Introducing A New Organic Way
to Develop Your Work and
Grow Your Business

A gentle, respectful, encouraging approach
that meets you right where you are,
with a supportive framework to
strengthen the roots of your work,
supporting the growth you
envision for your business.

The Organic Way is a natural approach to creating a viable business that supports your clients in transition in ways that align with your values, express your unique expertise, and create meaningful results for you and those you work with.

Taking bite-sized experimental actions as you evolve your work grounds you and keeps you in integrity with yourself. As you gain clarity about the benefits of your work, you are ready to share your work with those who will benefit from it most.

Enhancing your work and your business foundation in this way, over time, helps you connect with what matters most to you as you find answers to your most persistent questions about:

  • Your work with clients

  • Your ideal clients

  • Your business foundation

  • Your best ways to share your work with potential clients

This gentle, organic journey is specifically inspiring for Change Catalysts who are in the process of birthing a new, emerging business venture whether you are starting a new business, taking your existing business in a new direction, or creating an innovative, out-of-the-box way of working with clients.

 

Listen my introduction to the Organic Way (or read the text below):
There Is a New Path: Introducing the Organic Way
Series 1 - Episode 3 of my podcast

If you prefer to read this introduction, read Part 3 of my new eBook:
Discover a New Path Forward.

Growing a Flourishing Business Is a journey

Your business journey begins with the seed of an Idea with Potential and nurtures it through a series of stages to the point where you can harvest from your creation.

As you may already know, my work is grounded in the natural world’s response to the change of seasons, which illustrates ways we can create changes in our own lives gracefully and effectively. Birthing a new, emerging business or reimagining an existing business is just such a transition.

By honoring the natural process of growth, we can bring our emerging work into form with more ease, grace, and creativity than if we force ourselves to build something quickly just to get it out to market.

The Organic Journey to Developing Your Business

The beauty of this journey is that in order to proceed, you don’t have to be 100% clear and confident about every aspect of your business!

No matter where you are on your journey to bring your business to life, you can make a conscious choice to jump tracks from the Mainstream Approach to the Organic Way. When you do, it changes how you look at and experience the process of developing your work with clients and your business framework.

The phases of the journey provide you with the guidance and support to create your work, identify your clients, design your business structures, and choose your outreach strategies. In each phase, you draw upon your own wisdom and experience to discover and create the work and way of being in business that are the right-fit / best-fit for you, your style, and your clients. Hint: It doesn’t have to look like what you’ve been taught.

Taking a proactive, creative role in designing your work with clients and your business foundation brings you options and opportunities you can’t even imagine from where you sit right now. Sometimes you’ll experience a key insight in a mentoring session that opens up new levels of clarity for you or your clients may ask you questions or make observations that are the catalyst for a renewed excitement in your work. Each discovery you make strengthens the foundation of your work and builds your capacity to grow a flourishing business.

Order Matters

There’s an order of activities that sets the stage for your success that is often overlooked within the Mainstream Approach.

When you take steps out of order, you are more likely to feel confused, overwhelmed, anxious, and full of self-doubt. I often see examples of this in conversations with prospective clients:

  • Pinning down your niche… before you’ve worked with actual clients leads to more confusion and less clarity. In the early stages of your business or a new offering, you don’t know enough about your work to know your marketing niche. The only way to build clarity about the focus of your work is to start working with clients – free, low pay, and full pay – to begin to see what works and why clients are drawn to work with you. Sometimes your clients with show you your most engaging niche!

  • Rushing to design your website… before you know how clients benefit from your work puts you in the position of being a mind reader. If you haven’t shared your new emerging program with many clients, you don’t know how to articulate what you do or the benefits your clients receive. If you don’t have clarity on those points, why invest time and money to create your website right now?

  • Trying to figure out how to be visible on social media…before you’ve found the right words to describe your work puts undue stress and strain on you! It’s hard enough to create a new social media presence when you know your work backwards and forwards. When you don’t know the best way to talk about your work, you have no foundation to support your attempts to share your work on social media. That’s why it feels so scary and vulnerable to be “out there” publicly so early in your journey.

When you take the phases in order, each puzzle piece you figure out confirms you are on the right track and creates a stronger foundation for the next phase of your journey. Over time you develop a clear, grounded knowing about your work and business that allows you to feel confident about what you are offering, what you are charging, and the results you and your clients are able to co-create.

Prepare Before You Share

For those in the process of birthing a new business or a new iteration of their work, there’s always an inner journey out of the spotlight to gain sufficient clarity and proof that your work works before you begin sharing it with the world.

This inner journey is rarely included or recognized as an important step within the Mainstream Approach. In fact, the two phases (Prepare and Share) are often conflated in that you are encouraged to prepare everything you need for a launch, while you are building your program, and marketing it. Talk about overwhelming and exhausting!

Before you share your work with others, Prepare! Understanding the order of these steps allows you to discern what to work on next within your business.

1. What Business Do You Want to Grow? If you aren’t sure you know, this is the best place to start. Knowing your Idea with Potential (which is not the same as your marketing niche, by the way) and identifying the basics about how you want to structure your business allow you to move to the next phase. Knowing the focus of your work— for yourself first — gives you a firm enough starting point to proceed.

2. What Are You Offering? If you don’t know, it’s essential to sort this out before you craft your marketing message and design your basic marketing elements, such as your introduction, your website, and your business card. The best way to design the way you work with clients is a combination of 1) thinking it through within your own mind and 2) working with real clients on a small, experimental scale to get real-time feedback. Gathering evidence that your work works helps you create viable offers with confidence. This is true whether you’ve been trained or certified to share a particular program with clients, or you are developing your own unique body of work.

