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Welcome to Make More Money without Selling Your Soul with me Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert. This podcast is for you if you are an online entrepreneur who is looking to simplify their business to scale.  On this podcast you can expect to hear regular talk about wealth, about selling and about wellbeing. Because I believe these three core fundamental things are pivotal to your growth moving forward.

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Hello and welcome to make more money without selling your soul with myself Polly Lavarello, evergreen marketing expert and cushy business pioneer.

and today I’m talking about why being visible is your superpower. Yep. Visibility matters yet, let’s be honest. Most of us are playing it small, and I really mean that for literally nearly anyone on any level. I think everyone has another level.

They could, I’d say push two, but push two. Perhaps not quite the right word, but another level they could be inviting in if it went through a few little pesky demons holding them back. And I’m gonna be talking about that. Visibility. Of course, when I’m talking about visibility applies on so many levels.

If you’re listening to this right now, you might be immediately thinking, oh, in fact, probably when, as I say this, you’re probably jumping immediately to whatever is that you feel discomfort around. Um, so some people might be listening to this and thinking about talking on stages, talking at summits.

Others may be thinking about the beginning of their online business. and feeling anxiety around doing lives or creating yet another reel, or perhaps creating your first reel. Or maybe it’s showing up in stories. Maybe it’s how you show up. Maybe there’s a lack of candidness in how you show up, um, that maybe you feel some limitations around.

Maybe you feel you can only show up when you’ve had your hair and makeup done, obviously. This doesn’t apply to everyone. Not everyone gets their hair and makeup done. Um, and maybe it’s hosting events. Maybe you have been really tempted by the idea of hosting an in-person event. And while this is slightly different to visibility, there’s still similar sentiments that can hold people back from that idea of at some point standing in front in a, you know, in front of a room full of people.

Who are all there to see them. Um, and the fortunate thing for all of us, by the way, in case you’re feeling heart palpitations, just thinking about all of those things in one go, is that most of us don’t need to learn all of these skills overnight. So as I mentioned earlier, those in the earliest stages of online business perhaps are just, um, I say just, it’s not just , perhaps.

Feeling into what it is to be visible online. It’s quite unnerving, isn’t it? Not knowing who might be watching your lives or your stories. And in some cases people share with me. It’s actually knowing who’s watching the lives and the stories, and suspecting perhaps a curious family member is paying a bit more interest than they feel comfortable.

There’s so many reasons why being visible can feel uncomfortable, and then of course, once you’ve kind of conquered or at least found a way of managing those anxieties around being visible on the internet. There comes a time in your business where people will start inviting you to talk at summits. You may be con contemplating hosting your first event.

Um, you may be deliberating whether it’s time for you to do that Ted talk and start pitching yourself. Or it may be pr. I totally didn’t mention pr. PR was a huge visibility block for me at one stage, um, or at least I didn’t even realize it was until I booked it. And started to recognize weird feelings coming up, being seen outside of the goldfish bowl, which I currently was in in the online business space.

So there are, so, I mean, essentially what I’m sharing here is that regardless of where you’re at in your business, chances are there is another kind of visibility devil at another level that perhaps you haven’t quite dealt with yet. So let’s talk about this today, because essentially, Well, occasionally I see messaging on the internet talking about how visibility isn’t necessary, how your word can be enough.

How a great podcast can be enough. Well, yes, all of those things are true. You have to make a ruddy Good podcast or write a really good blog to be able to get around. Not being visible and in the highest likelihood when you get to the stage that your podcast is so successful or your blog is so successful, there will be opportunities coming your way where it will be necessary to be visible.

So essentially what I’m sharing here is if this is something you’ve been putting off, tackling or addressing, or just sitting with, then I really highly encourage you to be with. and hopefully some of the three things I’ll be sharing with you on this podcast today will help you with exactly that. In fact, we’re even finishing with a little exercise, which is a hundred percent gonna help you.

Okay? So like I say, the fortunate thing is we don’t need to learn all these skills overnight, and chances are there’s a, a le, a level of visibil visibility that you could do with tackling in your life right now. Here are the three reasons why I believe. People feel hesitations around visibility. Of course, if you listen to this and you’re like, you’re totally missing a humdinger here, Polly, please reach out to me on Instagram, @pollylavarello.

I always love to hear from you and if you have any suggestions for things you’d like to hear me talking about the podcast, do reach out. But anyway, back to the subject in hand. The three reasons I believe people hold themselves back is, one, a really simple one. Fear of doing something new. And this is so natural, right?

