Talk about what’s holding you back.
Talk about that feeling you feel before speaking in front of others.
Talk about the fear that never let you leap.
Talk about how unease you are when somebody asks a direct question.
Talk about the challenge in putting your work out there.
Talk about how difficult it is to say you were wrong.
Talk about the knots in your stomach before meeting someone you like.
Because as you talk about all of this, you take the first step to make it all go away.
At the beginning of this year, I had a few things I wanted to achieve in 2019.
Now I can say I have managed to stick to my three resolutions. I am particularly happy, and surprised, by the fact that I have managed to blog every day. It’s not always been easy, not always rewarding, at times almost a burden, and yet 368 blog posts later I am proud I have continued doing it.
It helped my confidence in writing, cleared my thoughts, cristallized some ideas. It made me face the fear of the blank page (and blank mind) in many occasions, as well as overcome the pressure of metrics and analytics. And most of all, it strenghtened my practice and made me even more comfortable in the day-to-day act of doing.
If you also have something to be proud of tonight, remember to celebrate.
Not the new year, not a new beginning, not the hope that it will be different. Celebrate your success, the difficulties you’ve overcome, the intensity of achieving. And celebrate continuity, because change is very rarely the product of a sudden revolution.
This one is to me, and to you.
Happy New Year!
The more words you use to describe what you do, the less the chances it’s going to be relevant for the person you are introducing it to.
We got used to jargon, adverbs, adjectives, buzz words, complex sentences, convoluted paragraphs, confusing language tricks and zero substance. Our brain is trained to disconnect as soon as things get too fuzzy. We lose our audience before we can even explain what it is we do.
The antidote to this is talking to the people you want to serve.
For 99% of our awake time, we are ourselves people someone else wants to serve. Yet, when our roles switch, we start believing the same things that would get our attention and money need to be made more complicated.
No one has time to waste on your pitch, save them time and get to their point.
What if you would become an expert in things those you seek to serve are interested in?
What if, instead of 20 blog posts a month you would write only one this time around? And then the next month. And the next. And the next.
What if you would have the time to thouroughly research your topics, interview experts, collect data, put together arguments from different areas, come up with something truly original?
What if your content would be the single choice for those you seek to serve, the only one article they would seek, wait for, read in the whole month?
How many visitors, contacts, MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, deals would you get?
And, most importantly, how would it make you feel? How would it make your audience feel?
With the amount of possibilities out there, with all the options one has to learn new things and reinvent themselves, it is very easy to get stuck.
It is the feeling of never being enough, the search for perfection, the impression to always need something more before actually getting going.
It is resistance.
Sit down instead and do the work. You’ll get better at it with time, better also at judging what to adjust, in which direction to progress, what else to learn, who to listen to. Doing the work is the only way.
You've got this 