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A
Note from Mitch |
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Featured
Article: Do You Have The Courage To Be You? |
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Tip
of the Week |
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Market
Place |
Dear Subscriber,
Every now
and then you have an experience where you
actually say "aha!" to yourself.
I had one of those last week and I’d like
to share it with you.
I was coaching
a client around Guerrilla Marketing strategies.
We were using the GMToolkit as a guideline
to create a marketing plan and a compelling
marketing message to send to his prospects.
As I often do I asked him,” How would you
describe your business to a potential customer?”
His answer, like many of my clients, was
a little unclear but we worked together
to create a message that was impactful and
addressed the real need of his target audience.
We crafted
some some powerful language and I asked
him to role play it with me as if I was
a prospect. It was then I noticed something
even more significant than his words-- there
was a hesitancy to his delivery. At
that point, I mentally took off my marketing
hat and put on my psychologist hat. I knew
intuitively that whatever content we put
together, this was going to be a roadblock
to his success.
Realizing
the power of direct feedback, I pointed
out there was something in the way of him
powerfully presenting his business message.
I asked him if he had any ideas as to what
that was about. He thought for a second,
but without much hesitation said, “It’s
my father."
I had a hunch
that something like this might be true and
asked him some more questions. He continued
to tell me a story about when he was younger
and was criticized most of the time. Nothing
was ever good enough and his accomplishments
were almost always minimized. As a therapist
and coach I have seen this pattern many
times before. Oftentimes, when we are hesitant
to express ourselves fully, it is a result
of an old pattern of protection from criticism
in the past. The less we say, the less criticism
we would get. We spent the rest of the session
discussing this as a team and agreed this
roadblock would have to be addressed before
he would ever be successful in growing his
business.
This was
the "aha" experience for me: I
realized at that moment that the five years
I had spent grooming my skills as a marketing
coach tied in perfectly with the previous
eighteen years experience as a psychologist.
In other words, these two sets of strengths
used together created a much more powerful
growth experience for my clients.
There's an
old saying that goes," Wherever you
go there you are." This means that
unresolved personal issues will affect all
parts of your life including business. I
have seen this throughout my career and
written three books on the subject. And
now I feel more empowered than ever to bring
this in to my business and personal growth discussions
with my clients. To promote our business
in a powerful way requires that we understand
ourselves.
With this
client, we will be addressing some of these
roadblocks but even more importantly we
will also look at his true strengths and
how he can bring them more fully into his
business life.
Here are
some questions for you to ponder this
week: What are some of your roadblocks to
success? What are your greatest strengths?
In line with
my own strengths as a publisher of this
ezine, it has become very clear I will continue
writing about these three topics: Guerrilla
marketing, online marketing and psychology.
In light of that, I will be changing the
name of this ezine to Mitch Meyerson’s
Success Tips starting next issue.
In today's
issue I will talk about Having the Courage
to Be You. I think you'll enjoy it.
Next issue
we'll be back to Online Marketing.
To Your Success,
Mitch
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Quote For The Day:
“It takes a lot of courage to release
the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real
security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous
and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is
power.” - Alan Cohen
Do You Have The Courage To Be You?
by
Mitch Meyerson and Laurie Ashner
At
thirty-four, Dan was a latecomer to success. Corporate downsizing had forced him out of two jobs in three years. He was wondering how he was going to finance
another round of job hunting when the phone rang.
"Can you come over? Now?"
His neighbor sounded frantic. Her
home computer screen had gone black in the middle of a spreadsheet and the hard
disk was making an ominous whirring sound. She would give Dan anything if he'd come and raise this file from the
dead.
That's when the idea struck
him. That evening, he designed an ad. Doctor PC (alias Dan) would offer a series of
home computer lessons at a reasonable rate. Clients would be eligible for twenty-four hour emergency assistance.
Maybe it was the photo in the ad: a man with a crazed look in his eyes, waving
his fist at a computer. Dan was besieged
by calls requesting the information packet he'd promised.
