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,” meant pure muddiness for her marketing, and how she was going to spend each business day.
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.
Clarity is like plugging into a wall socket.
A small little wire meets another small little wire, and the result is a huge jolt of energy. That energy, properly channelled, means the difference between your business being dead in the water, or moving forward.
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. (See my ezine “Help! I’m Lazy”- link at the end.) 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.
Today, as I was wondering what to write in this ezine, I got a call from my mastermind buddy Jason. As we were talking, he was offering me help with a part of my business, as good mastermind buddies do.
The funny thing is, after we hung up, I realized that I completely blanked out what he had said. Guess what? I found myself a “heart block.” People can offer me all kinds of help and information, but until I take some time to clear the heart block, the vague fog will persist in this one area.
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.
Any part of your business been stumped for months?
Keys to Finding Your Way Through the Fog.
- There are a lot of places to be vague about, but here are the major areas:
- The exact identity of who your best customers are.
- The exact description, in their own words, of the problem you help them with.
- Your offer of help: HOW it’s delivered, RESULTS it produces, COMMITMENT required of the customer to participate. -Note: Your offer must be clear in how it connects to #1 and #2.
- Infrastructure you need to deliver all aspects of your business, including marketing, as well as product/service delivery.
- Support you need to carry out your infrastructure.
If your business isn’t thriving, chances are there is a fog of vagueness covering one of these, so take a close look at all five, discover where the vagueness is covering discomfort.
- Make space for the discomfort. Of course it’s uncomfortable, that’s why it’s vague- you’ve been avoiding it. To see it clearly means you’ll have to sit with some discomfort. Allow yourself to feel the emotion, agitation, discomfort that is there, and be patient and gentle with yourself.
- Spend time in spiritual practice, at least 15 minutes a day. This may seem like a lot, but if you are in the fog, I’m sure you waste more time than that already. Taking 15 minutes a day with your heart, more if you need it, helps you to build a relationship of clarity with your heart that is accessible even in the fog.
