public perception of ourselves and our work, we risk cutting short the diving deep, the exploring, the working through the rough bits of these big questions that allows us to find and name real clarity about who we are and what we bring to the world. We risk sliding ourselves into the mold of what already exists, and missing the nuances that define our magic.

Before we “brand”, we need to ask and answer questions that have nothing to do with business or audience and everything to do with who we are as human beings.

Because that’s where our magnificence lies.

That’s the power we have to move and transform others – individual and collective – through our presence, and efforts, and our words. When we write and speak from the place of recognizing and owning that who we are and what we have to share matters. That who we are (and therefore what we have to share) is remarkable and irreplaceable.

And when we shortcut the process of seeing and owning that, when we rush to get to the neat and packaged version of who we are, we dramatically limit the power we have to incite action and invite change in the world.

And we also constrain our ability to create work that gives us the opportunity to write and speak about the things we care most about. We short circuit our ability to speak to and resonate with the people who need that particular thing we bring to the table.

The rush to package and monetize our Being limits our growth.

At its worst, the cult of “personal branding” invites us to craft and promote an image of who we are that looks good and sounds good but which hides the richness and complexity of who we really are.At their worst, branding services push us towards an image we are assured is attractive and marketable but not fully authentic. An image that is sanitized and cleaned up and polished but which lacks real life or breath. Or that grabs hold of one aspect of who we are and locks in a story around that.

At their best, branding services take a first step to delve into who you are before crafting language, sound bites, logos, and choosing colors and fonts. But sometimes that effort to excavate is quick, rushed, incomplete.

I had one client come to me after investing quite a lot in a popular branding service. She was told her key word was “sparkle”, and was given some language and design elements around that. But she came to me because she still wasn’t clear herself what she did, why it mattered. She lacked the inner connection to herself and her work that she needed to step out in the world and write and speak effectively about what she didAnother client described the feeling that the business and marketing training she’d taken encouraged her to put forward what she described as a “cardboard cutout” of she was. To put forward this shiny, simplistic front of positivity and success that she now needed to live up to.

Branding is not a bad thing. Branding is vital for businesses of a certain size and shape. Businesses that have brick and mortar stores, or uniforms, who buy millions of dollars of advertising.Good branding can support small business owners, help them project a higher level of professionalism, if that’s important to what they do. It can make their visual impact more consistent and more attractive.

But for solo business owners who offer transformative services, services that often evolve through the lifetime of the business, it’s not the first place to spend your time and your money.

I think we need to spend less time worrying about our brand, and more time exploring who we are and how we want to express ourselves in this lifetime.

We need to worry less about how we come across and are perceived, and more time stretching into truer, more aligned ways we can put ourselves out in the world.

We need to feed the fire in our hearts, so we can step out in the world and burn brightly, trusting that when we are true to ourselves, the words and images will follow.

Jenna has spent 23 years working in Organizational Learning & Development for organizations in sectors such as finance, healthcare, logistics and public health & safety. In 2015, she made the leap into her own business. “The whole jumping off, leap-of-faith was exciting, but also frightening. For the first 9 months, I was in a tailspin. I could not get my words.”

Jenna made the effort to meet with contacts who could help her, but when she tried to explain what her services were, she floundered. “What I wanted to do with people was different from how people thought they would work with me.” She felt confident when she spoke to someone she could take her time with, like her family and close friends, but that confidence evaporated when she felt on the spot. It was frustrating, because she said, “I knew what I was here to do and who I was here to serve, I just couldn’t find the words to describe it.”

She had tried working with another coach, who promised to help her get to her message. But what they came up with didn’t feel right. Jenna said, “it felt academic or cookie cutter. We weren’t getting to the heart of what I wanted to say.” Five months in to the process, she still didn’t have a message that felt right.

Worse, she didn’t feel supported working through her confusion and discomfort to get to clarity. When she raised questions about exactly what she wanted to do, or who she wanted to work with, she felt rushed, as though the outcome (any outcome) was more important than the exploration and discovery of her authentic way of expressing herself. Because she didn’t feel heard, she couldn’t hear herself. She was told to do some research on what people want.  Or to just go ahead and pick a focus.  She started to realize that this approach was “one inch deep. Very surfacey.”

