This one thing is a critical component of your marketing plan
Image by: @brett_jordan
For those of you following my daily lives in the Facebook Group, I have spoken often about this one thing that underpins just about everything else in our business: Confidence. What exactly is it, and why is it such a powerful element that must absolutely be present in our marketing activities?
Con/ Fidere
Confidence is an assured knowing that reinforces actions that advance us towards all of our goals. It is the combination of 2 Latin root words: “Con” which means with or completely and “Fidere” which means trust. So you are “with trust” or have “complete trust.” When we refer to trust, we often refer to others, as in I trust you. At times we turn it inwardly, as in trusting our own instincts. But what about a basic and unwavering self-trust? And how this exactly relates to our photography business?
Do you have your own trust?
We often do things for other people, sometimes to the detriment of ourselves, as in being people pleasers. We sometimes defer to others, as in lowering prices or offering unwarranted discounts because we fear being judged as greedy or uncooperative, or simply because we are desperate to find work.
Confidence isn’t something that’s largely taught to us. Seems that some people just have confidence and others don’t. We’ve all walked into a room and experienced someone who has this assured energy - it translates via body language, speaking manner, and gestures such as hearty handshakes and winning smiles. We’ve also undoubtedly experienced people who stand in corners of the room and avoid eye contact.
But confidence isn’t a a set of outward traits. Rather, the outward traits are a result of confidence. And we are all born with the same potential, which means we all have opportunity to develop and maintain confidence.
There is a sales educator that I follow that really was able to hit these points home for me, and help me understand confidence in a new way, by relating it back to its root meaning of trust.
When you trust another, it means you feel they will keep promises, hold your best interest at heart and prevent harm to you. And we’ve all experienced a break of trust. We know that feeling of being let down and we may be wary of trusting this person again.
When we give trust to others it is a risk because we can never truly understand their inner thought or rationalization process. They may have best intention to maintain your trust but factors that we don’t know of could impede them. Often when trust is broken, we receive explanations to try to identify the situation they faced, and then it’s up to us to know if trust can ever be cultivated again through forgiveness.
You know too much
While we can NEVER truly know what is in someone else’s head and heart, we know what is in our own head and heart. Have you ever committed to doing things in your business or personal life, and then not accomplished or given up? Have you ever made a promise to yourself (about anything) and then not followed through? Have you ever placed someone else’s interest above yours, to your disadvantage? If so, you are breaking our own trust! And you know it with certainty, because you did it to yourself and you also know all the reasons — the imposter won, or the cravings won, or the lack of knowledge or motivation won. As the sales educator puts it, it can come to the point where you can’t believe a word you say! After trust is broken with another, we all know how hard it is to regain it, and feel safe again. In this situation, we don’t feel safe with ourselves, because we are intimately familiar with and constantly aware of our own negative track record. Can you see why this can pose a huge obstacle in advancement?
Cultivating safety within ourselves
When we tackle things like marketing, it isn’t just a business activity for us, because photography work is so personal. If you’re selling a widget at a store for minimum wage, your confidence doesn’t really play into the situation. You serve customers, ring their sales and you’re done. For us, our marketing efforts require us to gain the trust of others. When we ourselves don’t feel safe within our own skin — living with the person that we know has broken promises — we can feel like an impostor, telling our clients to trust us but ultimately not having that same faith in our own selves. And that’s why so many marketing efforts feel disingenuous and why we feel like the slimy, hard-sell salesperson we see in certain industries. You don’t trust a car salesman because he doesn’t instil a sense of trustworthiness, and you paint yourself with the same brush.
Our marketing efforts will be much more successful if we can learn to have confidence — meaning have trust in ourselves. If we trust ourselves then we output that assuring energy and it builds faith in our brand voice and our client communications. It gives us the oomph to proudly tell clients why we are their best choice, to boldy give and stand by our prices. It fuels our creativity to produce better work, and it allows us to follow through with excellent client experiences. So how can we build our confidence?
Forgiveness
You may have a list of things that are unforgivable in your world, but I’ll challenge that most of them are pretty big. Bigger than you telling yourself you’ll work out today and instead sitting on the couch watching tv and eating a bag of chips. Bigger than you not following up with a client because you were scared of looking like a pest, and wondering later if the follow up could have triggered a booking. We know our shortcomings and we must live with them, but just like you might forgive a friend — or even tell a friend to forgive themselves for a situation, you must forgive yourself. Forgiveness is grace and understanding that that we aren’t perfect, and accepting that we are all doing what we can. The great thing we have at our disposal is the ability to dust ourselves off and try again - and pat ourselves on the back far more frequently for our wins, than decimating ourselves for our losses. As you might be encouraging towards a child struggling in sports, be kind to yourself.
Mind Training
I have now been consistently working out for months. And guess what? I’m starting to see definition in my body where there had been none before! That triggers motivation to keep going, for even more positive results down the line. Consistent messaging into our brain will see similar results - our brain needs exercise too! We are mostly fed a steady diet of negative and toxic messages through parents, friends, bosses, media etc. That’s what our brain knows, and that’s how it acts. Change the input though - it will change the output! I have been listening to positive and confidence-affirming content daily as well for the last many months and guess what? I have noticed definition in my brain too! It may not look shapely like a muscle, but I CLEARLY feel a different thought process in my mind. I get down on myself less often, I generally feel happier and more positive. I don’t second guess myself as much. I wasn’t aware of it right away, but there was a moment that I realized I hadn’t reacted to a situation the way I thought I would normally. It rolled off my back in a different way, without affecting my mood, and I continued to feel strong and self-assured. I’m going to say right now that it’s an interesting feeling that I am liking a lot. The rub is that even if you don’t believe something like mind training can change how you think (because you think your thinking is just how it is and you can’t perceive a different way of thinking), mind training will work regardless! There’s a massive beauty in that. You don’t have to be convinced. Do it anyways and before you know it, you will have a moment like me where I realized my thoughts and perceptions had changed. It’s wild!
For 3 ideas to boost your business confidence, read this post. You can also visit the blog and type “confidence” into the search box - it will bring up several posts.
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