One of my post-school-bus rituals is to walk the dog around my property and let my thoughts gather themselves into coherence. ICYMI we live on a 3-acre permaculture education centre. We host workshops. We raise birds and skills and community. It’s quite dreamy and the morning walk has animal tracks and barn cats and the occasional deer spotting but that isn’t the point of this email. The point is, the other morning I was wandering the property reflecting on a conversation I had recently with a friend about communication practices (in relationship and parenting).
They told me about a Venn diagram that looks something like this:
tl;dr Communicating is hard!
We’re constantly trying to balance who we are in any given moment, who we want to be, and how we’re perceived by others. When we think of it this way, no wonder there’s so much misunderstanding, no wonder we find it so tough to get our point across in a way that is loving, compassionate, true, and clear.
So of course I started thinking about how this also applies in our business. Take a look:
We have our Present Circumstances, our Aspirations, and our Reputation. Navigating all of those makes it quite difficult to figure out what to say, how to say it, and how to make the impact that we really want.
Something I know about you because you’re here: You’re in business to generate revenue but you got into business to serve and to help people. Walking that line of integrity is hard. Figuring out how to talk about it is even harder.
Knowing there’s rationale behind it doesn’t make it easier but it does help understand why talking about your business in way that’s impactful, confident, and fun is just so dang hard. And this is why finding a trusted advisor to talk about how you can find that sweet spot is key.
If you have something you’re stirring around your brain, let’s hop on a Clarity Session to figure it out.