What she appreciated about my approach was that I acknowledged up front that there were going to be moments of uncertainty. Moments of grittiness. Of discomfort. She liked that I brought in self-forgiveness practices like Ho o pono pono and somatic approaches that included moving the body. She liked the inclusion of these elements that speak to the entire person.

And going through the program, she felt met in that place. She felt accepted, like there was room to not have the answers right away.  And she felt honored and encouraged to bring forward her style and her essence. She loved the work in Level 1 —  finding the True Spirit and the True Wisdom. She said, “it was such a unique approach. It really resonated with my entire being.” She loved being challenged to get to that place of recognition, “This is it!” To bring together not just one piece of who she was, but all the parts of who she was.

As she described it, “From there, other things seemed to flow.  The True Spirit work allowed me to feel much more comfortable bringing my spiritual self forward.” With my encouragement, she finally had permission to incorporate that part of her into the work. She was no longer afraid. She realized “I don’t know if this is what people are looking for, but it’s who I am”

Here’s the True Spirit she wrote:

The True Spirit of my work is to support people who find themselves at a crossroads in their journey to fulfill their soul’s yearning to make a difference in the world by sharing their gifts. To help them step away from the script they think they have to follow, from rigid roles and one-sided expectations, so they can be fluid and dynamic as they lean into their own humanity while experiencing a rising level of confidence that comes from an irrevocable knowing of what they stand for (the messages & lessons they are here to share) in a way that’s only possible when they’re able to catch their breath and reconnect to their inner guidance.Crossing a threshold into sacred space, they become empowered to cultivate their full potential; no longer hiding parts of themselves in order to “fit in” or belong and in doing so they can fully acknowledge the gifts in each other as well as in themselves.

Once the True Spirit became clear, Jenna began to tease out her Conscious Leadership model. She began to see all the elements and tiers of that model that she hadn’t been able to put her finger on before.

In Level II, of the training, Jenna loved working on Bridging Statements. We had already worked on the elevator speech but she appreciated having these longer responses to what she sensed people wanted or were looking for. Even though the Bridging Statements used a formula, it didn’t feel restrictive.  She had wiggle room to make them her own.

These are some of the Bridging Statement she developed:

People come to me saying they want their leaders to soften their communication skills. But when I talk to them further, what really emerges is that they really want their leaders to create an environment where people feel respected for ideas, safe to voice their concerns and, encouraged to try new things.

You want your boss/senior leaders to recognize your potential. And what makes that possible is expressing your true essence, honoring the wisdom of others and embracing relationships as sacred. That’s why I mentor leaders in deepening and expanding their relationships in their network.

You want to gain greater clarity about how to advance your career and get rid of the obstacles that are keeping you from contributing fully. And what I know is when you step away from the script you think you have to follow and reconnect to your inner guidance, you experience an irrevocable knowing of how your talents make a meaningful contribution.

Since developing and using her new language, Jenna is sensing a positive response. And some people don’t get it. She now can say to herself, “they are not my people.”

She regained that confidence that she thought she’d lost. She describes how now, she can show up in the world with this “wonderful assertiveness wrapped in love and service. Even the way I speak, my delivery, my tone of voice, sounds so much fuller. It’s no longer airy or tentative. There is a deep resonance for me in what I am sharing. It comes from the depths of who I am.”

The work we did also helped her to look at all the programs and content she has access to in a new way. She says, “before Mojo I felt like a sell out offering other people’s tools and systems. I couldn’t figure out how to give it my voice. Now I feel liberated to show up as who I am, and from there it feels easy to pull my various tools and assessments into what I do. I can leverage time-tested programs that fit but I add my style.”

Since finishing the program a few months ago, Jenna has seen about 50% growth in her business. She has brought on several corporate clients, helping with some of their big initiatives. Another client has put her on retainer to work on strategy and messaging. She is also working with multiple individuals within one organization.  One person works with her, and then someone calls her asking “Can you work with me too?” She says, “I don’t know if I could have done that without the confidence I got going through the Mojo training”.

