Let Me Interrupt

February 20, 2010 by  

Someone asked me the other night what kind of coaching I do and without thinking I responded: paradoxical.

Most clients I work with want my help marketing their ideas, solutions and content. They’re very receptive to my approach:

  • create your “one of a kind” point of power at the edges or intersections – markets, industries, areas of interest or expertise etc.
  • discover your voice and develop your stories around that point of power
  • give and don’t hold back

And then they get scared and overwhelmed and go back to their old ways which stopped working long ago: email blasts, snail-mail announcements, hiring the magical business development manager, handing out cards at networking meetings etc. They give themselves over to the habitual impulse to interrupt instead of giving themselves over to their story.

When the old methods fail I suggest examining and clearing, with my facilitation, the assumptions and expectations blocking change. And that’s when the paradox kicks in. Because this is what they believe the process should be: telling me their stories! How they got where they are. Why they do what they do. The history, the details and most of all – the reasons.

They claim to be very receptive to my simple approach: unconditional permission to allow me to interrupt if I start to get more information and story than I need to know in order to facilitate an identity shift. Then I interrupt 5 times in 10 minutes and its “Call in the Marines”.

If it weren’t for paradox it would be easy, right?

Think about it this way:
Story is your ideas, solutions, and brand in form – the content.
Identity is your beliefs, assumptions and expectations “minus” the content (story, knowledge, thinking, form).

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Filed under: authenticity, Belief, Content, content-marketing, differentiation, self-awareness, shift, social business, solo psf
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