But when Dan sat down to write his
brochure, he found it impossible to convey his ideas into a two-page leaflet. He was unable in fact, to set down a single
sentence that sounded good. He tortured
himself for weeks. He couldn't focus. In the end, he couldn't even look at his
computer. The brochure was never written.
In therapy, Dan came face to face
with a nagging, unconfronted truth: something
inside of him did not want to have a
successful business. The question was, Why?
None of us choose to deliberately
sabotage ourselves, but the sad reality is, very often we find ourselves like
Dan: all show and no go. "Why am I so lazy?" we lament, or
"Why can't I follow through on anything?" Laziness
is almost never the issue. Often it's feelings
of unworthiness. Dan was driven by fears
that he had failed in life and always would. What he had found was a way to use
the brochure as a way to further wound himself with failure just as he was experiencing
some success. Simply finding someone
else to write it for him never even occurred to him.
There are other people who start out
so beautifully, their results are so terrific, that they lose their nerve in a
fit of, "I'll never be able to keep this up." One woman wrote a poem that was extraordinary.
When it came time to seek a publisher, she
had a sudden impulse to quickly rip it up and forget about it. The problem? She'd almost driven herself crazy getting every word exactly right. Because she knew no other way to work than to
be hopelessly perfectionistic, all being a successful poet meant to her was going
through a wrenching process every time she put a pen to paper.
Many of us would love to have that
woman's problem. We've got the talent;
we just can't get started. Sara, a
twenty-seven year old account executive with one of Chicago's top public
relations firms, often came up with imaginative ideas for public relations
campaigns at night, just as she was trying to fall sleep. When it was time to write them down in a
proposal, she'd be beside herself. "All
of the sudden, the ideas just seemed, well, stupid." In truth, they were highly innovative and
exactly why her company hired her.
According to psychologists, a lot of
these mental blocks may have to do with an ongoing, internal conflict between a
true self--who we really are inside-- and a false self, a persona we create to
protect ourselves. When people like Sara
begin to pursue their goals, the necessity of asserting themselves, or putting
their deepest desires into action fills them with a sense of panic. Sara's true self was creative, spontaneous,
ambitious. But Sara's father had
different terms for these traits: "Stop living in a dream world!
Why don't you think before you act? Don't be so greedy." Her self-expression
became unconsciously tied to a feeling of being abandoned.
To avoid the fear and the depression
that would result if our real selves emerged, many of us create a false self which
restructures life and makes it "safe." The unconscious thought
is: "I'll give up being what would
truly make me happy in exchange for never feeling the pain of
abandonment." No wonder we can end
up at the top of our careers, wondering, "Is this all there is?" and
not feeling the slightest bit successful.
If you've felt the wind go out of
your sails right when you're closest to your desires, you're not alone. Keep
the following suggestions in mind.
1.
Creative discipline comes from pleasure. It's not a matter of throwing yourself against a wall repeatedly, as if
the pain will suddenly motivate you. The
most successful people are able to work hard at their goals because they love
what they're doing, not because they're so good at holding the whip over their
heads.
Are you ready to move forward? If not, why not? When you find that your body doesn't want to
cooperate with what your mind demands, sit down and compassionately ask
yourself what the trouble is. Is there
meaning for you in what you're attempting to do? Or are you dancing to someone else's
expectations?
2.
You have an important voice. You
have something to say in the world that matters. When your work, your relationships, and your
actions are an expression of that voice, you will feel and be successful. If you can't move towards a goal, perhaps
you're trying to climb a ladder that's against the wrong wall. Perhaps you need a deeper connection with yourself, or
someone to help you clarify your desires.
3.
You don't need to do it alone. Reaching out, delegating, synergizing--all of these tactics can help
unblock a block. If this kind of support
isn't available in your family or on the job, you can get it from support
groups or group therapy.
4.
Perfectionism, self-criticism, procrastination are patterns thousands of
people have, and today there are well-researched solutions that work to
overcome them. Why hold onto a
personality style with so many costs? Isn't
it time to find out what you can do about them?
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