Jenna wanted to say to anyone considering this program: “This work is ideal for people whose avocation and vocation are the same. When you’re trying to suss out the plethora of knowledge and wisdom that is yours – articulating all the elements of who you are and bringing that forward can be daunting. How do you explain that so it makes sense to people?  Participating whole-heartedly in the Mojo program supports you in claiming all rich and juicy parts of you in a way that empowers you to connect with YOUR tribe. Your work in the world is your calling. Isabel and the Mojo program help you articulate what you’re called to do so the people you talk with aren’t scratching their heads in bewilderment.”

You can learn more about Jenna HERE (http://jennastoliker.com). Jenna coaches and mentors emerging and seasoned leaders to integrate all of their wisdom and bring forward their fullest potential as an authentic and conscious leader.  Through individual and small group coaching, leadership development programs, and nature retreats leaders discover their leadership path without compromising who they are. You can reach Jenna at 248-346-7107 or jenna@jennastoliker.com

This is a story about being told that you can’t say what you really want to say about the work you do. It’s about what happens when you’re told that enough times, and what changes when you are finally given a space to say what might seem to be dangerous, or difficult, about the work you do. It’s about debunking your inner myths about what your audience can hear, what they want to hear, what they’ll respond to.

Ellen Grossman is a former nurse-midwife, who spent years working, as she calls it, “in the belly of the beast of traditional medicine” – in teaching hospitals, in large practices, serving mixed populations. She worked alongside doctors and nurses, “treading that odd middle ground of not really being either, but fulfilling the roles of both.  It really was a place where I felt I couldn’t show the wild parts of myself.”

She has, in recent years, developed a business doing shamanic work with women, including vision quests. She came to work with me in my Mojo training this past spring, at a point where she wanted to make her small practice bigger, but found herself going in circles, stalling, when it was time to put her message out.

She had studied other marketing approaches, and had learned about all the usual solopreneur marketing activities, things like running launches and using social media. She didn’t like the way she was being taught marketing.  The tactics seemed manipulative and in her words, “yucky.” When she tried to go out in the world to use what she was being taught, she would freeze. She would sit at her computer thinking, “I can’t do this.”  (In fact, instead of sitting down to write about her work, she would zip off on the internet to go see what someone else was doing in hopes that that would inspire her.)

Looking back, Ellen says, “Now I know the reason I couldn’t make those approaches work is because they represented an outside in-approach, which just didn’t feel right. My work is all about helping people switch from doing what other people say they should do to listening to themselves, so it makes sense that it wasn’t going to work for me to market by ignoring what I felt. The whole marketing concept of offering the solution to the client’s problem is antithetical to what I do, given my work is about connecting my clients to their inner voice so they can find their own solutions.”

Ellen heard me say something to the effect that as business owners, we need to get clear on what we want to say and then say it. She found that refreshing: “I get to say what I really mean? Other coaches, when they heard me talk about the deeper, more challenging aspects of my work, told me over and over again, ‘Ellen you can’t say that!”

One of the things reassured Ellen that this approach to communication might be different was the questionnaire I ask people to fill out before enrolling for the training. She appreciated that I was upfront that this would be an intense process, that it might even be uncomfortable, even unpleasant at some points. And she valued that I understood that real work, inner work, is often messy and uncomfortable, She had been in trainings before that had triggered fear or self-doubt, and when she spoke about it was told in so many words, “get over it!” The questions I asked convinced her that she would have permission to talk about difficult feelings that might come up, that she’d be met and supported in the process.

As always, the first thing we worked on was developing the True Spirit of her Work. She appreciated being asked to tell stories about her most meaningful work, it helped her to start by writing as if no one would see it. She worried a little though, that “the other women in the group are going to thing I’m a psycho!”

Ellen describes the process this way, “You tricked me into telling the truth – you created a safe space for me to move into deeper territory, to move slowly toward the possibility of other people seeing these deeper elements, and I started feeling safe.”

What struck me in her stories was the way she wrote about how we face and move through danger. And the power of wildness. Out in nature and inside ourselves.

