More Clients - the Online Marketing Newsletter
for Independent Professionals
from Action Plan Marketing
and Robert MiddletonIn This Week's Issue: You know you have a lot to contribute but are you being held back by "heart blocks"?
I'm now on the last legs of my European sojourn and just arrived in Paris. So that I actually get a vacation, I've asked another one of the members of the InfoGuru Support Forum to contribute an article this week. This one is from Mark Silver from Portland Oregon.
How to Clear Deadly Heart Blocks in Your Business
I have a client who just broke through a haze of vagueness in her business. When she came to me, she had some extremely powerful skills, a sincere heart, but a floundering business.
What was she vague about? She wasn't vague about the skills she brought. Nor was she vague about the value she held (although she had normal, human doubts). She was vague about who she was helping, and what problem they were facing.
Why was she vague? Because she didn't know where her "calling" was, and she was really frustrated from trying to find it. And, she saw that the skills she had could help a lot of people. Unfortunately, "a lot of people," was an expression of that vagueness that stopped her marketing from moving forward.
Vagueness is deadly in business. Business happens, by definition, through contact between you and your customers. If you don't make contact, you don't give to them, and they don't give to you. No business.
All it takes is a little bit of vagueness to keep you from making contact with your customers. You can be 95% in the clear, and still, when you are looking for your customers, and more importantly, when your customers are looking for you, you can miss each other in that 5% fog bank.
What causes vagueness? Well, the obvious answer is lack of knowledge, but it's not that simple. Have you ever worked at something, worked really hard at it, and yet, for some reason, you kept drifting away from, dancing around, avoiding one aspect?
Why is that? What are you avoiding? You aren't lazy. You ain't stoopid. You aren't even cursed.
You've got what we might call a "heart block." What I mean is, there is some emotional -thing- going on in your heart (or your belly) that is making it VERY uncomfortable for you to look at the place of vagueness. Maybe it feels overwhelming. Maybe there is something scary about it. Maybe it feels exhausting.
Let me explain how I helped my client clear her fog.
I helped her make a guess at her calling in business, which turned out to be a wrong guess. Trying to live in that wrong guess made her feel deadened and dull. But before this she had avoided any guess, and instead had been living in the vagueness, unable to connect with very many clients.
The dead feeling turned out to be a clue that helped her find a core fear that, once she faced it, provided the break-through moment of clarity allowing her to name and begin to stand in her true calling.
If you are living in a fog bank around some part of your business, here's what I want you to do:
First, use all of your brain power, information, and tactics to get as clear as possible about areas of vagueness in your business.Second, with the areas of vagueness that are left, notice how they make you feel. (Note: if you have no areas of vagueness left, go make a million bucks, and tell me about it.)
Third, if you notice emotions around the vagueness, you've located the "heart blocks." Let the emotions come up, make space for them, and use a heart-centering practice like the Remembrance (described in my free workbook) to let them come up and out.
Once the emotion is faced, and the underlying issue is cleared, the fog can lift. For my client, she came out of the fog of not owning her own strength and clarity, by moving through some uncomfortable fear.
The result has been that now she knows without a doubt exactly who she can help, and she is moving rapidly ahead writing copy for her web site that had had her stumped for months. She's excited, and feels alive.
Mark Silver
Heart of Business
http://www.heartofbusiness.com
The InfoGuru Support Forum
Mark Silver has been an active participant in the Support Forum for about a year and a half (with almost 500 posts to his name). I think Mark is our most heartfelt and compassionate contributor to the Forum. His willingness to reach out and give assistance is truly inspiring.
What I like about Mark's contributions is that he looks at what he calls "The Heart of Business" (the name of his company) and provides a perspective on the human-to-human connections inherent in all business and marketing relationships.
Mark is one of the hundreds of people who populate the InfoGuru Support Forum with ideas, information and insight into how to attract more clients with less struggle and effort.
Listen to this quick audio clip where Mark shares his experience of the Forum (52 seconds).
http://www.actionplan.com/mp3files/MSForum.mp3The only way to join the Forum is by owning the InfoGuru Marketing Manual. Check it out below!
http://www.actionplan.com/infoguru.html
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Yes, it will take some work on your part, but the guesswork about how to make it all work will be a thing of the past. You'll have a very clear process to create a web site that gets the attention and interest of potential clients.
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Until next week, all the best,
Robert Middleton
ACTION PLAN MARKETING
Cracking the Marketing Code for Independent Professionals~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
210 Riverside Drive
Boulder Creek, CA 95006
831-338-7790© 2005 Robert Middleton, All rights reserved. You are free to use material from the More Clients eZine in whole or in part, as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link. Please also notify me where the material will appear. The attribution should read:
"By Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. Please visit Robert's web site at http://www.actionplan.com for additional marketing articles and resources on marketing for professional service businesses."
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