The fastest way to achieve meaningful growth for your brand in 2022

If you've been feeling a little bit frustrated or disheartened lately, because it just feels like you're working so hard, you're so busy, and you're just constantly spinning your wheels. And yet, you're just not getting the results to match the effort that you're putting in, then please listen to this episode, because I have five really practical strategies that are going to help you make sure that all of the plans you make moving forward, are the kind of plans that you can see through to completion, and really start to give you that feedback, that momentum and those results that you have really been looking forward to just know that you're on the right track, and that you should not be giving up. Let's just dive straight in. Welcome to the seen heard paid podcast, where we believe that success isn't just about what you need to do it about who you need to be. I'm your host, Kat Elizabeth. And each week, I'll be bringing you practical advice, honest stories and occasional dose of tough love to help you go from industry's best kept secret to in demand brand. So you not only get paid to do what you love, but can build a platform that creates meaningful positive change, and inspires the people around you to do the same. Let's get into it. Well, hello, and welcome back. Thank you so much for being here. I'm going to make this, we're just gonna get down to business with this episode. Because I am in the middle of a It's not just a huge week. I mean, it feels like it's been a huge life. But a particularly busy time at the moment, because I am on the final stretch. I mean, we're few at the time of recording this, we're a few weeks out from Christmas, I have some big client projects to finish, I am finishing off the new version of seen heard paid academy. So I'm recording Module Three today, which is Magnetic Messaging, and oh my goodness, it was a big one, I keep under estimating how much time I'm going to need to do this, which is kind of related to what I'm going to be talking about today. And I also have the build your brand without the burnout workshop, which is happening live next week. And there's just been a lot going on. So I thought let's just get down to business, I'm going to give you five quick fire tips that are very practical that I hope I mean, even if you take one of these and run with them, it's going to be game changing for you moving forward, because I've just been able to spend, especially this last year, but obviously it's been years that I've been working with clients, but this year in particular was one where I really felt like I was like a fly on the wall observing my own patterns and habits and struggles and successes, as well as those of my clients. And I really have started to find these, these common denominators when it comes to people, you know, succeeding building, building momentum and seeing results versus getting stuck in the mud. So hopefully you find these helpful. But with no further ado, let's dive into the first one. Now, if you've been a listener for a long time, you may have heard me say this one before. But I have to say it again, because it's one of the best ones. One of the most important things to do if you're wanting to achieve any sort of growth is set goals that you can control. There is nothing more frustrating or disheartening than creating goals that you actually like you can't control. So for instance, saying, oh, I want to have 10,000 Instagram followers by this date, I'm sorry, like you can do absolutely all the things to try and get towards that goal. But whether you hit on hit it or not is is out of your control. And I don't want you to get to that date have not had that number, and then beat yourself up because I didn't get there, I suck I failed, you did not fail. Like if you were taking all of the steps that you committed to to get to that goal, then you have done fantastically well. So instead, what if you were to figure out well, what do I think it would take to hit 10,000 subscribers in a certain period of time? Who would I need to be? How would I need to show up? What would my commitment to the platform be? And create those goals related to those things? So for instance, you might say, Well, I think if I put three reels out a week, that's probably going to be my best chance of growing. Or, you know, maybe you have a different hero platform like you you're a blogger or you know, you have a platform that you know generates a fair bit of traffic naturally. And you start switching up your calls to action on those pieces of content saying hey, come follow me on Instagram or maybe you have that as your main call to action in your email signature. But whatever you commit to it's something that you can do. You can check it off the list and go Yes, I did that. And then whether or not you hit that goal, at least you showed up and did everything within your power to hit it. So that's exactly what I did with my youtube channel when I was first launching it. And, you know, it was, I mean, really thanks to my partner who was like, okay, so what, what's your plan here? How are you going to guarantee that you don't give up before things get good? And I said, Okay, that's a good, that's a good question. I'm going to commit to publishing 100 videos, before I give up on YouTube. Holy dooly, that did not like it sounded big. But like, I didn't know just how big because the realities of publishing content, like let's be real, you know, it can easily spend, you know, it's easily three to six hours per video. That's been like on the safe side. So that's a lot of that was a lot of work. But I did it. And sure enough way before I hit 100 videos, I had found my groove, I'd found my momentum. And I had no plans on quitting