What Special Permission Do You Need?
CJ Hayden in her excellent book Get Clients Now! advises giving ourselves a special permission as part of a marketing plan.
This is a brilliant idea because so many of us in the healing arts feel hesitant to market our practices in really full-on ways.
CJ suggests enacting your special permission a daily action task, and I have a few thoughts about that in this blog.
When you think of needing to market your private practice, what emotions run through you? Are you:
excited about networking with lots of new people?
eager to tell your personal story about how you got into the work you do?
confident about claiming your expertise?
No? Then, are you:
hesitant to claim you are any more professionally adept than your colleagues?
too shy to say much about yourself beyond where you got your degree?
insecure about your experience and competence due to being so new in practice?
Because marketing isn’t comfortable or familiar for a lot of us, it’s normal to feel reluntance to stand in the spotlight. And yet, we know we must become very visible in order for clients to find us.
Now there are many ways to do that ranging from extremely extroverted to totally introverted, but no matter the methods selected, any marketing strategy has the potential for triggering our own emotions. And too often, those emotions are an obstacle to using adequately powerful strategies.
So what’s the special permission you need to give yourself to get beyond your emotional obstacles to engaging in compelling client attraction marketing?
Do you need to be a little more bold about admitting what you’re good at?
Could you benefit from a little less perfectionism, and let good enough be good enough? Might it be useful to feel the fear and move forward anyway?
Once you identify what your special permission is, I recommend writing it out in big letters and posting it in view when you are working on your marketing action steps. I put mine right into the Excel spreadsheet that is modelled on CJ Hayden’s tracking form.
That way, every day when I’m working my way down the list of tasks, I’m reminded and encouraged to not be stopped by my fears.
Wanna know what special permission I need? It’s this ~ it’s okay to not have the perfect thing to say on the tip of my tongue, just start a conversation anyway…they won’t bite.
If you’d like to share your special permission, I’d love to hear about it. Post it on my Facebook page.
What’s the fear that stops you from standing in the spotlight as the spokesperson for your business?