When you are comfortable with the work you are doing with clients and clear about the ways you will offer your work, then it’s time to figure out how to Share your work with those who will benefit from it most.

3. What Is the Best Way to Describe Your Work? If you aren’t sure, it makes sense to focus on this phase before you start sharing your work through traditional, public-facing marketing strategies. It’s most effective to test your messaging with your inner circle before you share it widely. Gaining confidence in the power of your marketing allows you to take the next step.

4. What Are Your Best Marketing Strategies? You never need to implement every public-facing marketing strategy you have heard about in the courses you’ve taken. The key is to find a few strategies that fit your style most naturally. Taking the push out of marketing helps you focus on the methods and platforms that are a natural fit for you so you can reach more people, expand your circle, and bring on more paying clients.



What Trips You Up

Although the journey I’ve described above seems fairly straightforward when you see it spelled out, certain Mainstream mindsets and perspectives are so deeply embedded in your psyche they will continue to color your evaluation of your circumstances even while you make progress on the Organic Path:

Expectations about what constitutes success – how many people you should have on your list or how many people you can expect to sign up for your offer.

Pace of action and success – how quickly you should get your website up or how little time it should take to reach 1000 subscribers.

Project management – how to break start-up tasks down or how to phase in new levels of your marketing plan.

Order of tasks – how you should get everything done at once for a big launch or how to market your program while you are creating it.

It takes keen awareness, clear discernment, and practice to remain grounded in organic perspectives when these mainstream expectations seep into your interpretation of your experiences. I’ve been working with the Organic Way for the last six years, and I still catch myself sliding down this slippery slope now and then.

The most difficult moments happen when multiple Mainstream messages and expectations get intertwined and limit your ability to make progress because they are such a part of how you understand the world to work. It doesn’t help that at the same time this convoluted experience undermines how you feel about yourself and your business.

As your frustration mounts, you may blame yourself for your inability to move forward. The longer this pattern is in play, the deeper you fall into a funk, and the harder it is to lift yourself out of this abyss of despair.

In some circles if you aren’t moving ahead with what you are being told to do, you may be labeled resistant or un-coachable.

Typically there’s a reason – often, a very good reason – for your hesitation.

If you’ve been commanded to push through something that is not feeling right to you and your honest attempts to articulate your hesitation aren’t being acknowledged or honored, of course you resist!

The key to moving forward is to pause long enough to get to the bottom of why you feel uncomfortable in the first place.

On your own, this exploration might take days, weeks, months, or even years to sort out before you find a way to resolve what’s bothering so you can resume your journey.

By working together, we can shift this dynamic, often within a few minutes.

Finding the Wisdom in Your Hesitation

Each time a Mainstream mindset or expectation surfaces or you are trying to move forward with a gap in your vision, your discomfort with your situation will likely show up as some sort of hesitation. This may look like confusion, overwhelm, procrastination, fear, holding back, or pushing through. Moments of hesitation like these are a normal, natural, and essential part of developing your work and growing your business.

Whenever you hesitate or struggle to proceed with your next move, which you will, you have the opportunity to uncover where you are hesitating and why. When you know how to tune in to “read” your body, mind and soul’s responses, you are in the position to make conscious decisions about how you are going to create other pathways forward.

Noticing what’s at the heart of your hesitation is the next step. With this insight, you have a profound opening to discern and describe what’s feeling out of alignment for you. Typically, you discover that something about your vision, plan, or execution is not feeling in sync for you.

After brainstorming ways to resolve the issue and making those adjustments, you feel in sync with your vision and plan once again, and then it’s much easier for you to take action.

This cycle of finding the wisdom within your hesitation happens every time there’s an opportunity to uplevel and refine your path forward regarding your work, your offer, your outreach. The hesitation you were told to avoid at all costs becomes the key to unlocking the next level of your growing edge.

Realizing your hesitation isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you, your work, or your business, but rather a gift, a source of wisdom, is a turning point in your relationship with your business. Honoring the gifts of insight your moments of hesitation provide invites you to refine and strengthen all that you do.


As the Pieces of Your Business Come into Focus

You discover work that grounds you, keeps you in integrity with yourself, and is aligned and true for you.

You have safe opportunities to experience each new element of your vision and confirm you are on the right path for you.

You experience a clear, grounded knowing about the value of your work with clients.

You feel excited about the changes you’ll co-create with your clients.

You revel in feeling the momentum grow as each step you take builds on the previous steps.

You take focused actions with ease to put your plans in place to refine your business foundation.

You sense that the ground beneath you feels more solid and more structured, ready to support your growth in business.

You feel confident about the benefits your clients receive from your work and about how to talk about what you do.

You are ready to share what you do with those who will benefit most and invite them to work with you.

Your confidence in yourself, your work, and your business develops naturally, allowing you to embody your work, wisdom, and knowing in the deepest recesses of your being.

Soon opportunities, referrals, and next steps unfurl for you quite naturally, as though you’ve always been here, doing this work. Doing your work is as easy as breathing because it feels so much a part of who you are in the world.

Deepen Your Exploration of the Organic Way

You may already have an intuitive sense of how the Organic Way is a better fit for you than the Mainstream Approach to business building. And yet, there’s so much more to discover about the journey, the culture, the practices and how they free you to build a business at your own pace in a way that is right for you.

Are you ready to gain more new perspectives about yourself, your journey, your work, and your business thorough the wisdom of the Organic Way?