What does it take to be seen?
What does it take for your business to thrive?
Our society and our online culture tends to favour louder being better,
And demand for viral content creates pressure to get wackier and more extreme to fight those dwindling attention spans.
This visibility is the goal.
But what does visibility really get you?
It will get you some attention and it will bring some growth,
But you will have to fight for it,
And you will feel the pressure to sustain your visibility levels.
And it will eat into your capacity to do your work,
Because your attention will be on sustaining or expanding your visibility to retain your business level.
For most,
The demands of this kind of visibility are draining but feel essential.
Is it really a necessary evil,
Or is there an alternative?
Now I believe that we can't change the system by using it as it stands.
We need to disrupt the status quo.
The biggest challenges we face in business are all centred around being noticed.
Attention spans are diminishing as the amount of information people consume rockets.
And with so many channels of information available,
Much of the content becomes white noise.
People become immune to anything but the loudest and the most extreme.
As everyone starts to shout,
More and more people switch off and it becomes harder to be heard.
What if you began to whisper instead?
Instead of speaking to the besieged senses of people with chronic information overload,
What if you spoke to their selves and woke up a part of them that has been switched off because of all the noise?
When my son was three,
I took him to his first day in kindergarten.
We sat in the garden as he became accustomed to this new experience and we watched the children running,
Climbing,
Digging,
Laughing.
They were busy and totally absorbed with their activities.
Underneath that general hubbub,
The kindergarten teacher began to very,
Very softly sing.
It was barely audible,
But every single child stopped what they were doing and gave her their full attention.
Within seconds,
They were all lined up and ready to go inside.
It was an extraordinary lesson that stays with me every day because we are tuned to hear what matters.
It's how we're wired.
It's what we're looking for.
As entrepreneurs,
There are some profound takeaways for our business life from this.
Instead of throwing ourselves into the noise and trying to come out on top,
What if we whisper to those inside the chaos?
If we can begin to adopt a quiet presence in business,
We can rock the status quo not by being loud,
But the very opposite.
We can whisper into the hearts and souls of those who are keenly waiting for it.
What does that mean in practice?
It means being more attuned to the energy of your work than the words and their format.
Energy is the first thing anyone notices.
We sense energy,
Then we have an emotion,
Then our physical senses kick in,
And then our logic takes over.
Modern business has been totally focused on logic,
And that's required a psychological pressure to reverse engineer the emotional responses.
Ultimately,
It's presenting a hollow shell that tries to animate but can't.
The heart of a business is energy.
This is what your audience and your future clients feel and respond to.
Quiet presence is the skill of learning to hold that energy consistently and extend it to those who are primed to listen.
Quiet presence is being felt,
Seen,
Understood because you are embodying energy.
To develop a quiet presence and use it as the foundation for any activity to share your business,
The first step is to drop into the energy.
In order to understand how it needs to be moved,
Expressed and received,
You need to understand how it activates you and how it activates your audience.
It will activate you so that you hold it in a particular way,
And that might well be quite different to your natural disposition.
It will activate your audience to become ready to transform.
This readiness is very specific to your business.
I am not talking here about the conventional quantifying of an ideal client avatar.
This is about where people are in their journey and what they are being called into,
And this is your key.
Everyone seeking transformation is on the cusp of a change.
Your energy can be what brings them to or over the threshold of that change.
Quiet presence is a clarion call to action.
So dropping into the energy is going to let you feel the qualities of this call.
You can then move into anchoring those qualities in the actions that you take.
And that's going to help you to see the types of experience that you need to offer and how to structure them,
The words to use,
The pictures to paint for your audience.
It will also show you how to express the life force of your business in ways that activate your future clients,
Because action comes off the back of energy.
Our challenge in changing how business works is to remember how to feel,
Translate and express that energy through our daily life and actions.
If you want to feel the energetic presence of your business and begin to understand what quiet presence means for you,
Then try this simple exercise.
Find yourself a quiet space and drop into your body using your breath.
When you feel settled,
Just ask to connect to the consciousness of your business.
The energy will come to you in many shapes and forms.
It's a completely unique experience.
Just be open to feeling the energy,
Experiencing its movement,
Its colour,
Sound,
Shape,
Form and dynamic.
When you feel comfortable that you can hold that energy,
See if you can extend it out to meet your future audience and your future clients.
As you extend it,
Watch how it is received,
How it activates them and then importantly how the returning energy activates your business.
It's a positive feedback loop.
Just understanding and experiencing this energy at its purest level will in time guide you to the actions that you need to take to extend that energy consistently at a tangible level.
And that's how you create an energetically aligned action plan.
Energetic approaches to business put you on another path to thriving.
This simple exercise will get you moving along that path,
Shaking the foundations of convention and transforming the entire business dynamic.
