Use visuals to simplify and clarify.

August 26, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment 

RedShift: Natural influence expansion in the connected world

RedShift: Natural influence expansion in the connected world

Most of the popular small business advice is tailored to product companies. That’s because service firms are always more challenging to define and differentiate without creating complexity which then leads to confusion. And that confusion will increase as new small and solo professional service firms are founded by generalists, multiple careerists and encore careerists.

The nimble solo psf’s are uniquely able to create services for evolving markets that emerge from disruption, convergence and shifting demographics. Their challenge is to simply and effectively communicate who they are, where they’re going and how they help their clients.

If I can’t easily explain my content, I step back, formulate a question that I think needs to be answered and then convey that answer in some visual format. I give my right brain the right of way so to speak. I know its a highly effective method for gaining “creative clarity” and I use it extensively and successfully in client work.

Here’s a recent example of mine. To improve my ability to more clearly communicate RedShfit’s benefits to my clients and community, the question I asked myself is: How do RedShift programs create natural influence and why is that good?

By creating the graphic, I let my right brain (mostly) give me the answer.

You don’t need high-end graphics skills to do this; a whiteboard sketch is great. I used CmapTools for the natural influence concept map.

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Filed under: Creativity, Natural influence, alignment, convergence, differentiation, direction, disruption, encore career, generalist, global microbrand, going solo, intention, multi-dimensional, simplicity, slash career, social capital, social media, solo psf
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Chain reaction of overwhelment

August 18, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Leave a Comment 

You know how some days you leap out of bed before dawn because you have so much energy and so many ideas? And then, by 10 a.m. you feel lethargic and let-down. You probably overwhelmed yourself. I get it. I’m a generalist which makes me very prone to the condition.

I was so excited at 5 a.m. about what I wanted to produce, that I took a rest day from rowing. Its now 11 a.m. and I have a headache, I feel like I’ve been working hard but have nothing to show for it, and I have to leave in 45 minutes for a meeting. All I can think about is “wake me when its over”. But what is “its”? Well, its just my thinking over which I have total control. In fact, at the end of the day, its really the only “it” that I have control over. But I choose to ignore that today.

So what triggers caused me to unwittingly flip my excitement over to anxiety, its shadow form? I’ll re-trace my morning:

  • I read dozens of tweets by people I’ve been following and started to mentally compare myself to them, even though I have little in common with them and care less. I started to think that I’m not doing enough.
  • I went on a support forum to review a thread about about a software problem I’d been dealing with but that I’d decided last night I could put aside for now because its fairly trivial. I started looking hard again for the “answer”. I started to think that my new site is not perfect enough.
  • I browsed through some feeds and noticed a trend that annoys me: popular coach/consultants marketing their very expensive and exclusive secrets of “how to triple your business” to struggling solo professionals. I got angry, thinking about how I hate pyramid schemes. I started to think that these people are not ethical enough.

Urgency. Perfectionism. Judgment. And the chain reaction was set into motion.

I could feel it happening but chose to not hit the “kill switch”. Sound familiar? This comes up in my work with so many clients, in so many contexts and situations. I often hear people self-describe it as their ADD.

Why is it so hard to stop it in ourselves or to help others caught up in the chain reaction? Well that’s a huge learning that I want to share: its because we protect our hidden beliefs that counter-direct us away from what we want. And there’s hidden payoffs in protecting those beliefs…or, there once was.

That’s it. When the spinning starts, and the anxious feelings kick in, just remind yourself that you’re choosing the thoughts that are creating your reality in that moment. Stress is an indicator. A different thought is yours to choose.

Filed under: Belief, alignment, counter-direction, generalist, intention, shift, stress relief
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Find Your Target Market At The Intersection

February 11, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

If you’re a slash careerist, second or third careerist, or hard-core generalist you likely encounter a lot of confusion to your response to the question “so what do you do?”

I’ve found that “I focus on the intersection of……” is a good substitute for “I specialize in…..”

intersection_blog.png

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Filed under: Consciousness, In Transition, career, encore career, generalist, going solo, slash career
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Niche philosophy and slash career

January 12, 2008 by Mary Wynne-Wynter · Comments Off 

I had lunch with an old friend last week who for decades has been both a successful therapist and abstract painter. He’s one of my few lifelong entrepreneurial friends with “little to none” technical or new media experience or interest, although he does have a web site for each business. In fact, I’ve often joked with my brilliant and talented friend that he’s the only Neo-Luddite I know who always gives me great insight and ideas about building a professional practice; advice that has nothing to do with the Web or technology.

So I was surprised when he told me that he knew he had a problem because in the last month he’s received no new calls from people who found him on the Web. He told me that until recently, he not only has consistently gotten inquiries but has had a number of people travel from the west for his services. When the calls recently stopped, he checked Google for his name and certain keywords, and saw that he did not come up at all until the second page. He previously came up on the top of page one. It was a big “aha” for him. It was a bucket of cold water for me, seeing how ahead of me he was, however unwittingly, in terms of getting business from SEO. More on that in my next post.

Later, my conversation with my friend made me think again about niche marketing principles, generalists and the recent buzz about “slash careers”, which I think is a cool idea, but interpreted so widely that it adds to the confusion about “to niche or not to niche”. But I do feel strongly that the convergences and intersections in our increasingly multi-dimensional lives, are big factors in how we design our service models and how we design and develop our personal/professional brands. Unlike some of the bloggers and authors on the this subject, I don’t think any model is more right, wrong, better or worse than any other. They’re just different, and a good starting point to think about what an integral, unique solo practice looks like.

generalist.pngI see myself as a generalist with a number of programs that share some core elements, for a number of different markets. My work draws upon my personal activities (like rowing, and being around kids as much as possible) but I don’t make money from my outside interests.

slashcareer.pngI see my therapist/artist friend as an example of a true slash career (and potential global microbrand). Both careers are businesses with separate markets. They draw upon and benefit each other, through him.

One of the authors, using herself as an example, describes her slash career as author/journalist/speaker/blogger/columinist. I see that differently from my friend – its words, largely the same topic and for the same large audience. I don’t have a name for it but it looks more like this to me – concentric.

quasislash.png

Other career-coach bloggers, when posting about the dangers of slash careers, lump in, for example, plumber/fisherman. But that feels more like career/hobby. But its a fine line, and like most career advice in the conceptual economy, there’s no one clear-cut answer. So I suggest play with it and bring in the right brain by drawing it. You may be planting the seeds for your global microbrand.

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Filed under: Consciousness, career, differentiation, encore career, generalist, going solo, multi-dimensional, slash career
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