Do you own a small business? The business plans are done; you learned about advertising and have your ‘elevator pitch’? Perhaps you have been in business for a while and you sense there could be more? The important questions is, ‘How much are you engaging with your customers, and how much is your business engaging with them?’
You and your business are not one in the same. Consider this: pretend your business is another person that has its own voice and desires. There are two advantages to this: It gets you out of your head since you have no way to compute this and, it opens up another way of looking at something. Just be present and allow what is coming up. Don’t interrupt it. You get to review it all when the exercise is done. Have a pen and paper or a recorder ready to record what your business is ‘saying.’
Here is how you should go about engaging with this exercise:
Main Target of Business
What is the main target of you for your business? As mentioned above, pretend your business is a person. Is this also the main target of the business? If not, what is the main target of your business? Is this a contribution to the customers/clients and their lives? Is it a contribution to your life? In which ways is this the case with both questions?
Ask your business questions
You could ask your business the following questions:
- Does it plan on growing?
- How would it go about it?
- What is working for it and what isn’t?
- What desires does it have?
You can also come up with your own additional questions.
The purpose of this exercise is to get you out of your head and open up other ways and perspectives of looking at your business, that you may not have considered before.
Take notes throughout your exercise and be contemplative when you read them. How do you feel about them? What interesting tidbits did you get that you can use in writing about your business, be it on a website, a brochure or even talking to other business owners or customers?
But wait, there’s more!
Here are 3 suggestions to keep in mind when you do the work suggested above.
Conclusions and Judgment
Be clear if you have any conclusions or judgments as to how things are supposed to be. If you have them, you can only see what is within the framework of these conclusions and judgments. I would like you to consider the suggestion Louise Evans makes to master your communication through owning your behavior. She talks about how judgment, self doubt, curiosity, self awareness, and listening with care of others, impact our success. When judgment is present, there is also a desire to be right. With self doubt, we tend to disappear. Neither one gives us words that will connect with others and invite them into our world.
Being Your Authentic Self
“Unless you are willing to be you, you will try to blend in,” says Derek Halpern. He continues: “What blends in gets forgotten. What stands out gets remembered.” I can remember well the time when I was blending in. Everything I said had to be right for everyone. If you continue to live by this, there is hardly anything you can say without going into judgment of yourself. There is no way you can say what is important for you since you know that there will be a person who does not agree with it. So why not be your authentic self in what you do and say? Being yourself, there is automatically an interest in others, your customers, your employees, the people you surround yourself with. You are engaging them, which pulls them in.
Asking Questions
In the exercise above, I invited you to ask questions of your business. Now, it’s time to ask questions about what is going on in the world that affects your business and what’s going on in your industry. This allows you to ask questions about how to be strategic and prepare for the future. Hal Gregersen in his article “To Find a Better Solution, Ask a Better Question,” shows several examples on how asking questions allows new possibilities to be recognized. He also talks about the effect of not asking questions and how that can destroy a business.
So, let’s get back to working with the notes from the exercise. What have you become aware of that you did not know before? How can you phrase this in your marketing material, keeping in mind the above suggestions? What do you have to be or do to implement what you learned? The answer to this question is not in what others tell you to be, rather it is in the knowing you have when you are being who you truly are. In the beginning, this be an uncomfortable exercise, as anything new is. But, it will pass quickly if you are willing to embrace these ideas and questions and be your authentic self. In my personal experience, acknowledging any new behavior makes it so much easier to do it again.
With every success, life becomes more fun. Who said that having a business couldn’t also be fun? It should be, why would you do it otherwise? Having fun creates a lot more ease with everything.
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