Because when we do something entirely new, our body will say, this isn’t. Don’t do this. You don’t know this. We know how to sit at our desk. We know how to eat our lunch. We’ve done this many times before. We feel very safe at doing this. We don’t know how to do alive. How do you end alive? How do you invite somebody into a live?

What happens when you hit publish on a live? Where does it go? ? So then we go and look for the information to understand how all these things happen. And even then, there’s so many different things to remember. To show up to make sure the lighting’s okay, to make sure that you have something interesting and a value to share, to know.

I mean, there’s so many different things you’re juggling in your mind. It’s probably not gonna be your best ever life. Let’s face it a bit like that first pancake. It’s very rare that your first attempt is going to be your best. Now, the good news is for most of us, is that while we’re at the phase of our business, that we’re trialing out these new things.

There’s very few witnesses to the blunders and to be honest with you, where people try new things later on in their career. And they perhaps have more to lose. Actually, I find that all the more inspiring. Someone’s saying, yes, I am really, really good at this, but this is new to me and I might not get it right.

Uh, Brene Brown’s first ever podcast was a really beautiful example of that where she talks about FFTs fucking first times. Ooh, am I allowed to say that? FFTs. Let’s leave it at that. Um, so, you know, fear of doing something new. And of course there’s kind of conversations we need to be having with ourselves to help ourselves feel safer.

About the fact that it’s new. I’ll come back to this in a moment in terms of ways to kind of support this. The second one, which is really, really huge, and something I hear from my clients, particularly in the wellbeing space, is fear of judgment. Um, particularly I find the more qualified someone is in the medical profession or kind of in the, uh, therapies and things like that.

The more I hear this, essentially the more intelligent my client know, the more experienced a client is, the more fear they have around what their contemporaries are thinking. Quite often it’s not even what their prospective clients might be. Think. Um, but it’s more often people either share with me that it’s family, that they’re concerned about what they may think, um, or, or, or their contemporaries or the people who’ve studied alongside them say, how dare she create a high ticket program?

How dare she charge that for one-to-one? How dare she speak about a subject that’s really simple to us, like it’s ground break breaking knowledge. You know, how dare she talk about such a complex, um, topic in such a simple way she’s totally missing X, Y, z. You know, there’s, there’s all this fear of judgment as to what other people may be thinking.

And of course there’s that, the trolling that people are fearful of people who just go out their way to say spiteful things. The moment anyone’s visible, which to be honest with you, I. Everywhere. I don’t think I’ve supported one successful seven figure coach, um, or highly influential coach who hasn’t had to deal with negative comments most of the time from made up accounts or people who are just very, very bored.

So, you know, it’s one of those things that we mustn’t let that hold us back because I think it’s one of the really unspoken elements about becoming more successful and more visible is that yes, that often comes alongside some negative. And finally, and this is the most important one that I really wanna hone in on today, and it’s a lack of self-belief.

It’s a lack of enoughness, a lack of, um, I’m not as expert as this other person who’s already speaking in this area. I’m not as qualified as somebody else in this space, so how dare I speak about it too? I’m newer on the scene that this other person has been around for a long time talking to the very same themes I’m speaking to.

Where’s my space here? What do now, how do I make sure what I have to say matters? You know that, that sensitivity as well to the fact that people aren’t immediately engaging with all your content. Some people take that very personally and it can really put them off wanting to be more visible and share more fears around some of the weaknesses we have.

Like stuttering, I stutter, I make up words as I go. I don’t always say the right things. Um, but people felt massive fear on that and, and physical elements of as well, you know, people were being fearful about that wonky tooth that drives him crazy, which nobody else notice. Um, but, you know, it’s all, all perfectly valid.

You know, they’re feeling these fears. But here’s the thing, right? If you were an explorer and you made an incredible discovery, wouldn’t you wanna make sure everybody heard about it? Or would you just send a few emails and hope for the best? Or would you try and find like the quietest way you could let everybody know about it?

You know, ultimately if you really believe in yourself, in the value you bring and the offer that you’re selling. You’ll want to make sure everyone hears about it. And here’s the truth, when it comes to being visible, is that video now for a long time, has been king or queen, however you wanna call it.

It’s Unavoidable. If you are a personal brand that you will probably need to create some form of video, whether it’s, I mean, it doesn’t need to be that you do all the types of video. Doesn’t mean you need to be on YouTube doing reels, doing lives, doing video stories. You get to choose how and where you show up and what feels good to you or what feels better.

