However, I do believe that ambition is an issue for many heart-centred, heart-focused, empathetic professionals in the business of transformation in the coaching and therapy space. That’s because the way that we’re ambitious is different than people who aren’t building a heart-centred business with heart-centred values. We’re also very different from those people in how we build our businesses. So it’s really important if you’re heart-centred, if you’re looking for business mentoring, or business coaching, that you align yourself with somebody who is heart-centred in the same way that you are. Read on for more of my thoughts on balancing heart-centredness and ambition, or you can download my Ambitious & Heart-Centred podcast episode here.
Can you be ambitious and heart-centred at the same time?
This is a deep question that I find many coaches and therapists and trainers in the wellbeing space contend with. Sometimes they contend amongst themselves, sometimes their struggling within themselves about this. They want to do good in the world and through their business and they also want success. But balancing the two don’t always feel comfortable for heart-centred professionals.
There is a difference between being paid for your work and actually building financial and professional success through your heart-centred coaching, therapy or other business. And this is where some people struggle because they feel that it’s arrogant, ambitious in a selfish way or taking them off track from their heart-centredness if they actually set financial and business goals that are ambitious.
What is your personal narrative on ambition and success in general?
This has a lot to do with personal stories about money, success, pride and ambition. By this I mean the attitudes and culture within which they’ve grown up. Sometimes this is about comments or mantras that their parents or carers drummed into them. It can also be connected with gender and whether your upbringing has left you with a feeling of abundance and possibility or of constraints for your gender or “people like me”.
Some people say to me “I’m not really that ambitious, I just want to earn a good living and just want to be comfortable. I just want a few clients a week or a month”. That’s fine, but I still talk to them about their ambitions, not in terms of the amount of clients that they work with, but actually in the amount that they’re charging. If they are offering a really outstanding service to people, then people will pay for that outstanding service and facilitation to help them get to the next step, and to their next breakthrough. So that’s a question of understanding pricing and the value that you can put at that. So even people who aren’t ambitious, that are heart centred, I challenge them a little bit and explain that they could be a little bit more ambitious in their pricing, though.
But let’s think about ambition in the sense of: Is it okay to be heart-centred, and still want to be the number one? To want to have a number one bestseller? To be the number one go to person in your field? Is it alright, to want to be an expert or the expert in a field that you’re working in? And I would also say again, yes! We need more heart-centred, empathetic, people-focused professionals in the transformation space.
Most of us are heart-centred, empathetic and professional. But there are an awful lot of people who aren’t because coaching and therapy are regulated spaces. So we need more people who really are leaders in the field who do keep their heart-centeredness, who do ensure that they are elevating the field in which they’re working as a heart-centred professional because that authenticity, that being so empathic, being somebody who really is ethical increases the good standing of the profession as a whole and makes a way for other people to be successful, who are behaving and running their business, in that heart-centred way, as well.
Rather than keeping yourself down with false humility, focus on lifting your clients up as you serve them
I believe that yes, it’s okay to have ambitions for yourself. No, it’s not necessarily incongruent with a heart-centred mission. You can become an expert in your field and it’s okay to want to be. Where that needs to be balanced with our heart-centeredness is that all the time, while we’re doing this, we want serving our clients to be central, and our clients to be central. So, heart-centeredness and ambition is not about using your clients or getting yourself to a higher place by treading on one client after another, building your business up and they just feel like they’ve just been used – their money taken, a service given and their testimonial demanded and plastered all over the internet. Instead, actually serving your clients and and building that community of people who recognise your heart, and who also then help to elevate your business through their good experience, their outstanding experience with you is crucial – and much more aligned with running a heart-centred business . So when you place your clients as central and serving them as your priority, then you know that heart-centred mission that you have, that you really want to get out there, that you really want to get the ball rolling with and to build momentum with, that mission is served as you serve your clients in an outstanding way.
