Your vulnerability is part of your brand!
Your openness and approachability make you inviting and trustworthy.
But how does your vulnerability help you become a strong successful leader in your field? Or we could ask it like this. How do you become so vulnerable, so inviting and trustworthy, that people naturally place their trust in you?
Over the next few weeks I’m going to talk about the set of important skills you need to become a strong successful leader in your field. Vulnerability is one of the vital skills you must portray and be!
Want to Be Vulnerable?
If you want to be seen as vulnerable, open and trustworthy, you must be just that.
You must be the imperfect person who is prepared to grow beyond their current limitations!
If you want to become more vulnerable, then check out these 8 practical pointers.
1. Don’t confine yourself to a set of rules that you’ve decided apply to who you are and what you want to become!
Instead you need to:
- Push your boundaries, develop your abilities, and stretch your capabilities
- Challenge your goal mindset and change the balance of who you thought you were
In doing so, the person you become is not the person you once thought you were. This is your vulnerability. In this place, you’re open to learning what people are needing to show you and empathising with their problems.
2. Don’t expand your audience in small comfortable shuffles.
Shuffles won’t challenge your concepts of the audience you’re serving!
Instead you need to:
- Expand your reach. And what that means is audience volume. The equation is simple. The more people you talk to, the more sales you will make
- Your business model must accommodate both a one-to-one as well as a one-to-many model
- Be aware of where the people you serve are congregating and go there, or give them a place to congregate in numbers
There are many online social places you can utilize to expand your audience, from Facebook Groups (like the Coach Yourself to Success for Entrepreneurs Facebook group), Facebook pages, Instagram, your blogs, Medium and LinkedIn.
Example: “Clubhouse”There’s a fast-rising app out that lots of people are starting to use. It’s called “Clubhouse” and it’s an invite-only audio-only social media app. Users can create a Club and within it different chat rooms can be created. Important to know is that nothing is visual. And you join by invitation only. If, say, I send you a referral – you only get three – then you invite your friends or clients to a Club, and they invite their friends. It’s incredible for lead generation because you can literally host thousands of visitors to your room. So if a Club has 30,000 followers, well guess what? You just hit volume! |
3. Don’t stop talking with the people you serve.
Once you stop talking with the people you serve, you stop learning about who they are and what they need from you—and you stop showing up for them!
Instead you need to:
- Really listen to what is causing them pain, frustration and what makes them feel vulnerable
Example: 20 Minute Strategy CallsOne way to keep in touch with your audience is to create a survey and to entice your people to complete it is to offer, say, a free 20 minute strategy call to anyone that completes the survey. You may find you get to book a lot of calls, but that’s a good thing. Doing the strategy calls will help clarify your clients’ mindsets for you because you’ll realise how you want to show up, and this allows you to know how to close sales. |
4. Don’t rely on your prospects to come to you whenever they feel like it, it’s too ad-hoc and lacks drive and planning.
Instead you need to:
- Find a purpose to get the people you serve to come to you or for you to come to them
Example: Give Away Sessions to Gain ClientsLearn about emerging issues during your strategy calls. Whatever you learn here should be used as the basis for the coaching sessions. Once you’re done with your strategy calls, plan out an email to your wider base. Then get even more specific in your emails. Talk about mindset problems that emerged during the strategy sessions, and invite people to join you for 20 (or 60, or whatever) open spots. You could even position it as a sponsorship, because your time is valuable. So if you would charge $200 for a coaching session, and you give 60 spots away, then that’s $12,000 worth of mindset coaching away for free today. In the email, you ask people if they have an issue with the specific mindset problem identified in the strategy calls. Then you indicate you have the solution. Ask them to click on a link in your email to set up a coaching session with you. Once you’re chatting away, you sincerely coach them, delivering on your promise. Then after coaching with them, you indicate that you think they’re a prime person to join your program and that you could help get the biggest results of their life in six months (whatever is real, be assertive, and be real about what you see for them.) |
Example: Play Tag TeamSometimes it helps to play tag team with another team member. If you’re a husband and wife team, then this idea might suit you well. One of you is a “setter” and the other is a “closer.” A “setter” is the person who starts the process with the client, drawing out the client and building up the relationship with lots of love and tons of value. The “closer” is the person who takes over the relationship and closes the deal. The “setter” doesn’t place themselves in the position of even discussing the deal. By the way, you have a higher closure rate if you do this. |
5. Don’t forget to build real relationships along the way.
Your clients are your best assets!!! The worst thing you could do is start to build up a relationship with a client then leave them alone. Because guess what they’ll do? They’ll tell everyone they know about how you don’t have enough time for them.
Instead you need to:
- Genuinely care about the people you bring through your program
- Have someone in your company who can continue to build that all-important relationship with them, to let them know they’re special and important to you
- Learn about them, their needs, their habits, their family lives
Doing this engenders trust and intimacy. It goes in both directions. The more you know them, the more they know you.
And if you keep listening out and identifying their needs, and meeting those needs, then you build hope and faith!
Faith provides assurances that you can deliver.
6. Don’t forget to trust the people you serve! Then leverage off what you taught them.
Your biggest assets include the people who are in your program or who have completed your program. The relationship you have built with them—by being vulnerable—is invaluable.
They each have a unique view of the world; together this provides a rich depth of knowledge and understanding.
Example: Leverage Off Your Existing GroupsLet’s say you design a program to have 12 people. Let’s call it Marketing Mastery. And once you’ve been through your process with them and taught them most of what you know (you’ll be looking for new and creative ways to keep coaching them as a group), then you close off that group. You don’t shut it down. You close it off so that no one else can join it. Then you create a new funnel to form a new group of 12 people. And you’d give that new group a different title. Then with that first group you birth another company, and you can start cultivating a pool of amazing partnerships which could be leveraged for your new group of 12 people. They could be summit leaders, for example. And you would then up the frequency of creating new groups of 12 people, leveraging off the skills of each earlier group of 12. |
7. Don’t forget to plan your stacked events.
Stacked events are events you’ve planned to go one-after-the-other-after-the-other. Often you’d use a funnel builder to help you manage the technicalities of this.
The goal is to lead people into a planned path of interaction and intimacy. Without it, you’ll be random and your rhythm won’t sit right. The problem with that is it seems unplanned and panicky. And you won’t get the momentum and numbers of people you’re after.
Develop a plan of stacked events. The goal is to keep bringing people through with momentum, so that they can start building relationships with each other as well.
You should seek to not just maintain but to continually build on that trust and intimacy that you have with people. Show them who you are and what you can honestly deliver for them.
8. Don’t forget to be true yourself!
Vulnerability can be faked. You don’t want to be the person who fakes their true purpose behind a wall of lies and disregard.
- Be true with yourself and true with those who you serve.
You’ll find you reach your destiny far more powerfully when you do.
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As one of our members so rightfully commented on the podcast:
“Vulnerability = growth. Yes! Our current struggle = our future way to serve!” Amy V.S.
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You’re welcome to join our Coach Yourself to Success for Entrepreneurs Facebook Group to learn more about how to build your business with the leadership skills you need today.
