This is my contribution to the oh-so-wonderful From Passion To Profit blog series curated by the luminous Laura Simms of Create as Folk (the outpost for creatives and incognitos). I’m delighted to be included in such an inspiring group: Thom Chambers, Michelle Ward, Tara Gentile, Alexandra Franzen, Dennis Baker, Lisa Sonora Beam as well as Laura herself. Over the next week and a bit we are each, in the words of our host, offering rock-your-world insight and strategies for passionate, at least slightly unconventional folks with an interest in pursuing meaningful work. And I’m the first post!

To get from doing the thing you love (your passion), to having people pay you to do it (profit), you need connection.

Passion + Connection = Profit

This means (amongst other things) finding your right people (and/or making it easy for them to find you), allowing them to experience the value of what you have to offer, and building a trusting relationship with them.

As someone working from the heart, wanting to contribute as much as you earn, you’ve got a head-start in this economy of intimacy.

But you’re also more vulnerable to one of the major blocks to connection.

What gets in the way of connection?

When you’re writing to connect you need to be clear, and you need to create mutual understanding.

There are techniques that help with this process, but the underlying block I see most often (including in myself) is not a lack of technique, it’s fear.

Fear seeps through your language

The most obvious is the fear that your passion and belief in meaningful work somehow impairs your business judgment and ability to sell, which means you suppress your true voice and mimic the marketing gurus (who encourage and feed on this fear!). And your people sense the discord in what you are saying, and not saying.

But there are more insidious fears…

The fear that you’re not good enough, or won’t be taken seriously, which expresses itself in About pages bloated with official credentials and self-congratulatory tales that put more distance between you and your people, rather than building intimacy.

Or the fear that you’re only going to get one shot—at this dream, on this website, with this person reading your page right now—and the opportunity is going to pass you by if you don’t explain every little detail of how your thing works and how great it is for them regardless of who they are. And you need to download all of this to them as soon as possible in one overwhelming mass of information.

The fear is understandable

In case you feel as though you’ve been singled out and put on the naughty chair at this point, please don’t. We all feel this way.

I’ve worked with clients who are aware of the fear and how it’s affecting their communication, and who still struggle with it.

It’s difficult because we care about what we do and how we do it.

The answer is courage

I found this wonderful definition of courage in Brene Brown’s latest book The Gifts of Imperfection: Letting Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are.

The root of the word courage is cor—the Latin word for heart… Courage originally meant “To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.”

Bring to mind anyone you deeply admire in the world of creative, meaningful work, and I doubt your admiration grows from them replicating someone else’s passion or message. Each one has found the courage to tell their own heart, and by doing so they’ve made a connection with you.

To turn our passion to profit, to truly connect, we need courage.

The courage to choose only the tools and techniques that resonate with our true voice. To forge a path for our story, and to do it with skill, awareness and an underlying belief in the integrity we all share.

The courage to be wholly present in our interactions with our people, to appreciate their needs, observe where we are connecting and where we are not, and then to respond in an agile, open way.

The courage to examine our motives and recognise when we are being driven by fear. To make our offering to the world honestly and with passion, and to accept the inherent vulnerability of doing so.

Be the change

I believe part of our calling in turning our passion to profit, in remaking a meaningful work life, is to remake the world’s understanding of business.

How we conduct our businesses, including our communication and relationships with our clients, can be as transformative as the goods and services we deliver. Take heart, take courage!

Let’s start with my butt

Earlier this year I got a seriously bad butt spasm.

I was really struggling for about six weeks, just managing for another month or so after that. At the height of it, I was in bed for a week on hospital-grade pain-killers and valium.

The spasm made me excruciatingly aware of every little twitch, every twist, every slight activation of that muscle – who knew how much we use our butt muscle?!

My mind became razor-focussed on how to avoid pain. All brain power was diverted to anticipating the next move, planning the series of careful manoeuvres that would get me from lying on my back, to lying on my side, to sitting upright, to standing, to shuffling towards the bathroom.

My world closed down to four walls, my butt and my pain.

