Some of us can wax lyrical about our successes, experience and accomplishments, some of us are much more circumspect. Bottom line is, people have to know enough about you to feel safe – to connect, to trust, to spend time with you, to buy from you and so on.
If you have no difficultly talking about your successes, congratulations – you are probably in the minority. Your biggest takeaways from this blog are:
1. Monitor what you are saying to people. Is it relevant? Does it help them on their journey? Does it position you to get the credibility and attention you are looking for?
2. Bigging yourself up to boost your own confidence or make yourself feel more credible rarely works, and can often do you more harm than good, as can irrelevant boasting.
3. Remember that, just because someone else is not shouting about their achievements, doesn’t mean they don’t have any.
If you do have more of a challenge talking about yourself, you are not alone. Neurologically we are programmed to stay safe – this can often involve fitting in, not making yourself a target, and not challenging the status quo. Most often this happens unconsciously, you won’t necessarily know this is what you are doing. Look out for those times you hold back when you don’t agree, you don’t bother to share your successes or experience – even when it’s relevant to the conversation – that’s not just humility – it is quite possibly a neurological habit. It is also quite likely this practice has left you feeling frustrated, overlooked and maybe even cross with yourself or others.
Most of us need to be visible, credible and trusted in order to run our business – whether this is by staff, community or clients. The best way to do this is to comfortably and authentically talk about yourself. Easy to say, but how do you start to change long held habits?
1. Write a big list of all your achievements, successes and experiences – however small, or even insignificant they might feel to you.
2. Next decide which are relevant to your business and will help others either to connect and trust you, or with their own journey. Focus on these.
3. What are you most proud of, what are you happy to talk about and what makes a coherent story.
4. Practice talking about yourself, you will get more comfortable with it and you’ll start to develop new habits.
Why is this important?
I absolutely believe we are all special, we all have some unique skills as well as skills in common with others. If you can’t articulate what is special about you or what you do then you are making it harder for others to connect with you and do business with you.
Even more importantly than this, if you consistently underplay your skills and achievements, if you don’t talk about them – or even really acknowledge them to yourself from a neurological level they don’t get embedded into your unconscious, they don’t become part of who you authentically are – and you might feel awkward, embarrassed about, or oblivious to how special you actually are.
Remember that however comfortable or uncomfortable you are talking about yourself, what others might see as your special skills or talent you might take as common sense – because the chances are it comes easy to you.
If you are in the Brave Business group tell us what’s special about you, if you are not yet in the group join here
