3 Ways to Overcome Resistance to Marketing With Mindfulness
Mindful marketing is all about being client-centric. As a business owner, this means serving your current clients with excellence. It also means doing the work needed to promote your services to more people who are looking for what you're offering.
After all, people gain the most benefit by working with you...and they can't work with you if they don't know about you!
But I know it's not always easy to promote your own services or business.
You may feel discomfort, anxiety or fear at the thought of promoting your work. It may show up as resistance to publishing a social media post, blog, newsletter or to marketing your business in general.
This is completely normal. None of want to grow our ego or toot our own horn. Yet what if sharing your words or knowledge could change someone's day?
What if fearlessly marketing yourself brings you the clients whose lives will transform after working with you?
If you've ever experienced resistance to marketing, here are some tips to help you address it so you can keep doing the work you love with passion and joy!
1) Release limiting beliefs by bringing them into self-inquiry
What beliefs do you have about business or marketing that may be preventing you from going all in and touching more lives? Some of the most common limiting beliefs that hold many mindfulness teachers and entrepreneurs back include:
Business is bad
Making money is bad
You can’t market yourself or your business in an authentic way
Many of these beliefs are held at an unconscious level, some stemming all the way to childhood. By noticing these mental patterns and behaviors as they occur, you can step in and question them.
Where did they come from? Are they helping you help more people or are they holding you back from growing your business?
If you unconsciously you have a belief that marketing is bad, for example, you'll always resist any tasks related to it - whether it's writing a blog, newsletter, or putting together an event or webinar.
If you believe that receiving money for your time is bad - or that you don't deserve it, you may unintentionally undercharge or give away so much that you end up feeling resentful or disappointed. You may feel as if no one is valuing your work. This can decrease your motivation to put in the effort needed to help more people. (If you're struggling with a limiting money mindset, check out these 15 ways to expand it so you can help more people).
Be compassionate with yourself for having these beliefs and thought patterns. Journal about them so you can separate your sense of “self” from these belief and move past them.
2) Be inspired by finding evidence of success
One of the best ways to counter limiting beliefs is to find evidence that proves them to be false. Look for inspiration from mindfulness teachers or entrepreneurs who show evidence that these limiting beliefs are not true.
Would teachers like Jon Kabat-Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Pema Chodron or (fill in your favorite mindfulness teacher here) be able to impact millions of lives if they were afraid to market themselves or their work?
Make a list of the businesses or people who you feel have had the largest positive impact on the world. Who are some authorities on subjects like mindfulness and neuroscience who are promoting their work fearlessly and thus touching millions of lives?
Take a moment to contemplate how limiting beliefs (such as marketing is bad or money is bad) directly oppose the evidence that business owners can make a meaningful positive impact on the world AND be financially independent.
When you're facing a challenge in your business, take a mindful pause. Come back to your breath and remember how capable you are of impact lives on a deep level. Think of someone in the mindfulness field that you admire and consider how they might view this challenge from both a mindset and a practical perspective.
3) Use fierce self-compassion to impact more lives
While self-compassion often means being kinder to ourselves, it also has another important aspect that is very applicable to business settings.
Self-compassion expert and researcher Dr. Kristin Neff calls this other side of tender compassion fierce self-compassion. Dr. Neff sometimes refers to it as the "mama bear" kind of compassion. It's about doing what we need to do in order to stand up for ourselves and our values.
But how does it relating to marketing yourself and your business mindfully and without fear?
When you know that your services and business will help more people, you can decrease the resistance to marketing by calling upon fierce self-compassion.
Look at this way:
It's compassion that drives you to want to help more people. But it's self-compassion that allows you to fearlessly do what your mind finds uncomfortable so that you feel fulfilled knowing you've touched others' lives.
Ultimately it all comes down to our intrinsic understanding of our connectedness and interdependence. Because what you do for yourself, you do for another - including moving past the discomfort of marketing yourself so you can help your clients move past their fears and anxieties.
If you continually finding marketing a struggle, learn how to make it easy and sustainable once and for all with this FREE mini-course to help you grow your mindfulness business.
Or prefer to work one-on-one with a mindful marketing guide and copywriter? Schedule your free discovery call to chat about marketing strategies that'll grow your business faster. I'm here to help you succeed so that together we can bring more mindfulness to our world!