Welcome to Meaningful Work, Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy, and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia.
In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.
Today, we’re going to talk about taking up more space in your own marketing. Now this seems like a strange premise, right? Because it’s your marketing after all. Like you should be in it, right? But what I’m seeing more and more is a worrying trend towards self-censorship amongst business owners. And of course, this is not the case for all business owners, but for a particular type of person who happens to be my ideal client or adjunct to my ideal client, where they are highly conscientious, where they are deep thinkers, they’re thoughtful, they’re not surface level people, where they can tend towards overthinking.
They’re thoughtful. They want to do an excellent job. They’ve got high standards for themselves and for others. They are sensitive. They are creative, even if they don’t believe that they’re creative. They tend to be over 40. So they’ve had a different socialisation, a different upbringing than younger generations. And for this particular group of female business owners, particularly, they’ve imbibed their entire life that you shouldn’t talk too well of yourself. You shouldn’t take up too much space.
So when it comes to marketing yourself on the internet, and especially when you’re attempting to grow your professional reputation, you’re no longer hiding behind a brand, or maybe you never did, where you are a consultant, a specialist, a professional, and you are in effect in the spotlight, there can be a hell of a lot of self-censorship and overthinking.
But this new evolution of marketing, this AI evolution of marketing is going to be a lot more personal. It’s gonna require a lot more personal sharing from people who perhaps are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with doing so. So today we’re gonna talk about selfish marketing. I’m gonna talk about it through the lens of the fact that selfish needs a good PR makeover, yeah, because the entire season, this is part of the PR makeover, the summer of selfish, the whole season for this podcast is how do we become more selfish?
And firstly, selfish isn’t a bad thing. We need to think about it differently. We need to stop sacrificing ourselves at the altar of niceness and integrity and conscientiousness and the rest of it. So selfish needs a good PR hangover. A good PR makeover, not hangover. The hangover is resentment. The hangover is anger. The hangover is poverty. The hangover is a lifetime of being overlooked and not noticed and not appreciated because you haven’t put yourself and your needs first.
So, in this next evolution of marketing, and I am not using the word personal branding, I don’t like that term at all. I find it aligns more with the influences that are documenting, you know, every second, every moment of the days. That is more of more relevant than what I’m talking about today. Personal branding, I think, encourages us to become caricatures of ourselves and to simplify what we’re saying so it becomes really, really basic. And we can do things such as wearing our brand colors all the time or wearing the same outfit all the time or wearing a particular item of clothing such as a pair of sunglasses so that that’s what we become known as, you know, or reminded of, like it provokes some weird behavior, I reckon.
That’s my little rant about personal branding. We don’t need to turn us off into a caricature, but we do need to appreciate that in the age of AI same sameness, we are the unfair advantage. You are your own unfair advantage. Nobody is quite the same way as you are. And so we need to embrace that. We need to start sharing our stories.
Many years ago, I wrote an article called The Year I Lost My Business Mojo. I’ll make sure to link it in the show notes. And at the time, at the time my babies were a little bit older, but it was a story that I finally got down on paper on the internet about having about 18 months of really not thriving and of holding my business very lightly during this time. So I had two babies under two and I was servicing my clients. I never stopped earning my maternity leave. It was non-existent. Do not do what I did, please. I did marketing. I did my minimum viable marketing. Again, I’ll link this up in the show notes, folks, so you can grab yourself a free copy. Minimum viable marketing got done.
My clients were serviced, but my business was in a holding pattern. I didn’t do any biz dev, any business development. I didn’t reach out to prospective people. I didn’t do any pitching. I did bare minimum marketing, minimum viable marketing. I was just getting through the days. And every time I shared this particular blog post and I share it multiple times in multiple places, I’d get great comments and compliments and people would say, Oh, I love reading that story. I’ve read it more than once, I love it. And it wasn’t an extraordinary story, it was just a true story, that’s all. It was a relatable true story. And back in the day, there was less and less and less of this. Now it was such a relatable story that it actually got picked up by a magazine. I didn’t pitch it to the magazine, I did share it with a journalist, but there wasn’t a big campaign behind it or anything. It got published in the Collective magazine, which I believe no longer exists because it was relatable, because it was real.
