Are you an academic or executive function coach who HATES even the idea of marketing your business?
Do you catch yourself thinking:
I NEED to improve my website…
I NEED to post more often to social media…
I NEED to send more cold emails…
I so often hear one of two things from coaches in our community calls, either
1. They avoid marketing at all costs which negatively impacts their biz growth, or
2. They feel pressured to do MORE posting and emailing and all the marketing things which is sucking the joy out of owning their own business.
Can you relate?! If so, there is a better way!
Join me for today’s video, where we compare marketing to studying to uncover a simple principle that can make a huge difference. Click here to watch the video … or read on for a summary.
I just had the funniest realization. I was thinking about the problems that the coaches in my Rock Your Biz training program have with marketing–with learning how to market their services as academic or executive function coaches–and it occurred to me the word “marketing” is so much like the word “study.” And in this video, I want to tell you about all of the ways I’ve noticed that these two words–marketing & studying–are similar, and how we can trap ourselves into not taking action for some really silly reasons. (I mean, they’re silly, but they also make sense because I know how our brains work!)
So come on, and let’s talk about what marketing and studying have in common.
What I’ve Noticed:
- Market & Study: these words are so BIG. The coach at the training call I just held was like, “oh, I’m not marketing. I know I should market, but I hate marketing.” And students do the same thing, right? They’re like, “oh, I should study, but I hate studying. I just can’t get myself motivated to study.” I think the reason for both of those is we hold these words as if they were these huge boulders.
But marketing should be simple. It shouldn’t be this big, hard thing. It should be like, “what is the next thing that I can do easily?”
- We don’t know how to break these BIG actions into smaller ones. When I was coaching the woman in this training call about marketing and how to make it more doable, one of the things I realized is that she hadn’t broken down the idea of marketing into small enough, teeny, tiny incremental parts so that each action felt doable. So instead, “marketing” was this big, mountainous thing that just created stress.
Similarly, students don’t know how to break studying down into smaller, doable actions. That’s why my Anti-Boring Approach to Powerful Studying program is all about how to help students find motivating, even anti-boring, actions that they feel like doing to study. - We don’t believe we can be our authentic self as a marketer or as a student.
The coach I was speaking with had a story that, in order to be an effective marketer, she needed to do a bunch of distasteful tasks that didn’t feel good to her.
Students have the same story all the time about studying, right?
So it’s really important for us to look at what are some of the things that feel good to you, as a coach or as a student, that maybe you’re already doing and can capitalize on.
This particular person I was talking to is a professor at a college and she noticed that she has some habits of building relationships and connections with her colleagues on campus that she knows how to do and likes to do. So she could just transition some of those tasks to finding colleagues who can help her build her business outside of the college campus. It was such a relief to her to realize that she actually already has some skills in being a good marketer!
Because what is a good marketer? In this case, it’s somebody who enjoys building relationships with other cool, amazing people whom they want to spend time with. That way, you’re not resisting spending you know doing your marketing actions. Instead you actually are enjoying the opportunity to go connect with somebody cool and
It’s the same with students. Often when they have to study, they think, “oh man, I can’t do things that I actually like to do.” That’s not true. Students can do things they enjoy to study effectively, but they have to rethink what studying means, just like coaches have to rethink what marketing means.
- When you see the word “marketing” or the word “studying,” there’s an Impulse to either over-function or to under-function. Students often under function–they don’t study enough; or the really “good students” over-function and do too much of the activities that don’t really help themselves study.
I’ve seen over and over in my years of training educators that educators think marketing means a certain set of things and they start doing all those things. “I gotta go get business cards. I gotta get a website. I gotta do social media. I gotta, I gotta, I gotta.” They over-function. They do too much.
One of the things I believe in for both students and educators–and for people in general living life–is that we need to hone our ability to figure out what’s the least we need to do to get to our goal–whatever our goal is in the moment–whether it’s to study for this test and maybe make a “B” or above, or whether it’s to make a few new referral relationships that actually feel like they’re solid connections.
If you need any additional support thinking about marketing your own business, I highly recommend that you click here to get my Crash Course because I take you behind the scenes of how I set up my one-to-one student coaching practice and you’ll have so many useful takeaways. It’s completely free. Go check it out!
Take care y’all!
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