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.)