So in this next age of marketing, we are going to need to center ourselves. And that was a Freudian slip, perhaps. We have brought so much censorship into marketing that we are killing our visibility. And we’re not just killing our visibility because this is just surface level stuff, right? We’re killing our visibility, which means we’re not getting bigger clients, we’re not getting bigger opportunities, people don’t know who we are, they don’t know how great our work is.
But more than that, more than that, because if you’ve got years and years and years of stopping yourself from saying what you think and feel and mean, out loud or maybe, which is what I see a lot of, you’ve broken yourself into two parts and one part is the real part that shares the real opinions and the real thoughts, the super articulate and very, very interesting and thoughtful and has nuanced interesting arguments to share but only face to face and only with people that you know and trust. And the other part is the part that you put on the internet, which is a hell of a lot more boring and beige.
And what happens when we do this? What happens when we have years of this self-censorship, without really appreciating that that is exactly what it is, is that we become resentful, we become are uneasy with ourselves because we know we’re not really representing ourselves, we know that we’re not expressing ourselves properly, and then this becomes a lot of internal stress, a lot of internal friction.
And this is just part of it.
So when we can embrace the fact that we are not doing anyone any favours. We’re not doing anyone any favors by being modest, by being inhibited, by overthinking everything. We’re doing ourselves the least of the favors, but we’re also not helping people who desperately needed to hear from us, who need to hear our story.
That ordinary story about losing my business mojo for 18 months is really, really common. And not only is it but not nearly enough people talk about it. And they certainly didn’t talk about it when I shared it back then. Thankfully, things are getting better and easier and more open by the day, yeah? But I think alongside this, we’re becoming a lot more conscious, self-conscious and inhibited because we’re aware of the pushback that some people get. When they share without thought, they share without thinking.
So when it comes to selfish marketing, there’s two ways of doing marketing. I mean, that’s a strange thing to say. There are many, many ways of doing marketing, but when it comes to ideal client groups, when it comes to target market, who is your target market? Who is your brand? What is your brand? Who is your target market? This is kind of foundational marketing, right?
And there’s two ways of going about this. The first is to identify that ideal client group, to empathise with them deeply, to reflect themselves back to themselves so that they can see themselves in your marketing with great depth and detail. The more specific you can be here, the better. You wanna be as super specific as possible and you become less important. The brand becomes less important.
It is not so much about your qualifications. It’s not at all about, you know, how great the business is and how many accolades and, you know, other credibility indicators the business has. It’s more about the fact that you’ve gained trust from your ideal client group because they can see themselves reflected in great depth and detail in your marketing. That’s one way of doing it. And that’s a way that I feel quite comfortable. You know, some people resonate towards that way. And certainly I resonated towards that way.
And the second way is not better or worse. It’s just different. The second way to do this is you put yourself in the spotlight. You put your business in the spotlight. And this is a way that I am teaching and training my clients more and more in. Because oftentimes it’s really difficult to understand who our ideal clients are. Especially when it’s early days of the business, especially when perhaps, you know, we don’t trust ourselves as much. We haven’t yet kind of deepened our self trust through years and years of talking to the same type of person. We can’t really see that ideal client as easily. And we certainly can’t describe their inner worlds in depth and detail.
So you can put then yourself in the spotlight and share what desperately needs to be expressed without censorship. What do you know to be true? What do you believe in? What do you notice that other people don’t notice and why does it matter? Yeah, what are the things that you see your competitors or your industry overlooking or doing that you think, oh God, that’s terrible. That is not what I do. That is not what I think or feel. That is not what I believe.
So putting yourself in the spotlight means sharing more of your story. And it doesn’t need to be polished. It doesn’t need to be dramatic. You do not need to have lost a limb while climbing Mount Everest with a baby strapped to your back. It doesn’t need to sound, you know, finished because it’s all, it’s a work in progress, right? And it certainly doesn’t need to sound like the shit that gets sprayed, braided, you know, all day long. I mean, these stories on LinkedIn, I kind of want to go through and just edit them all. I really want to edit them. I don’t, that would be weird. I would not make friends and influence people, but they often start out really good, right? Say, oh yeah, that’s a good hook. Oh yeah, I’m reading this story. Yep, that’s interesting. And then the business owner or the, you know, whoever they are, the business leader turns into, you know, the teacher.