YouTube. Yes, I've taken a couple of breaks and things like that. But that was the thing that got me started. But if I had set the goal of I want to hit 1000 subscribers, before I give up, oh, geez, like, When's that going to happen? And how am I going to get there, and you know, that that kind of growth, it gets easier as it goes along as well, like, it tends to be like, once you've got the momentum, it becomes a little bit more self sustaining. So you really need to have a plan in place when you're first getting started. And you get so little feedback. And you know, just a way of keeping yourself on track. So you don't give up. So that is point number one set goals you can control. The next thing I want you to do is to design or build a custom support system for yourself. Now, that sounds a bit fancy. It's not as fancy as you think. So I talk about this a lot in seen heard paid Academy, I get my, my clients to do a quiz. It's a free quiz by Gretchen Rubin called the Four tendencies. And it talks all about your sort of, I mean, it's your tendency to get things done. It's like how you see things through, it's really like, I kind of call it your accountability style. It's not quite that. But it's kind of like how you action your plans. And I find that really powerful when I took the quiz and found out that I was in obligers. Like there's four different results, I realized that external accountability was one of my big things that I needed. And that's how and it made so much sense because I looked back on, you know, when I was getting the most done, and working the fastest, it's usually because clients were waiting on me or my assistant was waiting on me, you know, someone needed something from me, and that wasn't myself, because I'll you know, let myself down all the time. I'll break appointments with myself, but I don't make appointments with other people. So once that was became so obvious, like I knew, but I didn't know, it was it was more like I was in denial. And it's so funny, because, um, one of my clients the other day was talking about this how, you know, they really judged themselves for needing external external accountability. So it's almost like that were resisting it. And because of that, they refuse to get the external accountability they needed because they were like, No, I need to be better than this. I need to find another way. And I was like, but is it good and bad? Like, is needing external accountability actually a negative? Or is it just a thing? Like, is it just neutral? Because the thing is, if we know that, and we work with it, and we don't fight it, and we build a support system, and so what I'm saying with this support system is like, okay, how can I implement some kind of external accountability for myself, it does not have to be, it doesn't have to look like anything in particular could be a business bestie it could be clients, it could be your assistant, it could be, you know, just declaring it out into the, into your feed, you know, setting public dates, for instance, you know, if you're planning on doing a launch or running a workshop, maybe once you actually tell people you're going to do it on this date, you're more likely to do it. So your support system can look like anything, but what I was kind of getting at is like, it doesn't need to be a negative thing like we've business messaging that says, oh, we should be able to self motivate or something. But we're all very different. And if you can just embrace that and not judge it and then work with what you've got with who you are, then you can build a support system around you, that's going to help you get there. And you know, not everyone needs external accountability. Like the other different types need different things like I mean, there's one of the types which oh my gosh, I have so much respect for like they they self motivate like they hold themselves to every commitment, but you know, which sounds like the best thing ever. But it also is a danger zone like it's a double edged sword because it means that anything that goes on their to do list they're going to do so therefore they can end up really busy doing non ad like unhelpful activities. So you know, when I say build a customer support system, it's really like okay, Self Awareness time, what do I need to get things done in the, you know, with the, you know, what's the path of least resistance? And how can I build some things around me to help with that, sometimes the support system is going to involve other people. You know, sometimes it's going to be actual systems, like whether it's project management, or automations, or templates. You know, sometimes it's more emotional, but figure out what support you need. I mean, and this is coming back to my s cubed framework that I talk about self belief, strategy support, there is a reason support has equal weight to strategy with my approach to building a brand. Because that support is the key to staying consistent and doing the things. Alright. So hopefully, that helps. I won't go any deeper, because we need to keep moving. But I will be talking a little bit more about this inside of build your brand without the burnout. So I will include the link to the workshop in the show notes below in case you want to check it out. Or you can go to personal branding project.co/workshop. But let's talk about point number three, narrow your focus, the more you try and do, the less you're going to get done, or at least the quality is going to slip, the you know how long it takes you is going to increase your stress levels and the chances of burnout are going to increase. It's just it's a fast track or slow track to you know, all the burnout without the results basically. So often when with especially in the earliest stages of things when we are solopreneurs. And