Solopreneurs – There Are No Cinderella Stories!

In college basketball, the term, “Cinderella Story,” is often used for the underdog who comes out of nowhere to win the prize. It is a romantic idea about rising from the ashes and winning the prince or prize.

Ponder what it takes to win a championship or bring home a gold medal.

• How many early morning training sessions?
• Pulled muscles?
• Wins?
• Losses?

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People ask me all the time, “How do I know if you’re the right coach for me, and if you’re not, how would I go about finding someone?” I have no difficulty answering this question honestly because I feel very strongly that there truly is no competition.

There are three important pieces when finding the right business coach, teacher, or mentor for you:

1.)  You have to be in alignment with the person’s message. Does the way they market, the way they present themselves, and the way they speak feel right for you and feel right to you?

2.)  Make sure they seem like they have a systematic approach. For instance, I have the Help More People system. They should have some kind of step-by-step process or series of criteria used to help their clients get from where they are to where they want to go.

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In many of my programs I have talked about “the cycle of quitting”. It is a pattern that many people fall into in business, in relationships, in all facets of life. There are very specific points in which people go into blame, they go into regret, and they start making excuses.

One of the things that happened to me when I decided to do my Help More People tour, which was a series of low-cost live events all over the country, was that people told me not to do it.

They said things like, “You know, with the economy the way it is, people just aren’t going to live events right now.” A lot of my colleagues, friends – some very smart marketers and business owners – were saying things like that. Some of my coaches told me not to do the tour. They said that it would be very hard to get people in the door.

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We are in a new era of business. Things are shifting very fast. A lot of the old marketing techniques simply do not work any more.

I was recently on the phone with a friend who works in the online business management world. She is one of the leaders in that industry and has been doing it for many years.

We were talking about the fact that many business and marketing techniques are just not working anymore and that a lot of marketers are still out there selling them to people. They’re saying, “Yes, do this. Do this. Do this,” but the climate has changed. What worked at one time doesn’t work any more. This new era of business is much more hands-on.

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Something that many coaches, healers and other helping professionals have a hard time wrapping their mind around is the fact that there really is no competition. There just isn’t. I don’t have any and I don’t think about it.

Let me explain what I mean…

I’m not a horse race person, but I’ve seen one or two. All the horses wear blinders. They are little flaps that go beside their eyes. They do that because the minute a horse looks at the horse beside them, it slows down.

In this same way you must run your own race in business. There are a lot of people who are overwhelmed, under-performing, under-implementing, and not doing what they need to do to grow their business because they are so engrossed in all of the newsletters and ezines and emails that are coming through their inbox making them feel “less than” magnificent.

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A common challenge for coaches, teachers, healers and other helping professionals is differentiating themselves from others in their fields.

The good news is you set yourself apart just by being born. People forget that. The nature of your unique life makes you different and makes you unique. I call this your intuitive intelligence.

You have not lived the same life that I have lived and neither has anyone else. Even if we have the same training and we sat down and decided to teach the exact same model to people, it would be different because we are different people.

Hold your hand up in front of you right now. No one shares those finger prints. Your marketing style, your business style, and your message all reflect that uniqueness.

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I recently hosted an event in New York and a woman signed up for one of my programs. We’ll call her Sally.

About a week after we met, I had a call with her and she said, “I thought it was just wonderful how you did that entire day and you didn’t sell anything.”

I said, “Sally, you’re in my program. You bought something.”

And she said, “Oh, yeah. I didn’t notice.”

So that’s the ultimate goal. You should be so fired up about what you do and you’re just sharing your services and saying, “Listen, you want to play with me? Great! Here’s how you can play with me,” and you move on.

People will actually pay you money and they won’t even notice that you sold them anything.

It’s not about the sale, it’s about the message. The people who are lined up for your message are a natural fit, and it doesn’t even feel like a sale. They understand your message and they are ready to say yes.

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Stop multi-tasking for one moment and grab a paper and a pen. Don’t over process. Think from the gut.

Now, answer this question:

What is it that you would like to see changed in the world?

Write down your answer. Only give yourself 10-15 seconds.

If you had a difficult time answering the question, that is the reason your business is struggling. You have to be the change you wish to see in the world. How can you grow a business around that change if you don’t even know what your mission is?

When someone asks, “What do you do?” do you respond with, “Oh, I’m a life coach Reiki healer energy worker underwater basket weaver…”?

If this sounds familiar, no one knows what it is you really do. They don’t care what your title is.

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Something that generates a great amount of curiosity is the fact that I built my coaching business to a relatively large level of success while working a day job.

People wonder how I did it so quickly and if there is a step-by-step roadmap that they can use. I’ll share my four secrets to my success when launching or growing a business. They aren’t complicated marketing formulas. In fact, their sheer simplicity may shock you.

1.) Be willing to make a fool of yourself every day.

I remember riding the train from New Jersey to New York to my day job. I was journaling in a notebook and I thought, “Gosh, how am I going to do this?” I had bought into the mantra, “Build it and they will come,” but when I first started my business, I was struggling to get clients.

And as I was writing in my notebook, this came to me:

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What is the topic that dominates the media these days? What is it that we’re reading on websites, in newspapers, seeing on TV and hearing on the radio?

Even if you only read the front pages or skim the headlines, you know it’s all about the economy. Everyone’s talking about Wall Street and financial turmoil.

Here’s what I know to be true – and this is especially relevant to the past year or so – the investments that I have made in myself never got lost in the stock market crash. No recession can ever devalue them.

What I am hanging onto today are the investments I made in my personal growth and in my business, not the investments that I put in Bank of America or my 401k. The investments I made in my training as a coach, as a marketer, and as a business owner continue to pay off regardless of what’s happening in the financial world.

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