Well, you know, and the takeaway is, and this is the three top things that you can take from this story of mine, you know, and it’s like, oh God, you were good. And then you turned into some bot, then you plumped it into chat chippy teen, that’s what it spat out. So the stuff that you’re sharing, you want it to be a little bit raw. And when I say raw, I don’t want you to share this story when you’re in the thick of it. I didn’t write that story about the year I lost my business mojo when I was in the thick of it. I couldn’t have. I couldn’t have because I didn’t have the perspective. I was still struggling with, oh my God, how boring is this? I’m following my toddler around the house. I’m literally walking around the periphery of the house watching the ants crawl and here’s a little butterfly and my brain is, you know, my brain is melting.
My brain went into overdrive because it was so bored from hanging out with baby and toddler all day long, you know, that I had these active kind of imaginings going on at the same time I’m singing Baa Baa Black Sheep or whatever. I needed to be out of the story. It needed to be behind me for me to have the hindsight and the insight that comes when there’s distance between you and the story.
So don’t feel like, you know, I’m right in the middle of my cancer journey and I need to share it on the internet. You don’t, you do not owe the internet your story when you’re still, you know, it’s still being written. Yeah. But do please share more of yourself. It doesn’t have to be the things that you’re uncomfortable with but it does have to be something, some detail.
Now, if you are thinking right now, yes, but who would want to hear this, Brook? You don’t understand quite how boring I am. Like, do you really think people are interested? Do you really think people wanna hear this? We are so cruel to ourselves.
Some years ago, I remember reading a columnist in a magazine, a regular magazine that came with the newspaper on the weekend. And she used to write about fashion, which I’m deeply disinterested in. That was her thing. But she also wrote about the minutia of life. And I remember it like it was yesterday, some of the things that she would write about the rolling boil in a kettle and how when you went on holidays and you’re staying in some place that has a crappy kettle. You can’t get the rolling boil that you need to have a good cup of tea. I had never considered what the hell a rolling boil was before. But I remember this very distinctly because that was a pertinent detail that was expressed well.
So yes, the short answer is yes, people want to hear about this. If you are thinking like an international spy, you sit down to do some marketing and you’re thinking like an international spy, mapping out any and all possible interpretations to the message that you wanna put out. You’ve got all of the different ways that people might receive this.
Stop! This is not marketing. This is not normal. This is self-censorship. You’re anxious and you’re overthinking it and you’re making it way harder than it needs to be. Far harder.
One of the joys and the privileges of marketing on the internet as a self-employed person, and especially if you don’t have to run anything through anyone, you don’t have a boss or a manager or whatever that’s going to approve or disprove, you know, disapprove whatever message you want to put on the internet, there is a great privilege in this.
There is a great joy in this. Humans have always expressed themselves to other humans. How can we let people in if we don’t do this? You know, we think we’re lonely. We moan that we’re lonely and that nobody knows us and understands us. And if only we had deep relationships. And yet we hold ourselves back all the time. We don’t share because it makes us feel vulnerable. And we’ve taken the trolls and the idea of the trolls, and we’ve made them into great monsters in our mind, whereas if we were lucky enough to be trolled on the internet, then that would likely mean that we’ve reached a level of visibility that we are far from.
So I apologize to anyone listening to this who has actually been trolled. I apologize to anyone listening to this whose lived, experienced or marginalised identity means that they are under threat? But I want you to ask yourself honestly, is that you?
And if it’s not you, then I believe that you owe it to not just yourself, but to others, to put more of yourself in the spotlight, to let yourself be seen, to let yourself be heard. Because how are other people going to know you? How are you going to be known, not just from a visibility and marketing perspective, from a heart to heart perspective, otherwise?
And that’s all I have to say about that. Thank you for listening.
Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favor and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.