As Ellen submitted various drafts of her True Spirit, she kept slipping in to safer, milder language. My feedback to her would point that out. I would write: “What happened here? Where did the language around danger and wildness go?” To Ellen, it felt as though I were saying “I see you and I am not seeing you in this.” This kind of feedback brought her to tears. She felt deeply seen and gently encouraged to show these deeply important parts of herself that she’d been told for so long weren’t okay. These themes she’d been told were too much, too big, too out there.

Here’s the True Spirit that came out of this back and forth:

The true spirit of my work is to help people swimming along in the river of their life to dive deeper to that river beneath the river where, if lucky they will be swept into the embrace of their own Soul.

That terrifying, exhilarating encounter with their own dangerous Wildness, their own certainty, their own questioning, swooping into the Mysterious Conversation happening just below our awareness.

Entering into this Conversation is not for the faint hearted. Our Souls are Wild in all the wonderful and terrifying meanings of the word: untamed, willful, powerful, raucous, tender, connected in a way that melts and electrifies at the same time. Saying YES to this deeper Conversation opens us to something that is bigger than us, that at once seems achingly familiar and yet delightfully startling.

It allows us to start living our lives from the inside out; exuberantly, soulfully, giving to the world the unique gift that we and we alone have come to give. When we say YES to this Soul Conversation, we are tapped into the powerhouse of our own Self Wisdom. Our work, our relationships, our experiences take on a vibrancy, a creativity that springs from living from this inner knowing.

The True Spirit, along with the True Wisdom, and the Basic Story that we worked on next, became a great foundation for all her other business writing.  Although these pieces were not directly what we would use for copy, they gave her a starting place to work from.

“When I do a flyer, I can look at my True Wisdom, and pick a phrase and make it work for whatever I am writing about. I am not recreating the wheel each time I do a piece. It not only makes it easier for me, it provides a cohesiveness that is reassuring to clients as they work with me. They have a structure that helps them know, ‘oh, this is what Ellen does’. It gives clients some language they can use to speak about their work with me.”

The conversation about what is and isn’t ok to say extended beyond writing the True Spirit. When it came to writing copy, more fear came up. “I can’t tell people that their lives may fall apart if they work with me, that they may be dismembered. It’s too scary, no one wants to hear that!” she’d tell me. But I held my ground. If that’s part of the work, she should share it. Now, she doesn’t have to lead with that, it doesn’t have to be her headline, but somewhere along the line, before someone comes on board, she should speak to it. Otherwise, it’s a bait-and-switch.

As much as our work was about giving Ellen encouragement to share what was true about her work, she also appreciated the practical tools I taught her.

She described it this way: “Something in your work teaches a craft. You offer formulas that are really helpful that you use in service to your own inner guidance rather than an outer guidance. You taught me something wonderful in editing – I learned a lot from the way you could see the True Spirit and go straight for it, and offer me examples of how that could show up in language. It felt like an apprenticeship. Here is how a master does it. I can do it. I can see the formula, but I see great leeway as well.”

Ellen cottoned to the idea that it’s good marketing when she writes and speaks from her True Spirit. After all the times marketing people had told her “people don’t want to hear this,” she appreciated my holding her to writing about the themes and ideas that matter most to her. For holding for her the space and belief that THIS is actually what people are hungry to hear, not the safe, mild stuff that could sound like a million other people.  That I challenged her to write until she had the sense, “yes, this is what I want to say.”

She says, “I want to make money, but more importantly, I want to give my particular offering. It’s not possible for me to make money doing something that is not authentic. When you don’t pretend, then everything – marketing, selling, enrolling —  becomes much clearer and so much easier.”

So what has changed for Ellen as a result of going through this intensive message development process?

Ellen says, “The most significant change is that I now believe that marketing is important. I really get that for people to find me I have to put out what I offer. I have all these tools and written pieces from the training that I am using all of the time – elements of my True Wisdom, the bridging statements. I have really practical ways of expressing myself that feel good to me and seem to be getting a response.

