It gives you more confidence, you feel more authentic. That authenticity and confidence helps you feel more at ease in your business, especially in your selling conversations.
One strength I see in myself and in my community: lifelong learning. My community is full of women who love learning new things.
If you look at your bedside table or coffee table, is it full of self-help books, books on spirituality, or building your business? If that’s you, then most likely you too are a LIFELONG LEARNER.
There are lots to benefits to being a lifelong learner AND in some ways it can decrease your effectiveness in your business. (You’ll find videos to help you increase your effectiveness as a learner and entrepreneur at http://marcystahl.com/blog )
Here are 3 ways your love of learning can interfere with your business growth.
- You’re on such a quest for info that you never consider yourself an expert. You’re always on a journey; you haven’t gotten to the end of your learning journey; therefore you don’t view yourself as an expert yet!
I invite you to rotate that and look in the opposite direction. Instead of looking at the distance between where you are and your desired knowledge, look in the other direction at how far you’ve come. There, you’ll see a big gap. That’s where your community is: your prospects, the people who follow you, and your colleagues. They’re interested in what you know AND they’re not into it as deeply as you are. They rely on you to digest, synthesize and summarize all that info and feed it back to them.
Not acknowledging yourself as an expert means you minimize your knowledge, skills and abilities.
It can also prevent you from stepping into the position of expertise that actually does match what you know and your capabilities. When you’re not stepping into that right position of relevance, authority and confidence, then you’re having less impact that you COULD have, on the people you want to touch.
- It can slow you down when you face a problem in your business. And your business journey is full of problems, obstacles, opportunities disguised as challenges!
When you’re a lifelong learner, your go-to response to a problem is: Let me find a new idea! Let me find a new book, an additional training, an expert on that topic. Your life is full of examples where you’ve gotten new information/ideas and taken action. That’s great, and it can slow you down. You don’t look within and acknowledge what you already have going for you. You don’t reflect on what has worked for you in the past. Instead of looking within, your focus is “let me find the next new idea”.
- Your style in terms of marketing and selling is to get behind information. You are not in front, your info is in front.
It’s like being a walking book report. That’s where I was in my business when I first started.
I thought I could just share amazing powerful information with people through my email newsletter or through my talks. People would hear this powerful information and say: “Wow, Marcy knows so much amazing, powerful information – I really want to work with her!”
Is that what moves most people to take action in their life? Seeing someone with great information? No.
That did not help me move my business forward. It did help me establish me as someone with expertise, so it had some benefit. However I didn’t get any clients. I didn’t have a call to action. I didn’t have any way of connecting with people emotionally, which is really where the connection needs to take place, In order to move someone into action.
As a lifelong learner, you want to stay behind ideas and rely on the power of ideas to lead to behavior change. That doesn’t work. That’s the third way being a lifelong learner can get in your way.
CALL TO ACTION
For this video, are any of these 3 characteristics happening for you?
- You find hard to view yourself as an expert.
- You tend to look outside yourself for new ideas to solve your business problems, before you look within.
- When it comes to marketing and sales, you much prefer sharing great information vs. connecting emotionally with your prospects.
If this is you, then your learner strength *is* getting in the way of your business growth. You’ll want to consider alternative ways to think and act in order to grow your business.
If support will help you get your business to where you want to be, faster and more easily than you can on your own, or if you recognize that you don’t have a call to action in your marketing, or you feel inauthentic in your selling conversations, then I invite you into a complimentary call for me where we’ll discuss your goals, what’s getting in the way, and whether my coaching is a match for you. Simply email me at success@marcystahl.com and we’ll easily set up a complimentary private call.