Amidst all this, an idea was planted

I got advice and treatment from a GP, physio, oesteo, acupuncurist and yoga teacher – some helped more than others. And there was no miracle cure. Even now, six months later, I get twinges (and I’m still doing weekly bodywork sessions).

However, in all this I started absorbing an idea my yoga teacher kept repeating – sometimes she only touched on a part of it, and sometimes she said it in different ways, but the gist (in my understanding) was this:

You can’t ‘work at’ a tension or misalignment in an athletic, driven sort of way. Focussing on that one point simply strengthens the knot. Tightens the noose.

You don’t want to tighten. You want to release.

Become intimate with your whole body, like a lover, and gently invite each and every part (not just the part in distress) to release and open. When you do you will rediscover your natural balance and ease. Your body and your deeper self know the way, they’ve been waiting for you all along.

What does any of this have to do with business or writing?

Around the same time I was working with a client who felt really stuck. She could sense the general shape of what she wanted to put out into the world with her business, but she couldn’t articulate it in a way that satisfied her. She wasn’t confident others would understand what she was talking about.

When I received her response to my Delve Deep questions* I immediately noticed an incredible focus on process.

Describing your process is an OK place to start, but a functional description of what you do will never adequately capture the essence of your business and it won’t help you communicate that essence to your ideal people.

Wherever I had asked questions designed to lead from process to a broader view (such as how her people benefited from her services), this talented woman would circle back to describing how she did step 1, then step 2 and so on, coming up with ever more intricate metaphors for the process.

I realised she had a spasm, and she was having trouble focussing on anything else.

*Note: there are no wrong or right answers to the questionnaire. When answered freely and honestly, it is simply a window through which I can see what’s going on for you.

The spasm of self-doubt

I think focussing on process, process, process whenever you talk about your business is a hint you may have a spasm in your self-confidence muscle.

This particular client was feeling a lot of self-doubt, and being questioned about the value of what she does was setting off that spasm. She was trying to anticipate the pain and carefully plan every move to avoid it. Her had world closed down to her, in a room, with her process and her self-doubt.

No wonder she was having trouble conceptualising anything outside of that – like her people, and the qualities she brings to the partnership, and the ways they are transformed by her work.

Don’t tighten the knot …

Great ways to tighten the self-doubt knot: “Hey, you do good stuff so snap out of this and let’s get on with it” or “OK, you think you suck so why not just fake it ’til you make it? Ready to go now?”

Yeah, I wasn’t going to say either of those things.

… look around for other places to release and open

It is useful to have a third party to help with the looking – someone who’s not closed down in that room with you, someone who can offer some little ideas to start opening your view (without blowing the roof off and freaking you out completely).

With my client, we acknowledged the spasm and I explained I wasn’t going to try to ‘talk’ her out of it. We just looked for openings at the edges – we started with people she had worked with previously and their feedback, moving more into their experience.

I think that opening ideas and perspectives in other areas flows back to help release the self-doubt spasm, much more effectively than trying to ‘fix’ the spasm directly. It’s the opening through which you can glimpse your essence, which has been there all along, waiting for you.

I come back to the release approach again and again

It’s been fascinating to play with the idea of ‘don’t tighten – release’ in different situations.

When I can recognise myself in that closed-down, frustrated, pain-responsive state (and recognising is half the challenge!), I think, “OK, I’m tightening the knot here. How can I let go of this specific point of spasm and look around for other places where I might get some opening – can I go sideways, can I go underneath?”

It’s not precise, it’s felt more than thought, but, for me, it’s about finding possibility in last-straw situations. Maybe it can help you find some possibility too.

In the world of marketing and copywriting, ‘What’s the benefit?’ is a mantra. It’s the question every service or product has to answer, in one way or another, to convince us to hand over the cash – What’s this going to do for me? Why should I care?

Naomi Dunford of ittybiz.com gives a quick how-to on working out what’s a feature and what’s a benefit:

If you don’t know [if it's a feature or a benefit], drill down. Ask why whatever it is you’re thinking about is important to your customer. When you arrive at an answer that even a three-year-old could understand, you’ve found your benefit…

Web design
Feature: Knowledge of PHP, AJAX, JavaScript, etc.
Benefit: You get a pretty website.

