Marketing to Yourself
Who is your greatest critic? Nobody cares so much about your business as you do and so you are your greatest critic. Your greatest challenge is marketing to yourself !
Your Greatest Critic
Every business owner carries around a miniature version of themselves, who sits on their shoulder and whispers criticism in their ear. Don’t believe me? Where do you hear things like:
- It won’t work.
- I know I have something to say, but I don’t know how to say it
- I’m stuck.
- I feel like a failure.
- I can give better advice to others than I can to myself.
- If it does work, I have to do it again because things change all the time.
Critics are famous for being negative. So much so that critical is synonymous with being negative. But critics do dish out praise. We’ve all seen five-star reviews. Why do we see criticism as essentially negative?
The trick is to turn your negative critic into a positive critic. How? Listen to your critic and work out the story it is telling you.
You learn a lot from marketing to the world but you must also learn to market to yourself.
What’s Your Line?
- What is the story you tell yourself?
- Is it helping you?
- What story could you pay attention to that would be more helpful?
Creative Destruction
What does it mean to market to yourself? If you do your marketing the right way, you make changes to the world. You need to come up with something fresh because old ways change nothing.
This is why there is so much more to marketing than the latest technique. If you have nothing new to share, you cannot change anything, whatever technique you use.
You may be a life coach and compete with a thousand other life coaches. What makes you and your offer different? What makes you stand out? Nothing? Or is that your critic speaking?
When you stumble upon the one thing that makes you different, everything changes. It is an act of creative destruction. The world shifts and now you have to start over again, building something new.
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