At the very core of all business marketing is who you are as a unique individual. This directly impacts the way you run your business and what you offer the marketplace.
All of us need to know ourselves, and what makes our businesses special and valuable extremely well.
But this is easier said than done.
One of the reasons for this is that human beings tend to think that everyone else is like them. This is partly because of world view biases, and the fact that our friend and family networks are often (and preferably) made up of people who align with us on values and standards of behaviour.
But everyone else is definitely not like us and other businesses do not offer what our business is offering.
It doesn’t take any effort to find this out. Just check out the website of another business that you know of in your industry. Or talk to another business person at a networking event. Or make the effort to talk to your clients about their frustrating experiences when trying to find the products or services they need.
But we get busy running and operating our businesses, and instead of spending rewarding time clarifying who we are as people and getting absolute clarity on why people choose to use our business, we defer doing this until later.
And of course later has a habit of never arriving.
But expressing who you are and how this impacts how you operate your business is not only a rewarding use of your time, it’s truly where the gold is.
Your uniqueness is you and all your superpowers, and life’s too short not to know what they are.
Not only this, your uniqueness is your competitive edge, which is the reason you are offering a quality service and the reason you charge quality rates.
So you absolutely have to explore your uniqueness to achieve financial traction in your business.
The best part is, it’s easy and enjoyable spending time building your self and business “edge” knowledge. All you need is some paper and a pen, and some time to let yourself go for it. There are plenty of prompts you can use to draw things out of your beautiful brain, but the more important thing is to just give yourself some time to write it all out. And keep writing for as many days as it takes to draw your uniqueness and super powers out.
Happily, there are huge incidental bonuses associated with doing this in other areas of your life. The more you know yourself and what you want in life, the happier you are. And your relationships are happier, because you know what you value and what you want in friendships and romantic relationships.
Personally, my self knowledge used to be absolutely the worst in the world. I was lost and unsure of what I wanted. And I most certainly didn’t feel special.
Instead, I pretty much just felt like shit a lot of the time due to the negative bias that we humans are all susceptible to.
It took me such a long time to give myself permission to sit down and discover me. Even when this cost me nothing but some time with a pen and a notepad.
Over many years, I finally got to know myself better, and this helped me cement what I valued, and what I didn’t value. This showed me the people, businesses and organisations I wanted to serve in my business, and it showed me the ones I wasn’t a good match for. And incidentally, the ones that would also be an absolute *ucking nightmare to work with.
I learned that I worked in a very personal way and that my values and my relationships were very important to me in business and in life. I realised that I loved taking full responsibility for getting a job through to finalisation. That I valued being trustworthy and thart I thrived when clients trusted me, getting instantly fired up when they set me loose to get the job done.
I also have multiple weaknesses, like all human beings. For example, one of my weaknesses is to wildly underestimate how much time things take. This is such a marvellously helpful weakness to have in business! Fortunately, I know about this weakness so I’ve put a compensatory framework in place to deal with it in my business. This is great because it prevents me from feeling continuously suicidal as a result of under quoting.
These days, knowing what is important and doing what is important is more important than ever.
And knowing ourselves is a key part of knowing what is important.
And I would argue absolutely critical to our happiness in business and in life.
As Socrates said, “To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.”
Knowing who you are and the values you live by helps align you with the right kind of clients. These are the ones who are great to work with and who make life easy and reduce your stress levels.
I’ve definitely made the mistake of working with clients that I knew I wasn’t aligning with, and I don’t recommend this at all. Because when you do this as a small business, you well and truly carve yourself a new arsehole. You spend a huge number of hours on projects that don’t mean anything to you, which sets your soul and your business back. And not only this, such projects exhaust you and tip the rest of your life off kilter, which makes you miserable.
I’d seriously rather avoid the above by instead spending some time defining my values and how I can help the world so that I attract the right clients, and wisely deflect things that aren’t a good match. If I’d just trusted my intuition and my sense of a mis-match in the past, I could have saved myself a great deal of grief and achieved faster and more powerful traction in my business.
R & B Singer Omarian sums this up beautifully below:
© Annemaree Jensen