044: How Long Will It Take and Fishing For Your Avatar

Welcome to Action Taker Tribe. I'm Jo Ingram, and I'm excited that today we're going to be diving into two excellent questions that clients have posed to my in one-to-one private sessions - but first my students have been asking me how come I got up and running so fast and filled my books with coaching clients.

However, before we dive in, I want to tell you about a brand-new training to help you get total clarity on your purpose-led business mission to nail your niche and create your irresistible offer in the New Coach Business Accelerator. In October, I'm going to be opening the doors and inviting a small group of beta members to go through this training with me in real time. We are going to work very closely together for six weeks to give you everything you need to get your business foundations in place, so you can create content with ease, offers with ease, make sales, and make impact. Click on this link to get on the waitlist and to learn more, so you can be one of the first people to learn about this when my doors are open.

In this week's episode, I'm sharing the answers to two questions that one-to-one private clients have asked me recently, which I just know are important for you to hear. The first question is about how long it's going to take to be successful, to have a thriving business. Who hasn't wondered the same thing?

I'm sure as you have set your intention to build your successful heart-centered business, it's never been far from your mind that you wonder how long it will take to reach the milestones - to get the dream.

Keep listening for the answer to this, and here's a hint: it's not always what you do, but also how you feel.

In the second question, we're going to turn our attention to your perfect avatar. You know that this is something that's incredibly close to my heart. I go into a lot of detail about nailing your niche and ace-ing your avatar in all my private one-to-one work and I love to share hints and tips with you here on the podcast to help you get this fundamental element in place for your business - because quite honestly, until you really do understand who you're marketing to and who you're creating transformation for, it is extremely hard - if not impossible - to reach the heights of success that you dream of.

In many cases not getting this right upfront can prevent you even getting off the starting blocks.

So, stay tuned in for that second question on fishing for your avatar.

Just to let you know that I recorded both of the answers to these questions whilst I was walking around the woods, which I do every morning - I do my journaling and my meditation and if you've tuned into my self-help episode, you'll know that even though early in my business progress I stopped doing my self-care, right now it is absolutely the first thing I do every single day - and I never skip it.

What happens - and I'm sure that you'll find this the same if you do similar practices - is that when you're meditating, walking in nature, journaling and similar, inspiration drops in. For me, that meant that I just needed to record these answers and share this information with you straight away. So, you may hear a little bit of birdsong in the background and apologies if the recording isn't quite as crystal clear as this, but a bit of birdsong is a good thing, right? So, let's dive in.

Today's question came to me from a beautiful, fierce, amazing lady who has battled so much adversity in her life and is building a business that is absolutely inspirational and I know that she's going to create amazing impact for people who really need it. Her question was, how long is it going to take? How long will it take me to get over the first hurdles and have a business that's basically giving me the income that I need to survive? She didn't want to be a millionaire - she literally just wanted enough money so that she didn't need to worry, and she could pay her bills.

I think we can all relate to that as we start our businesses. Let's be honest, this is a question that we all have, and we join these programs, and we join different trainings, and it can sometimes feel like, well, this should be happening for me instantaneously; I should be able to learn this technique, deploy it and suddenly the dollars should be rolling in. Yet that isn't the real experience that the majority of people have.

My answer to this is really realistic, but not pessimistic - and that is that it will take you as long as it will take you and enjoying the journey is so important.

Now I'm not unrealistic. I know we’ve got to pay our bills and I've had that experience myself, having lost my job at the beginning of COVID and having to make up that salary – and, most importantly, overcome feelings of insecurity to allow myself the grace to grow as an entrepreneur and as a human so that I can be the person that can do the things and have the things.

I think you have to be realistic with how much you're willing to put in, both emotionally and from a very feelings-space perspective, as well as from an action-orientated based perspective.

I have worked with someone who was very realistic about how much effort she wanted to put in and how she wanted to spend much more time with her kids, take whole summers off and not be working on her business, and that's absolutely fine. It's your life and your business, but you cannot necessarily expect yourself to move at a phenomenal pace if you're not also willing to make it your focus.