we're just getting started out, we think, okay, I need to make up for lost time, I need to speed things up. So I am going to get on all the platforms, and I am going to post every single day. And I'm going to create three freebies and I'm going to have 12 different offers. And I'm going to have a really fancy website and and and can I just tell you, I am seven years in. And because of my own mentality around this rush, rush rush need to be everywhere. I have seriously stunted my business growth. There are things that I am going back and doing properly now that I could have done three years ago. But I was so busy jumping between things that I just left this trail of unfinished ideas, unfinished projects in my path. And it's yeah, it's it's not fun. Things take time. In fact, I did a whole I did a video. I'm back on YouTube, by the way. I'm not sure if you knew I mean, I've talked about YouTube, you don't you do know I have a YouTube channel. But I kind of didn't share anything all year basically. And I've been really putting it off. And part of the reason is because yeah, I over committed, I was trying to do too many things. And this year, I did not have the bandwidth to be on YouTube for so many reasons. So I just I took a break. But it was time, I finally got myself back out there. And I have a video up now that I posted this week called, oh, gosh, it's called the things that wait things. I can't remember the name of the video. It's all about the things that I wish I knew before I started building a brand and business like what nobody tells you about what it takes. So I highly recommend if you want some extra gold that connects to today's episode, go check out that as well. I'll leave a link in the show notes. But what I was getting at is growth, meaningful growth, but also it's not even so much the growth, the building of things, the laying of foundations, laying them in a way that they stick that they don't have, you know, they're not full of cracks. They're not going to break later on. That takes time. And no one wants to spend this time but you will have to spend it at some point. And so I'm kind of this person, I'm sure sometimes my clients get very frustrated with me. Because I'm like, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Stop rushing ahead. Stop ignoring this, like this whole next chapter. Can we just focus? Can you trust the process? And can we do this? And the reason I do this is like I don't want them doing what I did. Which is just jumping ahead jumping ahead jumping ahead always being in fast forward and then having all the way back to like the beginning. Obviously not the beginning in every single way but in so many ways. So I need you to understand I think I've said this like three times already. That it's okay that things take a while. Let them take a while. Enjoy the process of building because it changes like you're you're only going to be in this exact situation like this version of you. This version of your business will only exist in this moment and it will change and one day you'll miss it. You know one day if you have decided to go some big team and do things really, you know, like really scale, you're going to be in a completely different role, you know, maybe less hands on in the business, and you won't be doing things like this, like, this gets to be really fun. If you let it. It's anytime we try and resist anything, that's when it becomes stressful, pick your focus, narrow it down, and just figure out what makes sense for me to be doing right now. And what can I really just focus on mastering, because that mastery, like, for instance, speaking, one platform, that is your platform that you absolutely know, like the back of your hand, and that you use to grow the biggest, you know, grow your audience the most, create the highest value content on, you're gonna see so much more momentum from having that one platform that you go all in on, then being on three platforms and giving them you know, a percentage of your time and energy. So and is exactly the same, like with your, with your offers, you know, if you have not even optimized one offer from start to finish, like all the little details from understanding, okay, how do I need to market this? Like, what's the messaging for this? How do I sell it? What's the mechanism? You know, what's my onboarding process? What like, what are the workflows? How can I, you know, improve the client experience? How do I off board? How do I get better testimonials, like, there are so many things to think about. And the people who blow up the biggest, the fastest, are usually the ones that picked their thing. And they went all in on it, and they optimized it. And they didn't add anything to their plate until it was fully optimized. And they had the resources and the support to expand. I could go on all day about this one, which is kind of the main focus of the workshop next week. So I'll, I'll save my rants for there. But hopefully, this makes sense. Point number four, is reduce resistance. Now, this might sound a little bit weird. But if you when you really sort of start to become more self aware in this process, and like that's been my, this has been the theme of my year is just looking at my own patterns, my own habits, and seeing where I tend to fall off the bandwagon. There are so many points of resistance. And when I say okay, so when I say points of resistance, I mean, when you go to do something, there is some level of whether it's like there's an actual physical obstacle, there is a mental or emotional piece of resistance, because like you've got a mental block, you're dreading something, something takes longer than it should you're doing something manually, that maybe doesn't need to be fully done manually. Anything that is kind of just slowing