Previously, I wrote about the importance of focus in making your passionate expression succinct and clear. You can read about the first step here: https://isabelparlett.com/the-first-step-in-making-your-passionate-expression-clear-and-succinct/
Another way that passionate people derail their message is by leaving their core message undeveloped.
Often, when I look over someone’s web copy, I see seeds of good ideas, but those ideas never get fully fleshed out and their power and impact gets lost.
So, someone might say, “the key to empowerment is recognizing yourself as a spiritual being.”
But that great thought gets lost because you say it once and never come back to it.
Or someone will come to me and say “my work is all about empowerment.”
Great, but what about empowerment? You can’t just say that word and assume that your audience will associate feelings, pictures, or even desire with that word. Your audience may not know what *you* mean by empowerment. They may not know if empowerment is something that they want.
To make a case for what you offer, you need to answer questions like:
What does empowerment mean to you?
What does it look like, sound like, feel like?
What happens when someone starts to feel more empowered?
What becomes possible then? And why is it important, in the grand scheme of things, for people to have that feeling?
If you haven’t fully developed your thoughts, and looked at what you are trying to say from all the angles, your audience experiences you as more vague and less credible. When you have challenged yourself to think more deeply, and to answer all the questions that might come up when you present your ideas, people listen and think “oh, she really knows what she is talking about.”
And that can be the difference between making or losing a sale.
Now, here’s the challenge: so much of this material might seem obvious to you, it doesn’t occur to you it needs saying until someone asks you to say it. You may be so intimate and familiar with this material, you may find it hard to step outside yourself and see when you’ve said enough and when you are leaving your audience hanging.
You need someone who not only cheers you on, but also challenges you to be more rigorous in your thinking, and also your communication.
Smart business owners hire me, and come back to me periodically, because they know they can count on me to challenge them to think deeper, and to help them discover the answers to the questions they haven’t asked themselves yet.
If you want to be challenged to fully develop your ideas, to define your key terms, to anticipate objections and misconceptions about what you do, and to ask yourself why your work is so needed in our current times, you’ll want to register for our Words on Fire training. This is the only place I know of where you’ll be challenged to develop and put words to your ideas this way.