When I say focus, I don't necessarily mean working 12-hour days. What I mean is to make it your focus of your desire, to make it your focus of how you feel, where you're getting your inspiration from - because in order to build your business, you have to feel inspired, and you have to want to take the action because it excites you.

Let's be honest, when you're excited and lit up, that's when you make the most impact and that's when people radiate towards you.

I like to think of it as vibrational energy and even law of attraction stuff. Others may just know it as enthusiasm, and that's cool. So, know that when you're putting that energy in – note again, I say energy, not hours - that's when you're going to start to move faster. When you allow yourself to feel despondent, it's really easy for things to slow down and goodness knows your momentum can stop altogether, and that's where you say, maybe I wasn't cut out for this.

So how long will it take? It will take as long as it takes, but the more you focus on the negative thoughts, the less chance you have of moving swiftly.

I'd love to leave you with a thought that might inspire some action and this thought is, what is it that you really, really want? And how can you feel better that you're already on your way?

Moving on to the next question, which literally was, how exactly do I get more people around me? You know what it's like when you're starting out - I felt this acutely, and there's no exceptions as far as I can tell - you launch your new business, you get excited, but it's quite hard to find lots of people to pay attention to what you're doing; to attend your webinars or join your courses, book coaching with you, do discovery calls with you, all the things that you want them to do, because it feels like your following's really, really small. I wish that there was a magic bullet for this one because it would make it so much easier for us all to go on and live our dreams in abundance and help the people that we wish to help, but the reality is that it can be a slow process.

There are a few things that I want to share with you today that have helped me along my journey, which is still very nascent too - however, I have found that I am appreciating the growth that I have done in the last few months.

The first thing, and this is a serious question, is are you fishing in the right pools? Plenty of people are like, oh, check out my Instagram, I do really well, and yes indeed you are - you're making really nice posts, you're starting to be consistent and you're gaining a few followers.

But my question is, is that really where your avatar hangs out?

It’s the same if you're on Facebook or any media channel; it could be that you're defaulting to what you want to do rather than understanding where your client actually is hanging out.

It's a sort of tough thing to do. In some cases, people have had to admit that really LinkedIn is where they need to be in order to sell their product. That might be a platform that you don't have any love for or familiarity with, but maybe you need to stop faffing around on Instagram and get over to LinkedIn.

The problem is that we spread ourselves quite thinly. In many cases, we try and be in a lot of online spaces and for good reason. I mean, we know we don't know exactly where our avatar is yet, but now's the time to start thinking about that a lot more deeply.

(Sorry if I'm out of breath because I’m walking back through the forest where I’ve spent the morning, and I have a client call in a few minutes, but I felt really inspired to jump on and share this with you on my walk, so apologies for any sound problems.)

I would really appreciate it if you would take a moment today just to analyse exactly what you're doing - where are you putting your social media energy? - so instead of barking up the wrong tree for a prolonged period of time, you can avert your attention now to where it really needs to be.

Bear in mind that there are a lot of social media spaces - Instagram, Facebook, Facebook groups and business pages, LinkedIn, YouTube (often underutilised), not forgetting Pinterest (particularly if you're product based), Clubhouse is growing phenomenally, even Twitter - there are so many online spaces. There are podcasts, you could be doing video series blogs…such a phenomenal amount of opportunity, but with it comes choices.

For your inspired action today, I would ask you please to just consider where you are hanging out online - is that really where you need to be expending your efforts?

And if you're not sure, now is an invitation to research your avatar just a little bit more, understand exactly what they're doing online, what kind of information they're expecting to get and where they go for it.

If you've got any doubts about that, there's an episode of mine - if you look back on my feed, it's called ‘how to find your perfect avatar’ or something like that - I'll put the link in the show notes, so you can go back, and it'll walk you through the steps to research your avatar more if that's what you need to do.

I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to my answers to these questions and if you have any specific questions you'd like to hear me answer, send me a DM on Instagram @iamjo.ingram.

Don't forget to join my waitlist for the New Coach Business Accelerator Program coming soon, where you can learn exactly who your avatar is, how that links to your purpose and your mission, and how these two elements, together with creating an irresistible offer, are what's going to get you and your coaching business off the starting blocks.

As always, wishing you an inspired action week. Take care. Bye now.