Is this missing when it’s time to talk about your business

One of the things I work on with clients that I don’t see offered anywhere else is something called Story.

(Yeah, Story is what I call tricky language. It means different things to different people in different contexts.)

When I say Story I don’t mean:

  • Your inner narrative about what is happening and what it means
  • Your personal rags to riches or overcoming obstacles trajectory

In my world, Story is the way you unfold a picture of the work you do and why it matters in a way that brings someone else along for the ride.

Story is the unfolding of ideas and pictures of what you know about the people you love to work with, what you see is possible for them, and the journey you know is required for them to have that possibility.

Story is all the real substance and content, the meat and the material, of what you want to say to the world. The concepts, the ideas, the images you want to bring forward so other people see what you see is possible for them.

In our regular business world, what you mostly hear about is writing Copy. Words for your business activities.

But every Copy class I’ve ever taken ASSUMES that you essentially know what you want to say, and then you are taught how to write headlines, and bullet lists, and use certain language formulas to enhance curiosity and to write a killer call to action.

All of those are good skills. But for my clients, what they struggle with is “What exactly am I saying? What is the message I am delivering? What parts of my work do I need to focus on to start? How do I paint a picture of what happens for a client when they work with me?”

Especially when the outcome and the experience of your clients is deep, and rich, and nuanced, and complex.

If you don’t have the answer to those questions, all the headlines and calls to action in the world won’t help.

And it doesn’t usually work to have some expert or guru listen to you for 15 minutes and tell you what the message is. It takes more excavation and exploration than that to dial in the right message. The True One.

So I take my clients on this developmental journey of writing their Story.

I help you walk step by step through three critical elements:

  • Expressing the deep love and understanding you have of the people you want to work with
  • Painting a picture of how great life can be once they work with you and experience the profound difference your work makes
  • Illustrating the journey they’ll go on with you

On one hand, it’s super practical. Once you’ve written your Story, and streamlined it, it becomes the starting point for all your copy writing. Clients tell me how amazing it is to feel that they are no longer starting from scratch when it’s time to write.

On the other hand, there is an equally important inner journey that happens as we work through this. It’s hard work, and a lot of clients say that without the structure and accountability of our work together, they wouldn’t stay with it.

This is the place you confront what you do and don’t know. This is place you wrangle with your ability to assert that beautiful things happen when people work with you, and to claim the full scope of those wonderful things. This is the place you decide what needs to be part of this first conversation with people, and what is cool information, but could be introduced later on the path with someone.

This is the place you have to translate your big ideas and passion into illuminating concrete details that help someone see, hear, feel, and smell what it’s like to be in your world.

It’s not for the faint of heart!

And yet, this is the point in the Message Development process where all the work we’ve done comes together. This is where clients rise into a new level of ownership of who they are and what they bring to the world. This is where that Story gets internalized and starts to color everything you write and everything you speak, even if you never revise your existing website.

This is where you step into the full magnificence of who you are. Into a way of being in the world where people can feel your heart beat. Into being able to quickly get to the good stuff when you show up and share who you are.

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