Visibility Lessons from my Birthday!

I want to dive in and share with you what I learned about Visibility at my Birthday celebration, a few days ago.  What?  Visibility again?  Yes!  And how it directly impacts my business (and yours too!)

I normally like to make my birthday as easy as possible and I try to get it done as painlessly as possible. Lately, I make the effort to do something so that I don’t regret not seizing the opportunity afterward, but it’s sort of a ‘should’ thing… not really an inspiring approach.

My usual approach is to have a beach-bash, pot-luck picnic with all of my dance peeps- a group of people who likes to hang together and swim in the ocean and play beach volleyball or whatever.

It’s fun! But….  It’s an easy way to hide, actually… 

The focus is minimally on me but I get to be with everyone and be delighted that they showed up to play with me and celebrate.

But this year,  I decided to invite a few women into my home for dinner- extremely last minute- in fact 2 days before!  I am so grateful 7 of them came!

We sat outside in a circle.  And when the sun went down, we got candles and each one shared what they loved about me.  WOW!  That was a lot more attention on me.  

It was a major visibility stretch!  And it was incredible! 

And I had to wrestle inside of myself, the whole time, to just receive their love and beautiful reflections and not try to ‘do’ anything or to ‘match’ them and reflect back the same way they had just given to me.

Phew! What an exercise in really feeling and not trying to get rid of the feelings by giving it all right back.  You know?  An exercise in receptivity and containment.

A lot of negative thoughts popped in, judging how I was responding to each woman:

• “Oh you aren’t really opening your heart the way she is.”
• “You’re not really giving to her.”
• “You’re not really a good friend.”
• “You’re a fraud.”
• “They’re just being nice to you, but you really don’t deserve it.”

WOW!  Can you relate to this?  It’s not pretty…

But luckily, I noticed these thoughts and kept re-directing my focus to just be present, really receive each friend and thank her.  Just share my gratitude as it came up in each moment with each one.  And just trust that I can just share what comes up and they will still love me as I am.

What an exercise in trust, receptivity and allowing myself to be visible. I realize this is a form of performance anxiety that I was unwinding.  Sound familiar?

Does this come up for you when you put yourself out there?  When you send an email to your list?  Make a video?  Launch a program?  Make an offer?  Post on Facebook?   So much opportunity to  tear ourselves down after we take a big step outward, in visibility.  And then we collapse and withdraw and take fewer steps forward for a while.

I’ve noticed the impact of these “visibility crashes” –how costly they are to my business.  And it makes it harder to actually STAY in business!

This is one of the things I help my VIP clients with.  How to stay in the game after taking major visibility steps- whether it’s on video, or making offers or launching etc…   I coach them on the visibility shut down as well as on how to stay fully present and connected so that you show up as magnetically as you can when you’re stretching your visibility!

This boosts their productivity and their ability to keep bringing in new clients!  They have the visibility stamina to stay in motion and keep showing up!

I am so grateful to be able to offer this kind of support and to continually be growing in this area, myself, so that I can keep supporting women to do the same.  And I have to say, it is a physical, movement skill, an emotional skill as well as a mental skill to be able to do this.

How do you handle visibility stretches?  What works for you?  I’d love to know!