When I say what I do, people say ‘whoa’! As I got more clear internally, people started coming up to me and asking ‘Tell me more about what you do, I am interested.’  I now use language that had been scary to me to use before. I am now bold about saying ‘I don’t offer you answers, I offer you tools to get answers.’  That seems to be drawing people in rather than repelling them! Surprising to them, but they like it.”

Now, she’s seeing how she creates a  pipeline to fill her practice. She’s been leading an ongoing Monday night group for a long time where she nurtures relationships with past, present, and future clients, and she is getting ready to start another. When she started Mojo, Ellen had been wanting to offer a second round of a year-long intensive program, but felt stuck. Now, the group is filling easily through conversations with people in her circle.  Her one- to-one practice has expanded by about 30%.

She has a new understanding of the interaction between her outreach work and the actual work she does with clients. The message development process deepened the work she does with clients. It clarified the teaching she does with her groups. As she puts it, “As I am clearer about my message, I can offer that to my clients in a deeper, wonderful way.”

Reflecting on the work we did together, Ellen said, “What you’re doing with your work, Isabel, is part of the paradigm shift that humanity is in. As we look at a new economy, and we shift our appreciation of what healers bring, this different way of valuing, we can’t use old marketing ways, it doesn’t fit the new economics. “

Ellen Grossman works  as a Mentor and Guide to people seeking to birth something new into the world.  I do this by helping them access the Wild–the Wild within and the Wild in Nature. I work with people in intimate, ongoing groups, one to one, and in wilderness retreats. You can reach Ellen at egcnm5@gmail.com or 707-391-9901.

When Aine came to work with me last fall, she was in a place a lot of people would envy. She had an easy, lucrative, boutique financial mentoring business. She got all of her clients through word-of-mouth and referrals. The way she describes it, “I could have kept on that path. Continued doing what I was doing. Be grateful for the success I had. But, my soulful passion and purpose kept calling me to something bigger.

My existing business was based on only one part of a much larger vision I had of how we can all make informed, conscious choices, not just about our money, but about our health, our communities, our economy. Most coaches I met said ‘you have to just talk about the money program because it’s clear and concrete’.

It was very frustrating. I couldn’t see how to communicate in a way that went beyond the money work. I had the overall quilt design in my head, but the way I was showing up in the world, it was like I was starting in the left hand corner.

I wanted to disseminate the wisdom of the foundational work, but then I didn’t know how to segue into the other programs I saw I could offer. Most coaches advised me that I shouldn’t even think about talking about those other areas until I had fully developed those offers into programs. I also struggled to describe the complexity of my whole systems, inner-outer approach to wealth.

This challenge made me not want to network or go out into the world, because being asked what I do was always an awkward moment. I had a cool name, a tag line, but when someone asked “how do you do that?” it felt wrong to talk just about my money mentoring. It felt incomplete and too small.

I was in this holding pattern for a very long time. I would remind myself, ‘ You don’t have to hustle, you don’t have to market. Why aren’t you satisfied?’ But my soul kept going ‘wait, there’s more’. ”

Aine had worked with me eight years earlier when she was establishing her financial mentoring services. We had worked to put together a True Spirit statement that captured the depth of her work. At first, she felt like the True Spirit was too big, too impossible, but over the years, Aine says, “I grew into it”. So, she had some trust that I could help her hold onto and speaking to the larger, and emerging, vision of the difference her work could make.

What made all the difference for Aine was finally being encouraged to tie her money work into that larger vision of a world where more of us are making holy and healthy choices about how we live, how we use our energy, how we use our resources.  The feedback I gave her reflected back the validity of what she wanted to put forward, not the usual feedback that she was too much of an idealist. She realized, “I am a cultural healer, and my work changes perceptions of money and wealth, not just what we think of as wealth, but how our culture is built to support this new vision of true wealth and well-being.”

She says, “what I got is that THAT is where the potency is. The Big Why of why I teach what I teach is what fuels me to go out in the world. I have the right to share my larger vision. When I just talk about managing your finances, I lose juice.”

With this new frame in mind, she reviewed seven years’ worth of material she’d written, and found all this strong, potent, on point writing. She says, “I knew back then WHAT I should say but not WHY. I’ve always known my larger vision, but I didn’t have permission to talk about it.

