What’s your sausage?
Pull back the curtain!
You know that scene in the Wizard of Oz?
The one where Dorothy arrives at the Emerald City… and the wizard is being all intimidating and aloof… until Toto runs behind the curtain and finds this balding goofball, hiding behind his microphones?
That’s what we as service providers are called to do. Pull back the curtain. And show how the (ahem) proverbial sausage is made.
Look, I can teach you seven tricks from Sunday about how to write snappy copy.
But what I really want to show ya is how to amuse yourself so much that your joy and know-how is flippin’ CONTAGIOUS.
If there’s one thing I hope all my writing students learn from Stella, it’s this: your writing FORMULA is as important as your writing STATE.
That’s a little heady.
So let’s break it down.
Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to teach what you know.
Not from a place of desperation. Or practicality. Or even for a huff of the fumes of your own productivity.
And, for heaven’s sake, not from a place of MARKETING. Egads. Anything but that!
Rather, what if every word you wrote or spoke about your business came from the same spot that your favorite elementary school teacher taught from?
A place of wonder. Of awe. Of delight and enthusiasm. Of kindness and gentleness. Of guiding your flock to see some really cool stuff about this world. And to blow their minds about what’s possible.
Adults aren’t all that different from 10 year olds, you know. Most of us flippin’ LOVE field trips. And, believe it or not, your area of expertise is a field trip to the rest of us. We have no idea about the intricacies of your field.
We just want your sausage recipe.
So go ahead, let us see you geek out. Share your enthusiasm. Plumb the mysteries of your craft. Just leave the rest of us a step-by-step recipe for getting results.
Mighty thanks to txcrew for the photo of the Emerald City.
Oh, and in case you want MY sausage recipe: 1 pound ground pork, 1 teaspoon salt, ¼ teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper, 2 teaspoons toasted fennel seeds (slightly crushed), 3 tablespoons red wine (better taste it, just to be safe), 2 teaspoons chopped parsley, ½ teaspoon dried chile flakes. Mix well (don’t crush) with your hands. And make into meatballs, add to pasta sauce, fry it up as a patty. With thanks to Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food.
Is your website a dinosaur?
Has your website become an artifact?
There’s a curious phenomenon when it comes to websites.
At some point, your business outgrows your website. Maybe your target market has changed. Or the way you’ve worked with clients have shifted. Or your offers and programs have been totally redone.
But your website remains the same. An artifact of an earlier time in your business. Dinosaur bones.
When you find yourself in this boat, one of two things typically happen.
One, you bravely blaze ahead into writing new pages (but then your perfectionism flares up and you eddy out into a cycle of endless revisions, rewrites, and agony over whether it’s any good).
Two, you write “update website” on your To Do list. And that’s all you write. Until next month, you Rewrite “update website” on your To Do list again.
Now here’s the rub: all of this “not doing” is siphoning off a portion of your business building mojo.
Example: one of my Studio All Stars is an intuitive and coach, who’d recently made the decision to steer away from the feng shui work that she’d become famous for (she had her own TV show).
She rewrote her website with me this year, and she’s reported that walking into a room is a whole different experience. “I’m confident… ‘cuz my website rocks. It’s got my back.”
She reports: the process of creating a new website helped her get clear on how she helps her clients. And supercharged her excitement for her work.
For her, rewriting her website made it real.
And while I’m fond of telling business owners that they can go out and get new clients without a great website (which is true!), I totally get what she’s talking about.
There’s something to being in alignment with what you’re putting up in cyberspace.
So, does your website make you proud? Can you enter a room of strangers and feel totally confident about what they’ll see when they check out your URL? Stay tuned for tips and notions about how to get your website mojo workin’. Stella’s here to help you get the job done right.
Mighty thanks to ianturtan for the photo of the dinosaur.
Why your desk needs a spittoon.
Why not create a spittoon for your inner critic?
Dear Stella, I want to write like you. But I just sound so stiff and boring. What do I do?
Right now, your marketing doesn’t really sound like you, does it?
And maybe, until you and I started hanging out together, you didn’t even know that your marketing COULD sound like you. And sell like hotcakes. But more than that: that it was even POSSIBLE to write marketing that was INSPIRING.
It is possible, you know.
But if that’s the path you intend to walk, be prepared.
Be prepared for the voices that tell you: “You suck at this.”
“This is no good.”
“You sound like a self-serving jerk.”
“You’ll never get this right.”
These voices are your inner critics. And they’ve come to tinkle in your punch bowl. (Are you going to let them get away with that?!)
Lately, my students have been sharing what their inner critics say to them. And man, they’re a nasty lot. Snarky. Belittling. Cruel. (The inner critics, I mean. My clients are utterly lovely, every last one of them.)
And I just felt so sad when I heard this.
Because I realized that inner critics have been holding many of us hostage for far too long.
No one talks about this when they teach you how to promote your business. It’s all technique. No lessons in “what to do when your inner critic flares up and makes you feel like the bottom of your shoe.”
Well, let’s change that. Shall we?
Why not create a spittoon for your inner critic? A little jar will do nicely. Right on your desk. When you hear a voice that says “I can’t” or “this sucks” or “I’m miserable,” when you write your newsletter or sit down to crank out your next flier, write that down on a piece of paper, put it in your jar and say “Thank you. Farewell. And now I do my work.” Then do something else for 10 minutes to clear your mood. It can also be nice to do something like toss them into the fireplace, bury them, or dump ‘em down the garbage disposal.