Being ambitious and heart-centred, is also all about humility and authenticity, but for some people, they mistake genuine humility for false humility and react with false humility about their work. There can be kind of humility that is just us pushing ourselves down too because we feel like it’s not okay to stand up and put our head and out hand up and our voice. Raising your voice as an expert is possible to do with humility. It’s possible to be heart-centred, and be confident in your expertise. For example, that humility can be there within you when you are amongst a peer group of other experts and you stand amongst your peers. You can be elevated in the business that you are in, in the niche that you’re in, by the way that you work with your clients. We can still remain humble and authentic as people, and yet also stand up in the confidence of who we are. The tone of your brand voice will express this – that authentic voice from you which expresses the tone of your brand voice, your heart, your understanding, your heart-centeredness, the way you put your clients and their experience first and your expertise in facilitating that transformation. That’s what your communication and your brand voice is about, and that’s what attracts people to you, and elevates you in that way, so that you can reach the goals that you have for your business and for yourself as an expert.
Having an ethical, authentic brand voice is key
Another important aspect when we talk about ambition is ethical marketing. Ethical selling in the business of transformation is a really big thing that often when people are ambitious. Once you start getting into the emails and the email marketing and campaigns for example, ethics comes into it and you will ask yourself: How do I want to be selling? Are you making it look like things are scarce?
So ethical marketing, if it’s for example, that scarcity as I was saying, false scarcity is considered unethical. For example, making someone feel like they’ve got to buy this now or the opportunity will never be there again, when actually the opportunity is always there. That idea that they’ve only got a certain amount of minutes to buy, only a certain amount available at this price then the price goes up. Those things by are considered to be unethical by many heart-centred professionals and not great ways of marketing. At the same time, there are things like pricing. Do you really need to make something £99 when it could be £100? Do you really need to do a really long landing sales page that goes on and on and on? Or do you just need to put the offer there with a video about it and trust that the people who are looking for you will have enough information there to want to make the next contact with you, or to buy the programme that you’re offering. Equally, charging for content that you give away elsewhere for free raises the same ethical issues and gives a bad impression to potential or new clients when they discover they’ve just paid for something they could have got free elsewhere.
Choose the values with which you will grow your business
So these are decisions that heart-centred professionals make, specifically, and particularly in the business of transformation, these are important decisions. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t be ambitious, if you are marketing and selling in an ethical way. And in actual fact, this kind of marketing, which is also often hand in hand with attraction marketing, and by attraction marketing, I don’t mean manifestation, I mean that you have your brand or your content in such a way and you’re visible in such a way that people are attracted to working with you. Attraction Marketing, combined with ethical marketing, can be really, really powerful.
Back to: Can you be ambitious and heart-centred at the same time? Yes, you absolutely can! And if you pack ethics in there with how you are growing your business, and if you have some really good content and products and understand pricing, and the fact that one to one work with you is actually a luxury that only a certain amount of people can afford, then you can grow your business, you can still widen and broaden the reach of your mission but you’ll create a good income for yourself too. And the more income you generate, the more you can broaden your reach through different types of content creation.
Many people that I work with do have big ambitions. Some of them even involve whole countries or whole cultural groups. Their ambitions are big. And I love that because I love the bigger picture of dreams and ambitions. But the important thing, if you’re ambitious, is that you always start with the one and that your heart is focused on the one, that you understand the individual, that you understand your ideal client, and you begin to create for that individual heart. So you’re not creating and speaking to the masses, but everything that you do is speaking to the one. So, yeah, it’s okay to be ambitious. What’s your ambition? Do you have ambitions?
As you align your business with your values, you will grow more confident as a business owner
Something I notice when people first start working with me in business mentoring, if their business is new, or if their business took a while to get off the ground, and they’ve come because it isn’t really getting off the ground and they’re not really getting many clients or not the kind that they want, is that strategy and learning to tweak your business messaging and actions is important. We start working on their business and we straighten up some of the important things; who they’re marketing to, and their expert offer, their strategy, and other aspects.
We need to understand that our confidence to be ambitious grows with us, as our consultancy grows. So as you begin to see more success in the area that you want to become an expert in, and you have those outstanding experiences for your clients and those outstanding testimonials from them, and you realise: “Yeah, this is working, I’m gonna roll with this!”, then you begin to be more ambitious for yourself and for your business, as well. You may be satisfied with how things are moving, but usually, if I circled back to people a year after they’ve been working on their business, and I say “So what’s your big vision? I know you’ve told me before, but can you tell me again?” They will nearly always say something along the lines of “Well, do you know it used to be this? I’ve realised, actually, that I really do want this as well. Is that too much? Do you think I can go after that?”. And I love actually being able to say “No, it’s not too much”.