As soon as I started to own this, step into this, communicate my larger vision, I went into a whole other level of becoming. I am owning all of these archetypes: the Truth Teller, the Crone, the King. It’s like I’ve turned on the spigot.

I need to share what I see without weighing in first on how it’s going to be received. I am giving myself power to be and let go of people-pleasing and needing to be liked and trying to fit in. I am moving past 65 years of conditioning. I don’t care anymore if you like what I have to say. Either, don’t listen or come join me. I am speaking to people who are hungry for this way of seeing what is happening in the world.

What I see is that my work around financial sovereignty is part of addressing the larger question of how we become a better collective. Without the Mojo training, I’d be farting around, resigning myself to what I was doing, and keeping my interest in social justice separate. I now have a recognition for myself that I am prepared for this large vision. I can lead it, inspire it, seed it, I don’t need to do it all myself.”

In addition to wrapping her arms around this bigger vision, Aine also found clear, practical language to talk about her work shifting people’s approach to money management and financial choices.

In working on her True Wisdom, I encouraged her to more clearly define her terms, what she meant by “intimate, informed, and conscious choices” or “your Ecstatic Enough” or Intimate Sovereignty. She says, “Now I have an entire lexicon, I don’t use normal words and phrases because I am trying to change cultural myths. I am giving people new language so I can give people a different world view.”

Aine was able to take some of the phrases from her foundational language, her True Spirit and True Wisdom, and start to use them when people asked her what she does. Phrases like “design and develop your own financial sovereignty” OR “support your business in a holy and grounded way”

What she noticed is that at public events, she would throw these potent phrases out  and some people would glaze over, but the ones who didn’t would sit up, eyes wide, and say ‘tell me what that is!’ Using the language and phrases we’d worked on, she could move into why it’s necessary. ‘This is a whole new phase in the collective consciousness, we each have to decide what is right, healthy, and holy and make every choice based on that. We are in transition from an Empire to a new form of society that honors individuated sovereignty needed for effective collaborative unity.’ What she saw is that the right people, her people, would get it and love it and eat it up, and others would be really clear it wasn’t for them.

Now, when calls come in from referrals, she can, as she describes it, “go boom, boom, boom, and talk about it. If someone challenges what I say, I can respond without feeling awkward. ‘Here’s why I do it the way I do it.’ I am calling the right people in. If someone says to me, ‘I just want to do the numbers’, I can respond ‘No, you won’t sustain your new habits, your growth, your Vision without the Vision inner awareness and deprogramming  work.’

Aine says, “I used to think if I couldn’t explain what I did to EVERYONE, I wasn’t doing a good job. I realized I don’t have to. I only need to explore what I do with the people who light up when they hear me speak.

What I would say to anybody who has a large vision and is doubting that it is possible to talk about it, know that it’s so important to connect to and speak to that larger vision, because it will juice you and give you the energy to take your next steps.”

She says, “Through your training, I became more coherent. While I was healing from mold poisoning and doing NO outreach, I had more clients than ever. I wasn’t even posting on Facebook about my work. I was posting about social justice. I am getting more clients, I’ve turned people away. I am literally embodying what my true work is. There is an energetic magnetic that is happening. “

She concludes, “This clear communication is what my dreams have been telling me about dissemination.  It’s not about me, it’s the message I want to bring to the world.”

You can follow Aine on Facebook at Aine Dee (https://www.facebook.com/aine.dee.1) or find more about Wealth Reimagined at https://www.facebook.com/WealthReimagined/ and www.wealthreimagined.com.

Partly because I’ll be sharing some stories from my brilliant clients with you over the coming weeks, so it’s on my mind.

And because clients often ask me about how they can best collect their own stories.

Some of the confusion I think is because of what we see out there in the world.

We see testimonials that basically say “Person-I-worked-with was great, amazing, wonderful.” Which is nice, but doesn’t say an awful lot.

Or we see the magical makeover kind of story/testimonial, stories that are so dramatic they can inspire a kind of queasiness: “I was a pathetic disastrous mess, and now I am confident, beautiful, and making tons of money!” Or “No one was signing up for my teleclass, and now, I made $50,000 on my last teleclass offer.”

