Why do so many ethically minded people struggle with marketing?
I suppose it comes down to one of three things which are all important.
- The Inner Work (e.g. uncovering our gifts, healing our wounds, aligning our business to our natures etc.)
- The Structural Work (e.g. business model, systems, tech etc.) This includes mastering your crafting and honing your offers.
- The Sales & Marketing Work (e.g. getting clients).
Over the years, I’ve steered away from giving advice on the ‘Inner Work’ of marketing.
There are a lot of good people doing work on anxiety, boundaries, people-pleasing, fear of visibility, ‘limiting beliefs’, ‘stressful thoughts’, trauma, and shadow work.
I’m glad it’s out there.
It just wasn’t my thing, partly because I think a lot of the ‘limiting beliefs’ or ‘mindset issues’ people are told they have in business are actually their conscience telling them not to do some unethical, pushy, sleazy approach.
I’ve found that people can often be saved years of therapy just by shifting to a more ethical approach in their marketing.
To state it more bluntly: a lot of the inner work is actually just the result of people going against their own conscience. When they stop the unethical marketing, the inner resistances vanish. They weren’t resisting the ‘marketing’ so much as the way they were told they needed to market.
But, sometimes it is the inner work that’s needed.
Your Struggles Might In The Inner Work Category If You Often End Up:
Spinning Your Wheels:
- Making almost no progress (despite having learned ethical marketing approaches)
- Feel trapped in an endless loop. Groundhog Day. It’s like being caught in a labyrinth where, no matter how far you walk, you end up back at the beginning. It’s so disheartening. You make almost no progress and can’t understand why. Or the going is slow. Too slow to continue for long.
- You might have put in twenty years but it seems to be more like you are repeating the first year twenty times.
- If you can relate, it’s likely you’re feeling confused, maybe burnt out and exhausted, questioning if this business is ever going to take off or be sustainable (and if you should continue with it at all). YEARS of your life invested and you never quite get ‘there’ – wherever ‘there’ is for you.
- You’ve forked over your hard earned cash for course after course on marketing that is unethical and hiring one business coach after another, getting tactical approaches with templates and scripts. Sometimes you ended up spending a lot of money. Sometimes you got ‘some’ temporary results. But if also often left you feeling jaded, ashamed, embarrassed, and resentful towards the entire business coaching industry.
Struggling with Boundaries:
- Having a hard time setting clear boundaries (e.g. charging an amount that feels right, enforcing a cancellation policy, firing a bad client, really handling your niche, taking the time to craft compelling offers or a workable business model or simply not overgiving and depleting yourself…).
- Under-charging and building up resentment while your bank balance goes down.
- Going over time in sessions consistently (even though you know it’s costing you).
- Working with a lot of clients who just don’t feel like the right fit.
- Making your emotional safety and comfort more important than success and so never stretching yourself or taking risks.
- Having a schedule that is way too overbooked.
- Feeling riddled with self-doubt and thinking, “Who am I to do ______?” and never hitting the publish button
Doubting Yourself:
- Feeling scared to share your real opinions online or with your clients.
- Knowing there’s a general sense of things being ‘off’ – a diminishing feeling of hope and a rising feeling of anxiety.
- Find yourself wondering, “What’s wrong with me?”
Avoiding Your Marketing:
- Putting off working on your business and making money on the regular.
- When it comes to actually doing the marketing, you find yourself shy, reluctant, and scared (and so often you do nothing or find all sorts of other things to fill your time with).
- You often end up getting caught up in distraction.
So many small businesses suffer this same predictable fate. I call it The Trap.
If that’s you, I’ve created a wee program sharing my thoughts on a core pattern I’ve seen my clients get into over the years that I call The Trap.
About ‘The Trap’ Product:
In mid-2024, I recorded a video on this insight which then turned into another video and then another until I had seven videos in that series which I entitled, at the time, ‘The Third Column’ (and which I now call The Trap). The ‘Third Column’ referred to three column chart which you’ll see laid out in The Trap itself.
So, you’ll be getting those seven videos.
But I’m also including some hand-selected content from my blog and YouTube to help you dive deeper.
An Important Note: What The Trap product is and isn’t.
This product won’t magically take you to that third column but it will help you understand where you are in ‘The Trap’ and articulate that there is an alternative and what it is. For many people, this opens their mind to something so simple they’d never seen it before. The experience is almost universally relief.
It helps them see how they’ve been seeing things (and not seeing things as they were at all).
It gives them a clear direction to go in and language for what they’ve been experiencing.
Sometimes awareness itself can be curative.
This product is, fundamentally, a map to find yourself in but sometimes you’ll need to hire a good sherpa to help you actually climb your way up the mountain.
But, if these patterns are tenacious, you may want or need some deeper, professional help (and I’ve got a list of people I’d recommend inside the offer).