We’ve all been there. You want to create a new teleclass or send out that email announcement showcasing your services. But days pass and you just aren’t doing it. “I’m procrastinating,” you say. Yes, you are, but that’s not what’s really going on. Procrastination is a symptom. What’s really going on is fear.
The Impact of Fear on Building Your Practice
Many of us think we’re being positive because we’ve created a marketing plan and we’re working it, but unbeknownst to us our subconscious thinking is running the show. More than 90% of the time it’s in charge. And much of that thinking can be negative—self-limiting and fear. Thoughts like: Marketing is annoying to people. They’ll avoid me. Or, no one can afford coaching in this economy. Or, what if I fail?
If fear, doubt, and worry are operating in the background, they’re informing your actions (or lack thereof!) without your even realizing it. The result is sporadic or no marketing at all, which translates into struggle to fill your practice and lack of revenue. Even worse? You don’t really understand why you’re having such lackluster results.
The effect is similar to poor nutrition. Your body will run if you feed it junk, but how will it run? Will you have low energy and will it break down? Will you have a negative body image? So the question is: What’s in your system? Because it’s feeding the results you have. If negative, subconscious thoughts and feelings inform your actions, how do you boost your thinking full of the nutrients needed to operate optimally?
Getting Conscious
The first step is getting conscious—awakening to your subconscious beliefs around marketing; what you’re really thinking and feeling. What you, perhaps, didn’t realize was there. When you identify what those thoughts and feelings are about marketing and connect them to how they’ve mitigated your results, you’re able to finally unhook. You’re free to disengage from the fear and negative belief systems. This opens a space to create a new mental model for how marketing could look—one that resonates for you and allows you to capture the attention and interest of the people you most want to help.
To start, you go below the symptoms and identify the fears fueling the behaviors. I’ll walk you through a simple process to do that in a subsequent article, but let’s take a quick look at procrastination again. We said that it’s a result of fear. Let’s take that deeper. What is the fear? Often, it’s a fear of rejection. We think people will avoid us if we “bother” them with what we’re up to. It could also be a fear that you’re not trained enough, not credentialed yet, or that you won’t do it perfectly, or what if they say “no,” then, what?
What are your fears about being an entrepreneur? All of them can, and often do, lead to procrastination. Once, you’ve identified what’s putting the brakes on your lack of consistent, forward movement, you can address the real issue, and in doing so, eliminate its power to negatively impact building your practice.
Copyright 2009 Paulette Rao, MCC All Rights Reserved
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