Visibility Matters

Visibility is probably my favourite subject and it’s the thing that people come to me for the most. They're just terrified of it. Terrified, terrified, terrified. 

They have to get themselves out there, and quite a lot of the time, they don't know the impact of it. So if, for example, someone had a successful podcast, they would definitely know the impact of it… They’d know that people listen to them, like them, give them feedback, and probably have ideal clients come towards them. So they've got a purpose. Whereas when people are starting out in business, they don't know the value of a podcast or video. They don't know if when they record a video and put that somewhere, whether they're going to get someone troll them, whether someone's going to think they're brilliant or say, “Who the hell do you think you are?” They don't know what that feedback is going to be. So that's the first problem - it's not valuable enough for them.

Sometimes it's because they don't think they're qualified, so sometimes it's about the content of it. If we start to talk about things we really think and feel passionately about, we leave ourselves vulnerable and open to someone going, “that's not right”, whereas actually, our feelings are our feelings and we could get hurt. We don't like the feeling of rejection, or somebody not agreeing with us. Most people don't like any sort of conflict or confrontation, which essentially, when we're thinking about visibility, we typically do have. So we have to become a bit more resilient, but we're not that resilient as people. Until social media arrived, we didn't have to like people we didn't like, we didn't have to see people we didn't get on with, we didn't have to see competitors unless they were advertised. The whole world has changed, and now we all have to kind of get along. 

Let's talk about the 4 FEAR STATES: Fight, flight, freeze and fawn. We haven't evolved much from living in caves, where we needed these states for survival.

Today we still have the same responses to every day challenges. Mostly subconsciously.

Freeze and fawn are what they call inactive states. The stuck states. Staying stuck is nice and safe! ‘If I just sit here, like Bambi in the headlights, and don't do anything, then nothing bad can happen.’ Or, ‘if I people please ‘fawn’, nobody will dislike or disagree and there won't be anything tricky to deal with’. SAFETY IS THE GOAL.

Fight and fight are the active states. ‘We're going to move forward, we've got to do something.’ Movement towards or away from, anything but staying still to get found out. SOLUTIONS ARE THE GOAL.

✅️ To shift, the trick is to get yourself from an inactive stuck state, into an active state. 

✅️ To avoid overwhelm and anxiety, we need to enter an inactive state and just stop forca while and rest.

The main thing to understand with regards to your NEXT LEVEL BUSINESS BUILDING is the value of the marketing and visibility tasks. It's no longer that you are a target or being chased by a dinosaur! Creating the belief and know it for sure, that whatever happens, you can deal with it because you have become quite resilient. 

The biggest trolls I get are on YouTube, and there's some stuff like “Okay, Grandma, what do you know?”. It’s like they're written by 12 year olds. Most of the time, it’s not even real. But once you realise that all people out there that might comment really have no bearing on anything, you start to get out of your own way. If I think about a 12 year old sitting behind their computer in India, that’s got nothing to do with my business, so I don't really care what they think. However, if one of my peer group talks about me in a different way, then I care, and that's probably what most people are scared of. 

This is a big subject, imposter syndrome sits at the back of it all. That comparisonitis - “Oh, they're better than me… they talk about it a lot more… they look nicer… they've got better hair” blah blah blah. We make all sorts of excuses, don't we?

The biggest challenge with putting out content to create visibilty is that we don't get the feedback immediately. We can't adjust and people please (fawn), we can't run or fight… so, we simply freeze!

When you think about having a conversation in real life, which is what we're designed for, it's a two way street. You and I would sit in a room before social media existed, I would say something, and I would watch your physiology and hear your verbal response. We heavily rely on rapport to feel safe and accepted, we're unconsciously tuned in to it. Even if we're not experts on rapport, we're tuned into that distaste, or that acceptance, or that feeling, or whatever that reaction is. We're looking for the response to make sure that we are safe!

We don't get that on podcast, on video channels, with blogs, social posts, stories and reels… until it's ‘out there’. If we write a blog, we don't get that required response until someone comes and gives us it and we're scared of the unknown. We want feedback immediately to know we're going in the right direction, or we don't want feedback for somebody to tell us we're not going the right direction. 

When my clients are panicking about doing something new, I tell them to just do it. It's never going to be easy that first time - nothing ever is. You just live and learn and you get on with it until it becomes the norm. New is always scary or exciting, there's a fine line between fear and excitement. Adrenaline is adrenaline!

❎️ It’s the fear that stops us. Or not feeling valuable enough or a lack of skill. Most women in business are terrified of tech. They’ll say things like they’ve got the wrong tech, what if they attach the microphone wrong and people can’t hear them? It's just all excuses, but the key thing I have to remember is that it matters to their inner child.

The first step I will take with any client is to work out if there are any real mindset blocks, trauma or conditioning. I.e. They stood up in class and they were made fun of, or they wet themselves; you know, things that happen to children. Or they spoke up in a meeting at work and they lost their job, or they were made to feel humiliated. There could be some real mindset shifts that we need to do from these hidden blocks - some deep structure belief change work. That's the first place I always start. If those blocks are there, it doesn't matter what physical, external marketing strategies and business skills I'm helping people with, those internal, subconscious blocks will keep blocking. We need to understand what is causing that fear, then we need to make sure that it's valuable enough to take the risk. We need make sure that what they're going to say to get out there has got enough power that is going to be valuable enough. So we need to make sure that it's fabulous because putting out luke warm, crappy, boring content is just of no value whatsoever, and therefore when you can post, you  gather momentum to do it and get no response, then that's going to stop you as well because it hasn't got any outcome. See, it's a tricky little trickster!

CLARITY IS KEY!

Our brain is very much driven towards outcome, so we need to then work out what we need the outcome to absolutely be, because if we're doing stuff and getting no outcome, then the stuff we are doing isn't right for the outcome. We need to be clear what we're doing. We need to make sure there's no blocks, we need to make sure that what we're saying achieves what we need it to, in which case we need to know what that outcome is. And once we can get all of that lined up powerfully, which is normally a one session thing, then people are driven towards it. They're more likely to shift and move because now they've got clarity, they've got courage, they’ve got confidence, they've got skill - they make sure they know how to do it. 

If you need some help to get move past your blocks and get clarity on what you want your outcome to be, then do get in touch, because if you don’t get that clarity, you simply won’t do the thing you know you need to do. It has to be valuable enough for you to do it, but often you don’t know what that value is yourself.