Optimise your mindset for bigger impact
“If I didn’t need money to live, I would do this stuff for free. I love it that much”
That’s a great way to feel, right?
Wrong.
It’s wonderful that you feel SO passionately about the impact you create, that simply doing what you do feels like a reward in itself.
But as a business owner, this attitude is Holding. You. Back.
If you allow yourself to keep thinking about your work in this way, you will never make the impact in the world that you want to make. You’ll never be the change you want to be.
Here’s why:
By thinking about your work in this way – even just in the privacy of your own head – you are allowing yourself to sink deeper and deeper into the comfort zone of YOUR experience and perception of what you do.
This means that you’re immersing yourself in a story about your work that has YOUR experience at the centre of it.
By doing this, you are DRAMATICALLY LIMITING your impact in two important ways.
1: You’re making it harder for ideal clients to connect with you
The way you think about your work naturally shapes the way you talk about it.
When you think of your work as something you’d gladly do for free, you’re like a vessel overflowing with value. The way you perceive (and, therefore, present) your work is framed by your own overriding desire to share it with the world - and this is exactly what’s stopping you from finding the words your future clients need to hear.
Put simply, your vision and perspective are skewed to reflect the experience of GIVING or DELIVERING your work, because that’s the experience you know and love. But that experience is not relatable to your future clients. Not one of the people who need your help, will ever experience your work the way that you do, from YOUR perspective.
What they need to see, is the experience of RECEIVING it.
That’s why creating a service that’s so good and so fulfilling that you’d gladly do it for free, is just the first part of your job as a business owner.
The next step, is to learn to see it through different eyes, so that by default you perceive and present your work not from the perspective of how good it feels to deliver it, but how good it feels to receive it.
Until you make this shift, no amount of free work or low-cost offers will ever unlock the client connections that you know you should be making.
2: You’re denying your customer their chance to be the hero
By thinking of your work as something that you’d gladly do for free, you’re affirming in your own mind that the privilege of doing what you do, is its own reward. You’re allowing yourself to accept that what you give is service, and what you receive is satisfaction.
There’s no space in that energy exchange for your customer to play a part.
Your future customer needs to be able to recognise that in choosing to work with you, they are playing an active role in creating their own better future.
Their investment in the energy exchange of your work together, therefore, cannot feel optional or nice-to-have. It is absolutely essential, because it defines them as an action taker: the hero in the story of their life, taking bold action (with your valuable support) to transform their circumstances.
As the hero, your customer needs to feel agency. That includes the agency to place their trust in you; and to invest in themselves by investing in you – as the catalyst to whatever transformation they want to see in their life and situation.
The bigger the transformation they believe you can co-create; the more highly they will value that investment: and the more value they will draw from it.
That is why it’s up to you to take the lead in redefining your work - in your own mind, and in theirs - as something that non-negotiably DEMANDS the investment of your customer. Their investment in your process isn’t a ‘nice to have’ bonus: it is an essential condition of co-creating the transformation they want to see.
Shifting the way that you think about your work, so that it stops being something you would gladly do for free and becomes, instead, something that you will confidently (and non-negotiably) invite your discerning future client to invest in, does not make you money-minded.
It does not make you grasping and greedy.
It makes you courageous enough to leave your comfort zone behind.
To step out from the safe space where you are convinced to your own satisfaction that your work is transformational and valuable,
To challenge yourself to look at what you do, through different eyes, and understand what your value looks like from the OUTSIDE.
To stop defining yourself as a service or a process or an expert, and become an IMPACT, a TRANSFORMATION, a CATALYST.
If you really want to make more impact in more lives, stop wishing that you could somehow bypass the transactional part of your work to deliver your ‘real’ impact.
Start thinking, instead, about how you can EMBRACE that transaction as part and parcel of the value you deliver.
It’s the act of allowing your customer to become the hero of their own story.
It’s the act of bridging the gap between your transformational work and the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who need it.
I help business owners like you to transform the business they’ve got, into the business they want: from the inside out. I do it by working with you to dig deep into what you really want from your business owner life, then showing you how to streamline your offer, your message and your day-to-day work around the superpowers you have, and the impact you want to create. Ready for that? Let’s talk!