Allowing Yourself to Stand OUT

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to episode 81 of Teachers in Business. I am Sara Torpey. I am your host Island business coach, I am a mom, I love the teacher, I am all the things. And for my people who are here regularly, I just want to tell you that my plan this year was not to take most of August off the podcast. But that's what my life happened. And I think that happens to all of us. So I'm glad to be back at it after I think either two or three weeks off, and we will be back at it through September. Later in the fall. There are some changes coming here to the podcast and to my Facebook group, nothing really big, just a title change, probably and some pretty graphics. But those things I will tell you more about as they show up. It's all very exciting and very secret at the moment. This week, we are going to talk about allowing yourself to stand out. I have been thinking about this quite a bit lately. As I have been working with lots of clients, on visibility and on being seen, and all of the sort of internal mindset stuff that comes along with that. I actually have a post of my own that was started in my notes section on my phone recently that I was thinking about the other day, and it bleeds with I am 43 years old, and I still worry about fitting in. So like if you think you're alone in the drama that you have around visibility, and around standing out, I am here to tell you that that is not the case that even people like I'm pretty visible even I, in my visibility and my quest to grow my business and the rest have these thoughts of like, ooh, gosh, what if people see me, so please know that this is normal. Or at least normal for us introvert ish kind of people. And in there's something to be done here. So here's the thing, I think we all come up with the notion we all know, deeply that being able to stand out in the business world is a good thing. Like this is a base level assumption, right? Like people come to us people can find us, people can access what we have to share. If we're seeing if the world sees us, and people can find us, we can't share stuff. But you know, as great as being visible is, the trick becomes that being visible. Being standing out in the business world also leads us to all kinds of thoughts. I can tell you from personal experience that I have all these thoughts to, you know, they're about what other people are going to think of us. If we say these things on our Facebook profile, like I recently have sort of expanded my circle into my son's, like baseball land. And it's all the moms in that group. And they're now all in my Facebook, and I love them. They're all wonderful people also, I now have a whole new set of thoughts about what all the baseball thing people are gonna think about me on Facebook, because I'm not like them. Like I don't do the same kinds of jobs they do, they sort of tend to corporate, or in a school system. And I am not either of those things. I own my own business. And I and I will talk about it publicly on Facebook and LinkedIn. And so I have like, caught myself not sharing things because I'm worried but the baseball folks are gonna think and like, I'm sure they don't think anything bad about me. But it's a thing. The other thing that happens, I think that, you know, stops us from being invisible, even though we know it's important is is doubt in ourselves and our ability to be valuable. And also just that general sort of imposter syndrome, like the Do I belong? Do I fit in is what I have valuable enough that people won't get good from it. You know, I was talking to someone this morning who said to me, you know, I just don't know if I have anything new to share with them. And here's the thing, like, it's okay, it doesn't have to be new. We have to know that what we have is valuable in the way we have to share it even though it's not a brand new idea, and be willing to put ourselves out there. That's the trick. We also worry about, you know, like the haters and the copycats. I think you know, I know as a business owner earlier in my business I worried about this more than I do now actually now that I'm more visible because it feels like a really big scary unknown. And you know, as someone who has had a couple of real serious haters and a copycat or two now that I know that that's happened and I didn't die. I understand it better and I know what to do with it. But I also like we all worry that people won't like us, or that people will like, say bad things about us on the internet, or that people will take our work. And I think that, you know, starting to be visible and really allowing yourself to stand out means that those are risks we take that we have to tolerate that we have to manage, and we have to think about. So the trick to really being visible to getting out in the world isn't so much in some ways isn't the work of actually writing the posts, right? For me, I think the the trick of visibility has very much been and being willing to be visible in allowing myself to stand out because no one was saying I couldn't, except me, I am in my own way the most there, I think that's probably also true for you. So here's how you know if this is a problem for you. And I say this from personal experience, for sure. Even just lately, and also from like being in the business of all of my clients, you know, there's quite a list of people I'm in, you know, right now 10 or 12 Different businesses every given week. And when I look at them, when I see this, like, disallowing, of visibility of standing out, what I see is, like writing posts, and then not sharing them, having an idea and then judging it as not good enough, rather than just like letting it fly. I see people question whether or not what they have to share is good enough. I have people where I see I've done this myself where you look and you're like, Okay, I could do that. But let me see how somebody else does something similar. Like is anybody else doing it like this? I also see people obsess obsess over Facebook engagement numbers, likes and followers and all that stuff over like metrics on LinkedIn, and you know, seeing how the metrics grow. And if they don't, and you know, how people respond to posts and all that kind of stuff. I also see people restart a lot. Because it's like, okay, this was close, but it's not quite right. It's not quite ready to be shared. And so for