Seems straight forward…

What if you’re talking benefits, but your ideal customers just aren’t getting it?

One possibility is that you are stuck in a reality distortion field, a term I lifted from a post about the Apple iPad (via @gwenbell):

[There's a] reality distortion field at work, though, and everyone that makes a living from the tech industry is within its tractor-beam. That RDF tells us that computers are awesome, they work great and only those too stupid to live can’t work them.

You know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of this, don’t you? To be the one who doesn’t ‘get it’?

What if I put it like this:

You’re in a reality distortion field. It’s created by your intimate, direct knowledge of how and why the thing you do is so awesome. You’re talking about benefits from within that field. And your ideal customers who aren’t getting it? They’re on the outside.

That doesn’t mean your benefits aren’t real or valuable

Let’s be clear about this. Because as a passion-driven entrepreneur you might become very disheartened at this point and conclude that if people aren’t getting it, there must be something wrong with what you’re offering.

You may think that people just don’t want it.

Maybe they don’t.

However, I spend a great deal of time talking with clients who are offering something wonderful and useful, and who do have very satisfied customers, so they know they’re delivering something that their right people want. But, the value is being lost in translation when they try to communicate with potential new clients.

What’s going wrong?

Honestly, there is so much to be said about communicating benefits and your value in a way your people can hear and understand. I expect to come back this topic again and again in the future. For now, let’s focus on just one translation problem that arises from your reality distortion field.

The benefits you’re talking about are important to you, but not to them.

With any service, particularly those provided by coaches, consultants and creative professionals, clients are likely to experience a bunch of great benefits. You really want to focus on just a few to create a clear and compelling message.

But what you perceive as the most important (from within your field of knowledge and experience), isn’t necessarily the ones that are most valued by your people.

Hint: Most often, they respond best to those benefits that are immediate, significant and easily understood.

Again, it doesn’t mean your other benefits suck. More likely, your people simply can’t relate to those benefits from where they are right now.

Very. Common. Disconnect.

You’re talking about how at the end of the process (or even beyond) they will have, or be able to do, x, y and z. Right now, their mind is tangled up with pressing problems. And from that place of pain and stuck they can’t even imagine, much less care about, x, y and z.

You’ve got two options here:

Stay in your reality distortion field. Dig in. You know that this particular benefit is the most important. Try to convince your people of that.

OR

Step out. Find the meeting place at the core of your business. Give information you believe will be useful to them right now. Don’t get caught up in your own narrative. Be absolutely present, but present without ego.

Give your right people enough to hang on to, without overwhelming them

It’s not about showcasing your skills or expertise for the sake of it. Don’t overwhelm your people with everything you could possibly achieve together.

Use your awesome knowledge of what you do, and your interactions with your ideal clients, to focus on what’s really important to them. So they can hear it, relate to it, understand it, and get excited about it.

Be willing to let go (not entirely, but enough to meet you people where they are) of your ‘pet’ benefits. The ones you really care about, but that your ideal clients simply aren’t able to see right now.

These benefits might continue to happen in the background whether you talk about them or not, and they may even end up being really valued ‘surprise bonuses’ that your clients recognise and appreciate by the end of the process. Excellent – who doesn’t like a surprise bonus?

The key to breaking out of your reality distortion field

Listen.

Make sure you are listening to the right people – your ideal clients.

Let them tell you what’s the most important benefit. Listen carefully. You will rarely hear what you need to hear in a formal way (in a testimonial or otherwise) like this:

Client: The thing I valued most about our work together was…

Instead, listen carefully for moments of spontaneous exuberance and clarity that emerge throughout the process. Such as:

Client: Wow, I’ve never thought of that… This is fantastic because now I can…

Or they may say nothing specific. You may just notice their energy level lift as you explain a particular approach, or work through a particular problem.

Pay attention to these moments! Really. Listen. All the information you need to connect with your ideal clients is there – offered up by your own people – don’t allow it to get lost in your reality distortion field!

• Freaking out about which specific shade of green (or blue or orange) should be in the logo?
• Agonising over pages of scribbled notes, searching for the perfect tagline?
• Putting off the website launch for the third time because it’s not quite right?

