Principle #8. Measure your success by how alive and on-point your message is

Too often I see people measuring the success of their message by how people respond. By how many people say they like the message. Or how many people opt in for the e-book, or how many people sign up for the program.

Those are important. Of course they are important.

But something gets lost when you make those your measures of success.

I want you to measure your success by how true you are being to yourself.

I want you to measure your success by the degree of rightness you feel when you right and speak.

I want you to be able to look at your website or your latest blog post and say “wow, this is me, this is EXACTLY what I want to be saying to the world.”

I want you to know undoubtedly that when someone says yes or no to you it’s because they got fully who you are and what you bring to the table. No hiding. No appeasing. No soft pedaling. No dancing around things.

Sometimes we don’t get the cookies and the yeses and the pats on the back when we first land on our real message.

That’s because we might be hanging out in the wrong crowd. Or because  people are shocked because we are showing up differently. Or because something we are saying is provocative and uncomfortable.

But it’s only when we show up in that full color that we not only connect, but we connect with the right people for the right reasons. Believe me, I’ve had clients who have no trouble getting people to show up for the wrong things, for the work they don’t really want to be doing.

We’ve got to get to that rightness first. To that sense of being on point and on message.

We might not do it perfectly at first. We might have the right message but rough edges in how we say it.

But when we keep saying the right message, as best we can, over and over, those rough edges get smoothed out. We see the better way, the right entry point, we find the turn of phrase.

So if we are patient, and we focus first on the aliveness we feel when we are telling the story we are here to tell, that’s where we start.

To me, there is a fulfillment in that that is unmatched by anything else. I’m here for a reason. I’m alive. I have a voice. I am using it.

And the more we do that, and the longer we do that, then we start to get the yeses, and the cookies, and the pats on the back. From the right people.  For the right things.