Your dream is not too much. But it may take time to grow your business into that dream. It’s possible to grow your business, be ambitious in your business. Just make sure that you’ve got a strategy. Make sure that in your heart-centeredness, that you don’t lose the ethics and your ethical beliefs. It’s completely possible to grow a great and incredible business, and an ambitious business on great ethics and heart-centeredness.
What’s your dream? What do you dream of right now for your business? What do you dream of for yourself as an expert? Do you feel comfortable with the ethics in how things are done in your business? Are you proud of, for example, your nurture sequence, if you have one if you have an email list already? Do you love the way that that is, or have you been led along in some of your content by other people – people saying do it like this, do it like that? If at any point you feel along the way, “Hmm… I’m not quite sure about that, but they’ve said this is the way to do it” but you feel uncomfortable, then listen to your gut. That could be your heart-centred ethical values speaking to you. If you’re not quite sure about it, and it doesn’t quite sit, right, maybe they’re not interpreting your voice correctly, maybe they’re not representing your voice correctly. So brand voice is a really big thing along with your ethical values. When you ensure that your brand voice is authentic to your heart-centredness, then people will recognise your heart-centredness and be attracted to that.
So are you ambitious or do you struggle with ambition? Iif you’d like support on working on your heart-centred transformational business, you know where to find me: Go have a look at thespecialiststudio.com. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. You can connect with me there, if you like and message me. I’d love to hear from you. Tell me that you’ve been reading my articles or listening to my podcast, and I would love to connect with you.
Keep your business heart focused on your clients as individual people
Remember, enjoy your business, and be free! Be free to be ambitious, because your ambition at the end of the day is actually for your clients. Your greatest ambition is for their breakthrough, and that’s the greatest satisfaction that that we have. At the end of the day, if your business brings in lots of money, and you create an income that you have really been wanting or desiring or perhaps didn’t think possible before, yes, that is fulfilling. Yes, that is a fantastic thing to happen in your life. But if we lose sight of the fulfilment of actually helping the one client have their breakthrough, then we get to a point where we have to ask ourselves, am I still doing the work I really wanted to do? So ambition is great. Growing your business is great. Don’t lose sight of your bigger mission. Don’t lose sight of your heart-centeredness.
And you know what? Don’t be afraid that you have to hustle to grow a business. So that is something that I do hear people say. They say I want to build a business, but I really don’t want to hustle. And what you need to understand is that we don’t all build businesses by hustling. We do need to learn how to sell our business. We do need to learn how to market ethically. We do need to learn how to front our business with confidence and to show that we are an expert in the area that we’re in. But you don’t have to hustle to do that, and actually there can be a peace about your business building. We can say no to overwhelm. If we have a simple enough strategy. If we are guarded and have our boundaries around our time, and what we’re doing and don’t get distracted, it is absolutely possible to build a cracking, coaching or therapy business that is still heart-centred and ethical. So don’t say goodbye to your ambitions. But make sure that your ambitions serve your clients, as well as yourself.
Thanks so much for stopping by today, and don’t forget to subscribe to my e-community if you’d like to be notified about podcast episodes or articles when they are published. As a thank you for joining my e-community you’ll be able to access some free trainings. If you do join that, you’ll get four trainings in four days. But after that, I will leave you alone. You’ll just get occasional emails, I will not be emailing you every day. Because who’s got time for that? I certainly don’t! And also, I do believe that the more people email daily, the more we start to tune their voice out. Their emails go to spam, or we just think, oh, another email from them. So I’m not about to do that to you. Again, that’s my heart-centeredness. And, you know, we notice, as heart-centred people, what works for us, and what works for us is often going to be what works for the people that we serve as well. Although that said, there are always new skills to learn. And I’m all about that as well, learning new skills myself, but passing those on to my clients to support them in their business building. And that’s in all sorts of areas, their ambition, their strategy, their content creation, confidence and mindset. Many different things come into the business mentoring arena, certainly with me.
So, enjoy the rest of your day or your evening, whatever you’re doing. But do pause and think about this: What are your ambitions? What do you have in your heart that you really want to achieve? In your business and through your business, and for your clients? What do you want to be known for? And where do you want to be in 2 years, 5 years, 10 years time? I love asking those questions. And I love working them through with people.
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