you down, and has the chance to throw you off course, we want to reduce that or remove it. So I'll give you just a practical example. So when it comes to creating, let's say, content for Instagram, I'll use this one because this is this gets me tripped up all the time, and I'm having to work on this. When I have this idea for a post, and then I go to sit down and create it and go, Oh, hold on, what should the design be? Or should I use that template that I created over there? Or what about this new thing or, or this person's doing it like this, and, and then I try and create some design from scratch just to get a really simple post out there. Okay, like I can get sucked down a rabbit hole for an hour or two on one little post, because I've got all these obstacles and all this resistance around Instagram, like that's something I have not optimized for myself. And therefore, you know, sometimes when I go to do this, I'll go down the rabbit hole, like I'll get sucked in a waste all this time, and I never even finished the job. I never even put it out there. What a waste of time. So for me removing resistance is I've decided, Okay, I am I need to like I'm not doing it this this second because I'm, as you can see, I'm back on the podcast, and I'm back on YouTube now. So Instagram is for the new year. But my plan is to knowing myself, this isn't going to work for everyone. I know what kinds of posts that I'll be sharing regularly. And I'm just going to have one little section one little folder in Canva that has templates for those, like let's say six different kinds of posts, and they're quite rigid. And I'm going to allow it to be imperfect, allow it to be a little bit messy. And just use the template, resisting the urge to customize it and make it fancier than it needs to be and just get the content out there. I may even remove myself from part of the process in future and actually have my assistant. You know, I'll hand them the like the copy and I'll say this is the template and have them put it in there. And maybe I'll check it maybe I won't. Because I am my own bottleneck when it comes to Instagram. So I want you to have a look at where is the resistance if you know is it proposals is it that you have to customize your proposal so much that it just takes too long or do you not have any email templates to send out when people send you inquiries? And it's taking forever? What else? Are there things that you just find yourself dreading? And putting off? You know, they're probably so many different areas. And so it's not about overhauling everything in a second. It's just maybe find one piece of resistance, like, look at the thing that you're going, you're not doing consistently enough, or you're really struggling to do at all and go, Okay, what are the resistance points here? And what could I do to reduce them. And every single time we do that, like this is the 1% work. This is where every single 1% improvement starts to add up. And in time, there's all these compound interests, we do not need to start everything from scratch. Okay. Alright, so let's move on to point number five. I want you to figure out your minimum viable growth plan. And what I mean by this. What do I mean by this joking. So what I found personally, this year, when I everything went haywire, and I mean, I haven't even told the full story. Like, I feel like maybe some people know it, some people don't like, first off the year, the challenge was like I had a relapse of glandular fever, which threw all my hormones out, like, my body was just like, very unhappy, and basically sort of like turned into chronic fatigue. So I was just out like, barely functioning. And just like, just kind of day by day, just like a zombie getting through each day, doing the bare minimum, which was basically just looking after the clients who are currently paying me at the time, and I could not do anything else. So that was an eye opening experience, because I've never like as soon as being an entrepreneur, I've never had such a physical challenge. Like the when I was hospitalized with glandular fever, the first time and pneumonia and all the things that was before I became an entrepreneur. So I was like, I had a day job at the time that I just had to take time off from. So it terrified me realizing just how fragile my situation was. And that if you know, if I don't have energy, and if my brain is not working properly, I can't, I can't put anything out there. Or at least in my head, I was like, I can't do anything. And that, I guess, planted a seed for me, because then I watched the rest of the year play out. And now I'm sort of publishing again and getting some things out there. And I've really looked back and gone. Was it that you couldn't do anything? Or was it that your plan was so big, you were trying to do so much that it was just overwhelming, and you just didn't do any of it? Like you didn't find your new normal? And so this, this is what I mean, when it comes to the minimum viable growth plan. Like let's say, you have almost no time, like, let's say that your standard is having almost no time and no energy, what would you do to keep showing up to keep growing your audience, if that was the case, all the time, that plan would probably look very different to the, you know, your idealistic plan that you have right now for your marketing. So I want you to sort of have your bare minimum, that minimum viable of okay. I mean, it's, there's kind of two levels to this. And again, I'm going to go into much more detail inside the workshop, like we're actually going to build out your minimum viable plan. But essentially, we've got the plan that's just realistic for where you are right now. But then I want you to have like, the bottom level of like, the, it's like your failsafe, if everything