You’re definitely not alone.

I’ve spoken and worked with people who’ve become so stuck in the process of building their business website – they’ve been going around in circles for months, or even years.

And we so-called ‘professionals’ are just as bad. Even though I’m a copywriter (perhaps because I am a copywriter), I’ve managed to alternate between procrastinating and reworking a single page of my own copy for weeks.

How I got unstuck: it’s all about iterations

What helped me get unstuck, and what I talk about with my clients, is understanding that a website is never ‘done’. It will always change. The critical question is: why?

Common wisdom will tell you it’s because you must get your business website live as soon as possible, and tweak as you go. The implication is that it’s more important to be out there competing in the market, than it is to be ‘perfect’.

That’s true, but there’s a deeper reason.

Your website changes because your business, and your understanding of your business, changes. In fact, particularly if you are a new business, it’s impossible for you to produce a website right now that will serve you really well in six months.

I’m not a designer or a coder, so I’m not talking looks or software. I’m talking about how you connect with potential clients, how you help them find what they need, the story you tell and the way you tell it.

Each day in business you will learn more about your ideal client, more about what you do or create that they love so much, and more about yourself. All this knowledge is vital to uncovering your business essence and crafting stories that inspire you and your customers. As your knowledge evolves, so your story evolves – sometimes subtly, sometimes radically.

Iteration means ‘repetition of process’. As you learn, you repeat the process of getting to the heart of your business, of uncovering your compelling message, of finding your unique voice. And each time that process is deeper and more rewarding.

So, whenever you are creating your business website you are creating only this iteration of it. There’s no need to agonise, to become entangled in this moment. Whatever you create will be right for now, and will be the perfect stepping stone to your next iteration.

I realise this all may sound a bit too ‘zen’ to be practical, but it comes directly from my own experience. To prove it – here’s a peek into my web past.

A smart fresh website retrospective

Website #1

When I left a management / corporate communications job to go full-time freelance in 2008, I knew that I wanted to write for businesses and that my approach was about being smart and fresh – high quality, authentic, lively business writing.

But I didn’t really know my ideal client because I hadn’t met them yet, and, unsurprisingly, I hadn’t honed in on what I could do that would best serve them and me. So the terms were broad, and also influenced by what I saw on the sites of other similar service providers.

This first site wasn’t refined – it didn’t sound like me – but it served its purpose and contained the seed of what was to come.

Website #2

By 2009, I knew a lot more about the people I loved working with (mindful, passionate entrepreneurs and small business owners) and the kind of writing through which I could deliver most value (website copywriting and content).

I stopped comparing with other websites and had the confidence to say exactly how I wanted to work (in full partnership with my clients), aware that it may turn some people away.

Of course, what I got was more enquiries from the kind of people I loved to work with, who loved the site and wanted to work with me.

Website #3

I’m going into 2010 with my third iteration, the recently launched site you are hopefully now enjoying (and if you’re looking at this in a feed reader – get on over and check out my site!).

This site takes what I did with site #2 a step further. I’m more specific about the kind of people I work best with, and how we will work. I’ve learned, from many interactions over the last two years, the stories that best communicate what I’m about in a way that resonates strongly with my ideal clients. There are a few key phrases that remain from the very first site, and more that have emerged from my intervening experience.

Most importantly, I think this site is more me – revealing my uninhibited voice and personality – than ever before, which means I can connect more deeply with the people I want to serve.

Enjoy your iterations

I could never have written site #3 when I first started freelancing, but if I’d let that stop me from launching site #1 I would never have learned everything I needed to learn to make site #3 happen.

I’m obliged to say that partnering with professionals, be they copywriters or web designers, can definitely make the process of creating your business website less painful, and bring the end result closer to your big vision.

Even so, there will, and should always be, iterations. Enjoy them. Take pleasure in the gradual and cyclical learning, uncovering and growing of your message. It’s a vital part of being wholly present, passionate and mindful in your business.

One last piece of advice

Finally, if you’re thinking of changing your site, take a screenshot of the old one first. It’s nice to be able to look back and see where you’ve come from :)