This month is an auspicious month for manifesting and bringing new projects or ventures into being. From an astrological perspective last Monday brought us the New Moon, followed quickly by Mercury going Retrograde.
Now, I’m no expert when it comes to astrology and I’m not even sure I understand it, but “boy” last week certainly felt like being on an incredible roller coaster ride with big challenges and even bigger learnings.
The biggest learning for me was around, “Finding My Voice”. The hard bit in this puzzle, once you have found your voice, is trusting it, but we will get to that later!
It’s been coming up for some time this question of, “How do you find your voice?”. Initially I wasn’t quite sure how to answer this question.
I’ll admit, this question caught me on the back foot and I felt infused with more than a little panic. Especially as I am someone who likes to have all the answers…and yes, you guessed it I am a perfectionist.
Then, the Universe brought me the perfect lesson to teach me what I need to know. I put my head above the parapet and asked attendees of a recent webinar I gave for their feedback as to why some of them chose not to take up my offer of joining my client attraction programme for therapists.
I’ve put all my experience over nearly 20 years in private practice and as a University Lecturer in Fashion Marketing into this self study programme that supports therapists with attracting clients and growing their therapy practices, so they can do the work they love doing.
I truly believe in this programme and love the transformation I’ve seen in the participants who’ve completed this programme. Whilst a few practitioners did join, the numbers were not what I had hoped for.
This was why I decided to ask for feedback. I received a lot of positive feedback but for me the most valuable feedback was the negative feedback.
It helped me to realise where I had stepped out of alignment with my heart and soul. Now, I didn’t fully agree with their take on my sales pitch for this programme, but their feedback hurt because I knew on that occasion when I talked about my programme at the end of the webinar, I wasn’t fully embodying my own voice.
I felt that I was letting down my audience. If therapists were being put off by my sales pitch, then I was clearly not explaining the benefits of joining my programme well enough, so that they could accurately tell if it is a good match for what they need or not.
So feeling a little raw, I took a step back and considered how I could discover my own voice. If fear did not get in my way – what would I want to say about my programme and how would I want to say it?
This showed me there are some significant components to finding your voice that I’d like to share:
- You need to trust yourself, you have all the answers within you. Only you can come up with the perfect way to talk about yourself, your life, your work or even how you can help others.
- There is a time for looking outside of oneself to gather information and learning, but it is always important to bring this information back to your core and ask yourself, “How does this sit with me?” “Is this in alignment with my heart and soul?”
- Be open to learning from negative feedback, but don’t take it personally. When people have a strong reaction to something we say or do, it gives us useful information about their world view. We have a duty to ourselves not to allow our inner critic to use this feedback destructively against us. Remember not everyone is going to like what you do or how you do it.
- Give yourself the love and acceptance you need so that you fill your cup to its brim with all the confidence you need.
I’d love to hear your reactions to this post, good or bad (she says slightly squeamishly!), simply comment below…