hit the fan, what could you keep doing to make sure that you don't come to a screeching halt the way I did earlier this year, like, thank goodness, so much of the content that I'd created in the past, which was evergreen, like, for instance, YouTube, and the podcast, still kept generating new people to my audience, you know, people were finding me in signing up the freebies. So my growth didn't come to a halt. But it's slowed right down like it was just kind of trickling in, versus like seeing that nice trajectory that I was on previously. So if I just gone back and gone well, what if the one thing I do is like a blog article every month, or every two weeks just a blog article, it doesn't even have to be a podcast or YouTube article. I could have kept increasing my website's authority and getting more traffic to my website. And that would have probably brought in some leads and some some new clients. But I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing. Now I'm not judging myself. I was doing the best that I could with what I had at the time. And I didn't have people talking to me about minimum viable plans, or fail safes or, you know, it's all just like big, big, big, everyone's just like, go go go, you know, and I think it's doing us all a major disservice that everyone just talks about what to do when things are going perfectly, like why don't why don't we have talks about the fact that life constantly throws us curveballs and running a business is really challenging and we're We're all humans, not robots. And some weeks you have great energy. And some weeks, you just have no energy. Sometimes you have time, some weeks you are running around like a headless chicken, which is not talking about that. So that's why I'm, I'm opening up this conversation to say, hey its like, as someone who maybe there's some level of putting me on a pedestal even, like, I feel weird about even saying that, but because you're like, Oh, she's got a podcast, and she's got this, and she's got that. And like, maybe you just noticed the stuff that I'm doing, and you haven't noticed what I'm not doing. But you do need to know that even someone who does this for a living who coaches people still struggles with these things, because she is a human, just like you. So rather than beating ourselves up, rather than setting ourselves up to fail, because we just raised the bar so high that we can never, you know, never reach it, stay there, whatever. I want you to figure out. Okay, if like worst case scenario, you know, for the next three months, I've got nothing to give, what could I give? So my business does not fall apart? And that's going to look different for everybody? Because it depends on the support level that you have, it depends on your budget, like how much savings Do you have? Like, what do you need to be able to keep doing, but I won't go on anymore, cuz I feel like this is just like, I'm opening up a whole can of worms. But hopefully, this has planted just a little seed for you. And I'll quickly review these five, because again, I don't want you to stress about getting all five of these down right now. I want you to pick one. And you know what I would love, I want you to pick one. And I want you to send me like so if you need some external accountability. Also, just to let me know that you're listening, send me a message on Instagram. It actually doesn't even have to be Instagram, send me an email, send me an Instagram message. Send me a message on LinkedIn, wherever you prefer to hang out, you know, you'll reach me. All the links are in the show notes. Tell me which one you're focusing on for the next quarter. Okay, so your first option, setting goals you can control. Number two, building a custom support system based on like your self awareness, narrowing your focus, like picking your lane and mastering it. Reducing resistance and figuring out your minimum viable growth plan. Okay, so you got those five options, and I want to hear from you which one you're choosing, okay. And if you want, I'm just gonna throw something out there. If you actually screenshot this episode, and tag me and tell me what you've picked out of the five like, actually publicly, I might have a little, little special, something for you a little, little surprise. Okay, so I'll be looking out Oh, don't forget @iamkatelizabeth, on Instagram and Facebook. And on LinkedIn, it's just Kat Elizabeth. Okay, I'm going to go now. But remember, build your brand without the burnout is happening it live next week, but then I'm turning it into an evergreen course that you can do at any point in time. It's not specific to, you know, the beginning of a specific year. It's, it's designed to help you whenever you're working on these things. And we're going to run a time audit, we're going to create your magnetic focus strategy, we're going to narrow your focus, and then build out your minimum viable marketing plan, the one that you can stick to that makes sense for where you're at right now. And then knowing what results to track how to know if it's working or not, when to make changes all of that, like it's we're gonna, it's gonna be huge. Okay, that's why I've spent like, two days in my, my little shed, working on the slides and the workbooks and the bonuses and everything, it's going to be epic. So if you want more information, and to save yourself a seat, I'll include the link in the show notes. And you can head to personal branding project.co/workshop In case you don't have the ability to click a link right now. Thank you for listening, and I will be I will not be probably publishing next week because I've got a big week, but you can always go catch up on all my other episodes and go find me on YouTube because I'm back. Alright, have a great week and I'll talk to you soon.