me, for you, if those are the things going on, part of what might be happening for you is, is internal mindset around allowing yourself to stand out like, Are you and you can just ask yourself, Am I allowed to stand out? Like, is it okay? Because, you know, there are days where I, my answer might be no, like, it's really not doesn't feel like it's okay, even though I know it is, like in that's real, real, real talk well, deeply in my brain. I have had more of that lately, to be quite honest with you guys. And so I think when you ask yourself, like, is it safe for me to share this? Like, do I feel safe? Well, am I willing to put this out? Like, it's, it's, it's how, you know, if you're sort of standing in the way of your own visibility, especially if it's not like some very, very personal story, if it's just like a post about your business? And you think like, Am I allowed to share this? And you're not sure the answer is yes. And that's the thing about it like that, that point, you're in the way of your own visibility, I do it too, like, full admittance here. So what I'd like to offer are some of the things that I do instead, some of the things that I suggest to clients to do instead. These are very mindset kinds of things. So forgive me, some of them are real, tactile, the first two are very in your head. And that's just the way we have to deal with mindset. Right. So the first thing I do a lot thing I think about is the what I think of in my head is the value trade off. Here's how it go. Is me or you being invisible, less visible last standing out less is me not being able to be found actually helping the people that need me. Right, is being less myself helping anyone. Surely it's not helping me. Surely it's not helping the people who need me most. So I think it's a good checkpoint, when you're like, Okay, well, if I pull that punch, who does it help? Well, no one honestly doesn't even really help your haters because it doesn't give them anything to do. So, the value trade here and this is sort of a rhetorical questions on ways right because the answer is never is being invisible helpful? Well, I think the answer is never Yes. But I do think it's a valid checkpoint in my brain sometimes to be like, who is me pulling this punch here useful to anyone. Of course not. And if my goal as a coach, as a business owner, as a human is to be useful to people, then I have to stop pulling the punch. Because what it's not doing is helping more. When I pull the punch, when I make myself smaller, when I don't offer the thought, when I don't share the thing doesn't help anybody. The only way I can help someone, is if I say what I need to say. And I don't get to know in advance, if it helps, I just have to trust that the idea that comes out of my brain is going to be useful to at least one person. And that's the second part of this. Can you decide to trust what comes out of your brain, and just let it be useful? This is what I think about as letting it fly. And often I have this note on my computer, that's just like, stop judging what comes out of your brain, let it fly. So like what happens when we're standing in the way of our own ability, allowing ourselves to stand out is we take thought out of brain, we go to put it on paper, and somewhere in that distance between paper or internet and our brain, we judge it as not good enough. Can you allow the thought to go from your brain to the computer or the paper without the judgment? That's the trick. Often I find that I just have to shorten the time window, I have to like, take it out of my brain write it and be done with it. Because if I let any time lapse from one to the other, it gives me too much time to be like, Oh, is that going to be helpful? I don't know. It gives me time to like, pick it apart, right. And sometimes what we don't need is time to pick it apart. That's why actually, for me in the past eight months, I've really stopped scheduling posts for the most part, because I found that I was questioning too much. So now I just make sure I post but I let whatever's in my brain come out of my mouth, basically. And it's worked a lot better. I mean, I hate to admit it, because it feels like planning should be better. And I always have like a relative plan. I know what I talk about. I know what I offer to people. But I think it's interesting to stop. caveat, adding it all so much right to stop over analyzing it to stop giving yourself time to judge it and just trust that what's coming out is useful. So that is the second part number three. I think of this as the secret supporter to hater ratio. I think it is useful to consider the secret supporter to hater ratio. I really do firmly believe that for every one hater in your world, like one person that is truly like you're useless, I hate you. And they are rare. There are 99 people who are like in your corner ready to fight the guy that you don't know about. They are your secret supporters. The interesting thing about it is to get one hater, you have to have 99 Secret supporters, but like to get either of them, you have to say enough for people to either support you or hate you. Like you can't have haters. If you never say anything, but you also can't have secret supporters in your corner. If you never say anything. You're going to get far more supporters, even people that just never say a word, then you are going to get haters. I have been in business for myself on some level since 2016. This is going on six or seven years. I can the true haters. I can count on two hands. Right? Have there been people who have told me what I do is stupid for sure. Do I give a shit what they think? No. But like, were there people that came out and like I've had people tell me I'm stealing teachers from the profession, that it's not okay for me to run the business that I run that I'm doing it wrong, that what I'm gonna do is never gonna work like people I respect and love and all of these things like those are what I think of as haters. I have people unsubscribe every week. But I also have people come in and join. So, you know, to work on this assumption that more people are in your corner than not is a very different thing than looking for engagement in Facebook numbers. You're just gonna assume people are with you. It was a very different way to look at what you're doing. Like it's a lot easier to see share your post and assume that people are gonna love