For me, as a reader, these kinds of rags-to-riches stories make me feel a little unsettled.  The change too great to feel real, even if it is.

And it stirs in me a kind of shame.  I feel guilty, or anxious, or embarrassed that in my own life, I haven’t seen that kind of miraculous transformation. That I’ve plugged away, or gotten smaller results, and I want to learn the secrets, but I don’t want to spend the money, take another class or program, and I’m not sure I really believe in the promise. It awakens a kind of rootless wanting that isn’t easily filled.

And my body knows that something is missing from these stories. A level of complexity. An acknowledgment of the hurdles,  the ups and downs, the setbacks —  really, the messy middle. The messy middle where things were confusing, or didn’t make sense, or something big had to be let go of.

To me, the messy middle is where the magic in the story lies. It’s in the struggle, the ups and downs that the wisdom comes forward, not in the sexy, simplied before-and-after. The messy middle is the substance, the meat of the story. It’s why we read memoir, and autobiography, or fairy tales. Because the details and specifics of the journey matter.

Writing your own client stories to include the messy middle, to be more gritty and less fantastical, requires a few things.

It requires believing that your audience is smart and can handle complexity.

It requires believing that people aren’t just buying an outcome, a result, a solution, they want to understand your process and decide if it’s for them.

It requires believing that more subtle changes and growth are as worthy of celebrating as the knock-it-out-of-the-ballpark outcomes. That intangible outcomes are as worthy as bottom line ones.

It requires believing that you deserve to take up more time and space to tell the story you want to tell.

When we write these kinds of stories, we do a lot better by our audience. We honor their intelligence. We tell them a story that is about more than just how great we are. We focus less on proving the value of our work, than we do on revealing the method behind our madness.

If it’s useful, here’s how I develop my client stories:

1. When I know a client has had a positive experience with me, I ask if they are open to my sharing their story. And if so, if they’d take some time on the phone with me to talk about it.
2. If they say yes, I interview them, maybe 20-30 minutes. I take notes and I also record the call so I can go back if needed to check the details.
3. On the call, I look at three basic questions: where were they before we started working together, what happened during our work that was an aha or game-changer for them, and what is happening now that they attribute to our work together. I may ask what else they tried before working with me, or ask for more concrete details. I’ll mention my own recollection of what happened in key moments and ask them to confirm their experience and put it in their own words.
4. Using the notes I took during the call, I write up the story, the long version of the story. For clients in my communication training, I often include samples of the language we developed in our work together.
5. I send the story to the client to review and correct. Sometimes I get details wrong, or there’s a nuance to what they said that I didn’t capture.
6. Once we have a version we are both happy with, I ask for permission to use the story in full, or excerpted form.
7. Not always, but often, I’ll share a link in the story to my client and their web site, so that their work gets more exposure.

Potential and eventual clients have told me how useful it’s been for them to read these longer stories. That is gives a clearer, more detailed picture of what it’s like to work with me. That it has conveyed the depth of the work I do with people, and how it’s different from the typical business/marketing approaches out there.

Doing it this way also takes the burden of the client of having to craft the story, which isn’t their job any way. It’s gets you out of waiting and hoping that they’ll pull something together.

There’s so much joy for me in this process of collecting stories. I love celebrating with the client  the journey we took together. It reminds me on rough days of the power of the work I am doing. It guides and shapes how I continue to message what I do.

Is there some of this approach that might apply to you?

Is there a way you can better celebrate your client’s successes?

New ways you can harvest those stories to express in the world the magic that you create?

It takes tremendous energy to show up, to communicate whole heartedly, to build multiple relationships the way we do when we have a business to nurture and advocate for.

I’m not talking about the effort to rally to write a series of articles or a promotional email. I’m talking about the more enduring effort.

Showing up with a full heart, with something to say, with courage to say it, with willingness to step forward requires a constant returning to center, an anchoring in, a nourishing of courage and strength and depth.

And in a busy modern life, that can be hard to find.

I struggle with it. How about you?

I have moments where I am on fire. Where some notion takes a hold of me and comes tumbling out of me. Where something in me demands to be said and won’t let me go until it has shape and words.

