brand clarity in your business and being.
How many times have you heard that you have to love what you do, and that you can sleep when you are dead, and that you should let your passion/purpose kill you slowly as you just pour into this identity of finding your purpose and allowing it to consume you?
Yea… I hear ya. Me, too. I often think that as entrepreneurs we are asked to blend our identities with our work and never look back. And in some ways, we are one person, and we should not wear 500 different masks to show up in the world… but today I want to offer you this idea that having clarity in your business and being can allow you to have a healthier relationship with your self and your work.
Hear me out. I live, love, and breathe design. It takes everything in me not to comment on menu designs as I sit down in a restaurant. I crack open a new book, or freshly printed brochure and smell the pages. I touch and feel paper on an almost inappropriate level. So I get it. I really do get it. What I have learned however, is that when you blend your personal love and passion into your business you have a really hard time separating out your selves after you get going. As passionpreneurs—it’s extra hard. See what I did there? I call my tribe passionpreneurs, because I get it and I see it. You march forward with passion and operate out of the core logic of an entrepreneur. But it’s a tricky balance. You want to help the world, you are amazing at creating this thing and then you slowly let it consume you, take up all hours of your day, night, weekend, family time, vacations, etc.
It’s blurring boundaries between your personal and business life. But of course, you love what you do, so it doesn’t seem so harmful. You want that client to be totally excited and happy with your final product so you pull that all-nighter.
I want to offer a different idea. I want to offer you a conversation around your brand that is not just home-grown but fully developed into a business that can take on a life of its own, so can go on vacation without guilt, hire people to help you manage your proverbial business baby, or shut your doors for a few months because a virus hits. That’s what I like to do in my brand clarity workshops and online course: offer you a path to work through all of your brand pillars, identify who you are as passionpreneur, figure out your vision, and mission (it’s tough work but super worth it!) and get to a place of so much clarity that you can set healthy boundaries, and healthy relationships with time, work, family and friends.
This work is done throughout weeks of self-inquiry, thought-monitoring, and digging into your business. The results for all my clients that I have guided through this process have been amazing. It has allowed them to clearly articulate who they are and know how to pour into their business and how to rest.
Brand clarity allows you to once and for all identify what makes you, well, you. What is your unique path as a boutique shop owner, life coach, or designer? No matter what endeavor you take on, each business and idea can have brand clarity that allows you to love what you do but hang up your tools and hardhat at the end of the night.
I know you see your world through that passionpreneurial lens and you can’t turn it off, and your business idea may have originated from a very personal need or mission close to your heart. And listen, that is all ok. I just want you to have it all. I want to advocate for this space where you are clear on your business and being. I believe brand clarity affords you that focus and distinction to march forward and be the most amazing badass self you can, and then allow you to have an assistant to help you, or a website to automate your orders, or a clear vision and mission on your site to explain who you are, so you are not constantly redefining who you are or reinventing the wheel. I often think brand clarity is this luxurious extra thing we do not think we really need, because we need to sell the thing we are selling, but it’s everything. It’s the foundation to come back to when you want to train employees, when you need to hire a social media manager and explain who you are, when you want to add a new branch/service/product to your biz, when you want to target a specific demographic for advertising. If you don’t do this work you cannot stand out from a crowd because if you don’t know who you are in your business and being, the outside will sure as hell not know who you are.
Over the next few weeks I will be sharing branding tips here on the blog, so be sure to check-in if you are curious. In the meantime, if this hits you harder than you expected and you want to learn more, like you feel ready, let’s do an assessment call via this link.
Would love to hear your comments and thoughts below on brand clarity, what you do and don’t know, even what you would like to learn. I’m always here listening.