Hey Reader,
I’ve been playing with ideas for how to share wins and testimonials differently because if I’m being completely honest, I think many of the ways I see people sharing social proof right now are gross and designed to play on potential purchaser’s insecurities.
In transformational work, nuance makes all the difference.
One coach taking credit for a client’s successful launch seems so strange to me when there is so much more that goes into sharing a project with the world than a blueprint someone gave you.
Not to mention, the identities we craft online have a tendency to be versions of ourselves we’re okay sharing, which means as a passive observer you’re not getting the whole picture—there’s no way you could.
It’s easy for people to share professional wins like, “I made xx off this launch” or had a “XX dollar week.”
And it’s easy to teach the strategies of how they got there.
But what’s much harder to share—the thing that actually makes the difference—is how they handled obstacles when they came up. Or even more so, whether their professional, outward-facing success felt like a personal success.
I know many successful people who don’t feel successful at all.
In fact, they’re desperately trying to come up with a new offer that they themselves love right now because they’re miserable launching what they’re selling. Or they’re desperately trying to make a change in their life because they’re sick of their current position.
Or the way they’re operating is slowly killing the passion in their relationship.
This doesn’t diminish the impact of their professional win and it may even help you get where you want to go…but if you’re creating your picture of success based on someone else, it’s best to have the whole picture.
What’s better yet, is to create the picture for yourself.
And to do that you have to get in touch with your desire. Which starts with shedding all the ways we’ve been taught to disconnect from our desire.
Just think about how many times you have said you’re not hungry even when you are so that you don’t appear like you “eat too much.” Or how many times you say sorry to appease someone else even when you don’t actually feel sorry and actually feel like they should be apologizing to you.
It’s these small disconnections from ourselves that make it hard to know what we want on a larger scale when the stakes are higher.
And that’s the slippery slope to never feeling like you’re successful because you won’t know when you have actually reached it.
What you do needs to involve and include how you want to feel in your life. It must be connected to desire, otherwise, burnout and exhaustion keep knocking.
Take a moment to elicit a desire.
Take 3 deep breaths, then ask yourself, “what feels alive for you right now?” Let your imagination run wild in service of your soul. Write down any desire that comes to you and if you want to share hit reply. There’s power in sharing your desires with others.
With so much love,
xx,
Alyssa
P.S. My latest idea for letting people see the transformations I help facilitate came from a conversation with my friend Cole Schafer. We agreed that a far more effective way to demonstrate social proof is to figure out a way to let people into the process. So I’m going to be experimenting with that by sharing clips of sessions in action and by live coaching on my upcoming YouTube show and podcast.
Want to be a guest? Hit reply to this email to let me know.
P.P.S. I turned 30 two weeks ago and while I’ve been looking forward to 30 for years, it still got me thinking about how we view aging. I’m working on writing something about it, but some topics take me much longer to write about than normal. Apparently, that’s one of them.