Just a thought. Don’t let your inner critics keep you from spreading the word about the good work you do. Or your business.
Many thanks to Bahi P for the flickr Photostream of the spittoon.
What’s your jellyfish?
What’s your jellyfish?
It was 78 degrees in the Atlantic ocean on Sunday, and I was pretending to be tough.
My companions had decided they were gonna spring the extra 5 bucks for wetsuits.
Not me.
Never mind that I was covered in goose bumps.
It was a wet, windy ride out to the reef, after all. But I’ve been running every day for 4 weeks and—I’ll admit it—I was rocking my bikini.
Dangit! My people are from Minnesota! My uncle was a deep sea diver in Alaska! Why on earth would I need a wetsuit?!
Thankfully, the still small voice within has my number. She whispered: sweetie, you’re shivering. Remember, my love: there’s no pride in going hypothermic and sinking to the bottom of the sea.
So there I was, in the ocean in my goggles, snorkel, fins… and wetsuit. And I’m swimming around, looking at the fishies and the coral and BAM!
Out of nowhere, a jellyfish comes up and gets right in my face.
I totally spazzed. Lost my surfer-bro calm and flailed. FULLY.
Once my wits returned, I swam away, came up for air, and gathered my composure. Then I put my goggles and snorkel back on and went back to watching fish tv.
No more than 10 minutes later… BAM! A second jellyfish, up in my business. Same thing. Got spooked, flailed, had to come up for air and calm myself back down.
Around this time, one of my companions swam back to the boat. “I’ve had enough of these jellyfish.”
Not me. Snorkel and goggles back on… I turned back on my stomach and kept on swimming.
Some moments later… you guessed it. ANOTHER jellyfish. Again, I flapped my arms and legs like some sad, flightless bird.
And then?
I stopped.
And calmly paddled backward until I put a good 5 feet between me and the biggest jellyfish I’ve ever seen.
It was the size of a garbage can lid. Bubbleyum pink. It wasn’t floating like a flying saucer. It was sideways, like a cable tv dish.
And it was PULSING to propel itself forward.
For a tiny moment, I realized that this jellyfish wasn’t terrifying.
She was beautiful. She was alive. And she was at peace, just doing her thing, moving about the ocean. Just like me.
This morning, I sat down to do a little soul-searching. And I wrote out 4 questions to ask for guidance on:
- What do I desire?
- What’s really fun for me right now?
- What am I being called to learn?
- What’s bumming me out about my business?
And I realized that last question is my jellyfish. The things that are frustrating or scary or overwhelming in my biz can be admired and observed… they’re there, in this ocean we call life, just like me. But they’ll continue to cause me to lose my cool… UNTIL I learn to take a moment, paddle back, and watch so I can make a new choice.
What’s your jellyfish these days? If you’re feeling brave, leave a comment on the blog. And remember your wetsuit. There’s no pride in going hypothermic and sinking to the bottom of the sea.
If I see more of this, I will scream.
Alright, faithful reader. We’re about to get UNCIVILIZED up in here.
Stella’s about to get UNCORKED.
Grab your bucket of popcorn and sense of schadenfreude.
I just got a Facebook message from a woman I adore. She does INCREDIBLE work in the world. She is an AMAZING person. I would drag myself over hot coals in a swimsuit to help her succeed.
But not only that. She has an AWESOME personality. This woman lights up the room. She’s running one of those businesses where her clients seek HER out.
But when I read her message, I was crestfallen.
Totally bummed out.
And as her friendly neighborhood wordsmith, I didn’t know what to do.
So I’m writing about it. That’s what we wordsmiths do, after all.
In a nutshell, she was inviting friends and family to “like” her business fan page.
Okay, so we all do that, right? It’s step one: start with your inner circle.
But here’s what steams my clams: her “message” to us was totally impersonal and “boilerplate.”
In fact, if I recall correctly, she didn’t even say Hello.
It was just a bunch of paragraphs describing the work she does. And there were too many words, too many concepts, and it wasn’t fun to read. At all.
Here’s how it left me feeling: meh.
And here’s what I suspect is going on… as business owners, we move through our days with our task lists dangling out in front of us. We get to the task that says: “invite friends and family to ‘like’ Facebook fan page” and so we go do THAT.
I applaud the action. I just can’t STAND the STYLE of it. Makes me feel like she sent me a line item from her “to do” list. Bleh. No, thank you.
When Stella was younger, she loved the quirky and irreverent novelist Tom Robbins, who once wrote some of the best marketing advice since Emily Dickinson: It is content, or rather the consciousness of content, that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us; it is style that makes us care.”
Ah, there’s the rub. It is STYLE that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us; it is style that makes us care.
Amen to that.
The next time you find yourself with a writing task on YOUR “to do” list, Stella wants you to stop, drop, and roll.
STOP what you’re doing. DROP into who you are when you are connecting with people face to face. And ROLL that into the style of your writing.
Which means: lighten up. Put down the marketing megaphone. Write TO one person in your email or message. Think about how you open a live conversation with human beings when you are together in person. And then do THAT.
Know what Stella does when she’s tasked with writing an email, website, or sales page? She imagines she’s writing a letter to one person on the other end, who really needs to hear what Stella has to say. So my advice? Don’t write marketing. Write love letters.
Many thanks to Brent Schneeman for the Flickr Photostream of Things That Pop
