Throw It In The Air (See What Happens)

Ka: remember when we were sitting at the Top Pot in Seattle a month ago and made mind-maps about what was pressing to us at the time? You did one on how to proceed with your life in general, mine was on conceiving of a website for my coaching business. We took turns branching off our thoughts, conversing on paper, with a stop watch reminding us when to switch papers.

Anyway, for a while longer, I remained obsessed with this idea of my website and what it might look like and contain and whom it should speak to. In fact, I kinda despaired about the whole thing, because I just don't quite know how to brand my coaching practice yet. And so, after all our work and brainstorming, I threw the whole thing in the air, and decided to temporarily ditch the website and focus on finding clients through my existing networks.

So as it goes, Zornitsa, one of the first people I come across to ask whether she'd like to have a complimentary session with me, told me briefly of her plans to finally go into business for herself as a web designer to support her dancing career, and I suggested we make a barter agreement, and she said great, and we met -- and now I'm getting a website AND I have a new client to coach!

This, my friend, is called putting your intentions out there and letting the universe take care of the rest. Can't wait to show you what we come up with.

Collage: My Tool For Business Growth

Okay hi, I'm back. For a moment there -- a month, really -- I was confused about how to move forward with various aspects of my life, including my budding coaching business and, apparently, this blog.

In an effort to define my brand, develop a website, and come up with a business name -- you know, those things you're supposed to do when you start a new business -- I got all hung up on semantics, exact wordage, design requirements and some notion of a precise target market. I did the exercises given to me by my business development coach, I got coached by other peer coaches on how best to work with the business development coach, I brainstormed with friends and frenemies, I even visited Kat in Seattle (!!).

My findings:

1. I discovered that I like approaching my "target market" as a research project. Namely, I am super curious about people who live in multiple cultural worlds simultaneously, and I want to know how they make sense of where/who/with whom they live and how they approach their professional/creative/spiritual lives. I am reading and I'm having conversations. And the logical place to process my findings is in writing. How about on this blog!

 

2. After throwing all the "guaranteed-success" exercises in the air, I made a collage with the question in mind "What is my relationship with my ideal client?" This is what I came up with. It's fun to interpret what ended up on the collage, but what ultimately sticks out to me is a) that I really profit from visually organizing my thoughts in a non-linear way, and b) that the process of collaging says tons about my approach to coaching: People's multiple cultural worlds are like collages and I like to recognize them as such. In addition, working with scissors, glue stick and magazine images is really fun!

(Also, visiting with Kat was like food for my soul. Note how we didn't really make a tremendous effort to blog while we were in each others' presence... we were too busy taking the ferry, canoeing, walking, mind mapping, hanging with friends, cooking and eating. Damn, tangibility is good.)