How can you be visible in your business when you don’t feel visible in your own life?

Let’s talk about losing yourself

It could be a dose of self-doubt taking over, it could be that awkward messy middle that happens right before a big change, it could be that you came back from the festive break and nothing fits as it used too…

And I’m not just talking about your jeans here!

When you step back, even for a short while, from anything you start to see things differently. As the saying goes, you can’t see the picture from inside the frame. I love that one. It’s so true. When you’re in the day to day of it you can’t always see the big picture.

It’s easy to get lost in it all. It’s easy to lose yourself to your work, to get lost in delivering mode, to get swallowed by that big project you were so excited to get stuck into and you’re loving working on that you forget to work on your own business at the same time.

And then you forget who you are. Why you are doing this business thing. What it is you want out of this thing you get to call work.

How do you show up as ‘you’ in your brand when you don’t know who ‘you’ is anymore?!

First up. It happens. More often than most care to admit. The visibility wobbles. The WTF am I even doing moments. They can hit you at any stage of business. Not just when you’ve come back from a festive feasting break! They can show up when you launch a new thing — when you take on a huge new project — when you decide to stop doing what you’ve always done and moved into a new stage of your business, your brand evolves and you can get lost inside it all not knowing how or what is you anymore.

It hit me when I came back to my business after having kids, I was a different me, of course I was, I had a whole new perspective on life, I had way less time to do things in my business and a crazy new instinct for saying NO to a lot of stuff that wasn’t a perfect fit for what I wanted to be doing with my time.

In an instant, my world changed. And with it, my business and brand had to change in a way I had not at all prepared for!

I share this because I know what it’s like to lose yourself, to wake up to a business that doesn’t seem to fit as well as it used to and not have a plan to get you through that messy moment.

But those moments don’t have to be ‘burn it to the ground’ moments! You don’t have to make massive changes. You can absolutely grow your brand, your business, and your life together as things change. Your brand is supposed to grow with you. Your business is supposed to have moments of massive change. Just as you do.

So how do you show up when you don’t know which way is up?

RIDE IT OUT

See where it takes you, don’t stress about it, put a date in your diary to check back in on things and give yourself a couple weeks ‘play’ time

SCHEDULE IT OUT

This is my favourite, write something, like this post, and pre-schedule a load of posts around it… then do that again and again so you have a chunk of content pre-scheduled then forget about it and let those ideas auto post and see what happens when they emerge, do they feel right to you and your brand? Do they get engagement?…

FUCK IT UP

let yourself do it ‘wrong’ knowing there’s no real wrong way to do you, only doing what feels right and knowing when to stop & change when it doesn’t fit anymore. Nothing worse than sticking with something that doesn’t fit — like your pre-Christmas jeans, sure they might come back out again soon but for now give yourself some breathing room in those stretchy joggers! Same for your brand… give it some room to breathe, put it in some elasticated waist pants!

Doing this all on your own is tough which is why I’m putting together a little something where we can all dig into these questions together, it’ll be free, it’ll be fun and it’ll change the way you look at your brand, your business, even your life.

Keep an eye out for an email next week with more details on that one. But until then, I’d love to hear from you.

What’s your big 2020 vision for your business?

FREE MASTERCLASS:

Branding means a lot of different things to a lot of different people — but at its core is getting to YOUR CORE. It’s not just logos, colour palettes, websites, and photos… it’s not just the external elements that people ‘see’ it’s the strategy, the story, the messy inside that’s all too often forgotten.

Whichever way you come at it, it always starts with YOU. Because if you don’t know who you are as a brand — how will your customers!

Originally published at https://bydeesign.co.uk on January 10, 2020.