When You Feel Resistance

I help therapists and healers who have private practices to add a second part to their business models. I show you how to create a niched and outcome based program that you can get known for and offer to people all over the world.

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I realized I need to tell you something today:

Even if you are doing your marketing right, you probably won’t enjoy it all of the time.

This is sort of a part 2 to my last podcast episode.

Here’s a summary of that in case you didn’t hear it or you’d like a quick recap:

Reactive marketing is when you feel like you urgently must take action to make more money, to get more people to sign up for your work, or to fix something that seems broken in your business.

You know you’re in reactive mode when you believe you’ve got to do something NOW to market your work.

If lots of your marketing activity is reactive marketing, it isn’t going to be very effective and it’s going to burn you out. When you’re reactive, you’re not tuned in to the people you want to serve, you don’t have access to your more creative parts, and you aren’t taking action from a thoughtful strategy.

Relaxed marketing is what we want to be engaging in at least 90% of the time. Whether you’re creating content, reaching out to referral partners, running free live events, pitching to podcasts, or writing website copy, whatever it is that you’re doing during your marketing time, you want to engage in it with a more relaxed nervous system.

You’ll come up with better, more attuned work when you do that. And you’re going to be able to make better decisions about what your overall marketing strategy looks like.

I received emails from some of you letting me know that the episode really resonated with you.

You loved being reminded that you’ll do your best work when you’re tuning into the people you’re serving, and NOT when you’re in panic mode.

The next thing I need to share involves a lot of nuance:

Even if you engage in relaxed marketing practices, You might still not enjoy marketing some of the time. “Relaxed” might not be the way you feel when you’re sitting down to your marketing activities.

Two things happened today that reminded me to talk about this nuanced truth.

One is: I sat down to do some of my own marketing work. I was not in urgency or panic, and I WAS tapped into the needs of the people I am here to serve.

I also didn’t feel relaxed.

I felt a bit of dread, a bit of anxiety, and a strong urge to find something else to do.

I felt my heart rate speed up a bit. I felt the fear that I might not have a good idea to share. (Yes, Even though I’ve got a huge list of ideas that I’ve been storing up for years).

I had the thought “I hate this part.”

We have a pillow that lists dozens of emotions, so that we can look at it and identify which ones we are feeling in the moment. Yeah, it's the kind a therapist might have in their office. In that moment I identified “inadequate, avoidant and worried.”

Then in order to properly procrastinate, I opened Instagram and I saw a post from one of my favorite writers, Clementine Morrigan. She writes on personal growth, trauma, polyamory and other stuff, and she’s a leftist.

Here she’s talking specifically about writing, but I want to apply this to how it can feel to work on marketing your wonderful work.

Clementine says:

“I find writing viscerally uncomfortable. Sometimes it is excruciatingly painful. It almost never feels good. The thing that is most important to me and that I have dedicated my life to is extremely difficult and un