But other days, I am tired. I didn’t sleep well. The kid is home sick. I get distracted by Facebook. I schedule too much important life stuff and it crowds out my thinking and writing time.

I see how easy it can be to hide away. Days and weeks slipping by. I don’t flatter myself that people are wondering, worrying about me.

But I also sense this. If I am not that beacon. If I am not emitting a homing signal every now and then, then I disappear.

And if I disappear, my work doesn’t get served. My people don’t get served. There’s a little less magic and potent expression in the world.

The answers I am finding for myself aren’t simple or formula-friendly.

First, take exquisite care of yourself. Attend to your sleep and your food and the demands of this lovely body. Our bodies can be our allies, our homes, our guides to finding what we want to say.

Stay connected and engaged in the world. Read, wonder, ask questions. Allow yourself to be stirred. Provoked. Enraged. Enlightened. A part of something bigger.

And keep asking yourself, over and over, what’s inside that I can bring forward.

Like the baby’s ask for milk creates more supply, keep asking yourself.

What do I have to say today?

What do I have to share?

How simply can I bring it out in the world?

Truth is I am only just emerging from this swirling time of stepping back. This time of reevaluating and recalibrating how I engage in the world. The demands of my personal life have left me at times depleted, wrung dry. Unable to find the energy to foist myself and my vision out into the world. I landed in June worn to the bone, my spirit paper thin.

I am still building the health and energy and support I need to bring forward this emerging expression of myself and of my work. And it’s clear now that the energy is building, and the path is opening up in front of me.

I have a clarity now that I didn’t three years ago. A sense of myself as solid ground that wasn’t there before.

In some ways, things may not look that different on the outside.

I continue to offer my Put the Mojo in Your Message training, my deep dive into intimacy with your message, which offers liberation from old patterns and an expanded capacity to share yourself and your work with the world.

I am still running my Action Circle (though I anticipate the form may change somewhat for 2017).

I still do my free events: the Annual “Planning” Day, and my Wild Business Writing Retreat.

I am still taking private clients through the clarifying self-awareness thet comes fro defining their True Spirit and True Wisdom.

But I am no longer caught up in the old dance of complicity with the half-truths, myths, and damaging stories about what we have to do and who we have to be to have fulfilling and thriving businesses. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there is more letting go to be done.)

I am less easily distracted or seduced by bright and lovely new things.

I am committed to making every class or session with clients a container for Catalytic Recognition. That moment of clarity about who you are and what you do that changes forever how you move forward, that expands your capacity to be out in the world in an effective way. I am committed to helping my clients take full Energetic Ownership of the work that wants to come through them, beyond having good copy or an on-point tag line.

I am yearning for more intimate work with clients, not bigger groups of clients. I am saying no to “leveraging” my business and rather making more room for private work alongside of the group work I am more known for.

I am yearning for more long-term work with clients, helping them beyond the initial discoveries of what they are here to share and offering ways we can continue to work together to bring new language forward, define the nuances of their message. To be a partner on the ongoing journey of unfolding their work and their ideas.

Navigating the bumps and troughs of being an alive, fully expressed human being out in the world making myriad decisions about who to be and how to be and how to bring that to the world so they can be seen and heard and paid and valued for what they do.

Are you feeling it too? A shift in the landscape of business? A change in your own willingness to play the old games or do things the way you’ve been told? An impatience to finally speak what you know and love and believe that’s gotten blocked up and bottled up somehow? Many of you have written to tell me that you do.

Are you tired of being told you are too much, too intense, too verbose, too esoteric? Is something emerging in your work that needs space, and air, and support and encouragement? I’d love to know.

As part of this rebirth, I am also reworking how I use email and social media to connect, communicate, and interact with people interested in the things I am interested in.

Going forward, I anticipate sharing more spur of the moment insights and perspectives inspired by my classes and clients throughout the week on my Facebook page. I anticipate making this email list more of a monthly or bi-monthly digest of what I’ve been sharing elsewhere as well as straight-forward notification about upcoming events or offers.

I look forward to sharing the journey with you.