Are you part of the segment of entrepreneurs that have marketing phobia or have experienced marketing trauma? This is not a small minority of the entrepreneurial population. I’ve seen it mostly with women and mostly in the heart-centered, helping professions: healing, teaching, coaching, serving, supporting. The professions where people with very big passions for changing and healing the world congregate.
Marketing phobia has these symptoms:
- procrastination,
- wild swings of motivation (super excited and moving forward only to crash and burn a little later),
- fear of rejection,
- fear of criticism and judgment,
- fear of not meeting expectations,
- fear of showing who you really are at your core,
- fear taking action or hiding in a flurry of activity
- severe doubt about capability of handling change and challenge
Some of you may be saying, I have all these symptoms at one time or another am I really marketing phobic? Only if these symptoms can stop you dead in your tracks and it takes you days, weeks, months (or even years) to get back on track, do you truly have marketing phobia. If your business is failing or stagnant (and you want it to grow) you may be suffering from marketing phobia.
Another marketing phobia indicator
Most often people with marketing phobia race to another “how-to” course in marketing or in their profession specialty as a way of coping with the phobia. They believe that if they truly knew enough or the right things then marketing would be easy. After all, it is easy for all the people they are learning from, i.e., those people are filling their classes and making money, right?
The real problem
Have you ever wondered why successful marketing coaches are successful? Or even better, how they are successful? Probably. And you probably came to the conclusion that what they are doing, the system they use, the knowledge of marketing that is in their head is what makes them successful. You would be only partly right and unfortunately not the most important part.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dissing marketing or the people who teach it. It is a very important concept and structure that helps us create systems for creating connection with those who need and want our services most. However, if that was all there was to it then we would all just pick a system that works best for us and our tribe, do what the system dictates and be done with it. We probably wouldn’t need oodles of systems and we certainly wouldn’t need oodles of people to teach us how to market using these systems.
The missing piece
But we have oodles of systems because we are trying to teach something that is not teachable through learning a system for connecting; creating trust, visibility, likability; and offering our wares.
What is this mysterious something that everyone is having difficulty teaching? Before I describe it (because we don’t yet have a name for it), I want to give you a few ideas to try on. First according to Steve Andreas, co-founder of NLP Comprehensive: “…self-esteem is a natural and automatic result of a self-concept that is aligned with your values.” According to Caroline Myss self-esteem is something much greater than self-confidence; it is your core power and that your potential for success in life is determined by how greatly you “esteem” or value who you truly are.
I believe what marketers and marketing coaches are having difficulty teaching is how to become internally congruent when doing the actions that create connection, trust, visibility, likability and also offer our wares. This congruency rests on our self-concepts and our Self-esteem (in the Myss sense).
These three things are simultaneously building blocks with any two being the foundation for the third and also a network that has each one influencing the other two. In other words they are complex system whose interactions register in our internal world as beliefs and in the external world as our behaviors.
How it works
People who are highly successful with their marketing for their business are highly internally congruent when doing their marketing. They have beliefs about what they are capable of, who they are, the meaning of their business to them and to the world that fully support them being their authentic selves while marketing.
Whatever doubts or concerns they have, have been handled with their beliefs about themselves and the world. This is all internal to their mind. What we see on the outside is someone who acts with conviction and decisively, is motivated and gets results. They already have, in the way their minds operate, the most powerful part of their success. When the client also has the internal congruency and then is taught “the system,” they experience the profound success of their mentor/coach.
With internal congruency, supporting self-concepts and Self-esteem you can have success with or without a system because if you don’t have a system you will automatically make one up that works for you. If you have a system but not the internal structure that aligns with the system, you’ll never have success.
Change can happen rapidly and easily
Changing beliefs, behaviors, self-concepts, or self-esteem can happen as a result of simply doing different behaviors, however that kind of change was already in the offing. When a person is seriously stuck, as in marketing phobia, the more a person tries to change by changing behavior, the harder it becomes to do the new behavior and the more intense the symptoms of the problem become.
That is when a belief change specialist, like me, is required. Someone who can align the person’s self-concepts with their values, heal wounds that undermine self-esteem, create congruency, and reframe limiting views in order to create flexible responses and increase choices. When this is done appropriately, the person gains an internal sense of capacity, clarity and lightness that propels them forward enabling them to act with commitment and consistency in achieving the results they want.
These changes can happen rapidly and easily. They can also drag on depending on the person’s openness to change and exploring themselves. The changes should not be viewed as ‘fixing’ someone. We are not broken. The changes are part of a journey we are always on to congruency and authentic self expression. You might also term the destination of this journey as Whole Life Health.
So a person with market phobia can completely and congruently remove the phobia by restructuring their beliefs, aligning their perceptions and framing of the outside world with their self-concepts and their values, and developing their Self-esteem.
What you can do about it
If you’ve experienced inertia, procrastination, crippling fears and doubts, inability to act or stay in action with your marketing there is a way for you to completely change your experience with and reaction to marketing so that you can marry the creative authentic you to the financially successful you for a whole you that operates with integrity and grace; easily claiming your expertise and sharing your gifts with those who need and want you most.
- Are you ready to take all that knowledge and learning you’ve accumulated and put it to work for you?
- Are you ready to empower yourself so you can improve your life and the lives of others?
- Would it be OK with you if marketing your business became easy and fun?
Then contact me for your free “Breakthrough Marketing Phobia” Session at drlik@beliefbreakthrough.com
9 comments
Shaquana Abercombie says:
August 27, 2010 at 1:59 am (UTC -8)
Great post. Thanks!
admin says:
September 2, 2010 at 1:29 pm (UTC -8)
George, Here are my top 3 tips for someone new to the topic of Marketing Phobia:
1) Decide if you are running a business or a hobby.
If you are doing a hobby, then forget about marketing. Just enjoy doing your hobby. If you are running a business then you must start acting like a business person. With one restriction you can define “business person” in almost anyway you want. The restriction is that the thing you call your business generates revenue and a profit. Deciding you are running a business is tantamount to deciding you want to grow as a person. So go for it.
2) Decide where you end and the world begins. Do you know where your boundaries are and do you maintain them?
Being “nice” is only one value that’s important. When you have firm boundaries you can add the values responsibility, respect, effectiveness and leadership to name a few. The rewards for honoring these other values is even more fulfilling than just being nice.
Being nice is also confused with taking responsibility for other people’s actions, thoughts and feelings. Again, a boundary issue.
Bartering can be another way of ignoring your squishy boundaries. If you are always trading you never have to have the dreaded “sales conversation” and you can go on feeling happy because no one has said ‘no’ to you.
3) Reframe ‘marketing’ as a mirror (not a mask).
When you are being who you really want to be in your business then you will attract all those people who find you interesting, value your opinion and wisdom and want to connect with what they like – you.
It’s about communicating you to the world through another medium – your business. You already do this communicating by the way you dress, the car you drive, the neighborhood you live in, the books and the movies you tell your friends about.
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Braulio Gay says:
September 8, 2010 at 7:12 pm (UTC -8)
This would definitley affect my way of thinking. I would like to try this.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts. This one is a nice post!
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