it. It's just a different way of thinking. Like, what we're taught to think is like, I will post this and then see if people like it by how many times they click the thumbs up. That's not, that's not how it has to work. For me, it's, I'm going to put this out there, people are going to love it, and maybe some of them will even hit the thumbs up. Okay, that works. So it makes it a lot easier to be visible if you're not counting on the thumbs up to make it valid, right? The next thing is this. If you're really stuck, and you feel like you're like questioning everything you do decide to do a science experiment. Like I'm experimenter. Sometimes what I believe, and I know this to be the case, it's like little kids testing boundaries. The only way to know if you swung the pendulum too far is to swing the pendulum too far, right? Like, we can't know if we've gone too far until we've tried to go too far that you don't know, if you broke a rule until you tried to break a rule. This is how it goes sometimes. But what I know about you and I know about me, is it's pretty damn hard to go too far. Right? Like you're not gonna get out on the internet and advocate for something absolutely bananas, you're not gonna, like kill kittens, you're not gonna do anything insane. What you're gonna do is like, tell people you're really fun to work with, share a testimonial, and then be like, Hey, you should work with me too. And no one is going to think you're a complete jerk. Like you that's not swinging the pendulum too far, the only person that's going to feel like that too, is you. So do an experiment, and swing the pendulum, what's going to feel like too far. And then if you want, run away, close Facebook, leave for five hours, don't talk to it again until tomorrow. Like you don't have to then sit there and wait to see how it went, like have the idea, make the post run.

That's your experiment. Let yourself say the thing, run away, and then get up the next day and see that you have not died yet. See that people probably actually supported you, and that you're still intact. And then do another similar experiment, until you raise your tolerance to this particular kind of thing. Like I have just become more tolerant of saying what I need to say on the fly. Because I've gotten used to it. I've been working on it for almost nine months. And before that I was working on it just not as diligently. Do I have blips in it? Right where I have right now with with the new people in my world? Yes, of course, am I going to get over it? Yes. Because now I'm going to have to start to experiment again and like but try to put things out in the world and not die from it. It's going to be fine. I'm not going to die from it. They're going to be lovely and supportive, and, and kind and all the things because they're just magical people. But that doesn't mean it's not uncomfortable. Like allowing yourself to stand out is uncomfortable. And that's okay. And then what I will tell you is, you know, when you make the thing that you think is too far, you say the thing and then you run away, you're gonna feel weird about it, it's okay, you're going to feel like a little, like, for lack of a better word. pukey you're going to be like, I feel so gross. Now, I can't believe I did that. Your job is to just like, not die from it. You're not gonna, it's okay. And then the last thing I would say you use this allowing yourself to stand out is the backbone of it is remembering you Who the hell you actually are. Like, you are valuable. You are important. You are full of things, ideas, content, questions, expertise, that the world needs, remembering who you are and that people need you. is a way to remember that you get to stand out. You don't have to you get to, you're allowed to because you're a big deal. What you do is a big deal. What you do is important. And because of that it is okay for you to stand out. What you do with no one else does quite like you do. It's magic. And when you hide magic, it's wrong. Right? So sit back and remember who you are for a hot minute. Because what you are is important and people need it. And that's a big deal. So if what you want you can try all these things. If you're like okay, cool. Sara, like I'm going to try all these things but I don't think it's going to be enough. I need more accountability. I have the perfect thing for you. I have small group coaching. Because honestly what you need is accountability and there is nothing nothing And nothing, nothing better than the version of small group coaching that I do, where you get individual coaching week to week, every week. Everyone gets what they need in the small group because they're capped at four, but you get the accountability of five people, right? You get to hold yourself accountable. But you get to have the other people in the group with you, you get to have me with you, and more will get done, you will stand out you will have people amplify your voice you have will have people remind you who you are on the regular you will help people help you hatch your experiments, you will have people who help you remember that you are more helpful by being visible than not. And you will have people who will not even be secret supporters, they will just full on be your supporters through this group. And you will grow your business because we will be pushing you along very gently and kindly shoving you into allowing yourself to stand out because we as a group always know how much that matters. They are forming right now. If you are interested in joining group coaching, our first week is the week of October 10. The seats are up for grabs. Now there are four people in a group I think I might run to we'll have to see. And if you have questions about it, come on into my Facebook group. It's called Teachers in Business. Or just send me a message. I'm sara@torpeycoaching.com. All of this will get linked in the transcript. And I will also put in the link for you to just sign up to have a call about small recruiting because it's worth talking about, even if you're not sure. If you have questions reach out. I am happy to have you in my group. If you're not there yet, please know that you're welcome. It's called teachers and business but it's actually for all of us. Right? We are all teachers on some level you do belong don't question it. Just come join. And I will see you all here on the podcast again next week.