Maybe, maybe good is a bit of a stretch, but it will come up at some point and it’s something that’s. Tackling sooner rather than later because like any form of content, creativity, um, content creating, I find that when you create videos, when you write blogs, when you write newsletters, when you write social media content, There’s an evolution that’s happening at the same time, a connectedness to your clients, a connectedness to your prospective clients, and a connectedness to what it is that you do, which is incredibly powerful.

But essentially, video is the, the fast track to that famous thing that we all know we need as a business, which is the like, know and trust factor. Because ultimately when you’re reading something, you don’t really hear somebody’s voice do you? Until you’ve actually heard that voice, until you’ve actually seen that face.

You know, it gives us that whole, oh, I know her, you know, the familiarity bias I’ve seen her face several times. There’s, there’s so much science behind the more somebody sees your face, the higher the likelihood of them trusting you with a sale. So it’s, you are massively missing out if you’re not allowing yourself to be the face of your brand.

And I think it’s important to say that no, you won’t be for everyone. People will take umbrage with what it is you have to share. People will criticize you behind your back, you know, and that’s why I love that Dr. Seuss phrase about those who matter, don’t care. And those who don’t care matter, , it’s not the phrase, um, but you know, it’s the whole element of it doesn’t matter.

Whatever strong feelings they have about you that are negative are their own project. They’re not yours to carry. And I’m always, always recommending to my clients that they focus more on those who are being positive and encouraging. One thing you can do as a tactic to support dealing with negative um, feedback is to have somebody else handle it.

And I say this within the context of sometimes there’s really valuable learnings in that negative feedback. Sometimes people are raising valid things that you do need to be considering. And so it’s not to just brush them off immediately, but if you could have somebody there almost being the filter of those comments to share what it is you do need to know, but letting go of the stuff that you don’t could be really power.

Anyway, this is a bit of a kind of, uh, scatty conversation going on talking about these things. So the other thing I said I would speak to was the whole, um, fear of doing something new. Honestly, what I find if I’m about to do alive is really helpful is some deep breathing exercises. Even just doing box breathing, you know, the four breathing, hold it, breathing in for four, holding for four, breathing out for four, holding for four, and just doing that repeatedly for a while.

It’s really, really, The fear of judgment, like I say, is recognizing that you know it’s their projection, not yours, and if you are receiving enough of it to perhaps even hire a VA or somebody to support you with managing those things. For example, it might be that you no longer are the person managing your dms.

It might be that you are not the person managing your inbox and you have somebody else only forward you the things that you do need to deal with and have them communicate useful feedback in a way that’s helpful to. And when it comes to lack of self-belief, self-belief is the biggest thing. When you believe in yourself, when you trust yourself, your clients will trust in you.

And that is a me sea, challenging because essentially the one thing most human beings have in common is a sense of a lack of enoughness. That’s why we’re constantly doing new qualifications, uh, or doing, you know, always feeling like I’ll be enough, when I’ll be enough, when, which I think was the subject of my previous , my previous, um, podcast.

So essentially it’s recognizing that self-belief perhaps won’t be naturally there. There may be areas that need to be worked on, but if you are having anxiety around the way, visibility could see your business quickly crumble apart down to your inadequacies. I would encourage you to do this very, very simple exercise.

It’s the, and then what exercise? I love to do things like this. I’ll, I’ll do something like, oh my gosh, I’m gonna do a live and I won’t know how to end it. And then what I will apologize, um, on the live and say, this is my first live, I dunno how to end it. Um, does it, can anyone tell me where the button.

And then what will that be Really embarrassing, because someone will probably have to tell me, or they’ll see up my nostrils while I’m trying to end it. . And then what? I’ll feel really uncomfortable afterwards, and I probably won’t want to do a live again, and everyone’s going to think I’m really unprofessional.

And then what? And as you kind of continue going , it’s like, you know, and then what? Um, and then I guess I will know how to do a live and do it differently next time. And then what? And then, then I guess I could reach out to the people who help me and say, thanks so much. And it starts the conversation. I think the main thing here is sometimes when I have anxieties around bigger things, like not earning enough in a particular month, I’ll do all my, and then what’s to get to the stage where I realize I am many multitudes of, and then what’s away from being in the dire circumstances that my head immediately jumps to when things are going wrong.

And it’s the same with visibility. So what if someone sees you struggling a bit with. I have seen that happen so many times from so many entrepreneurs. I respect, and it doesn’t make me think any less of them because I’m not there to listen to them because they’re a tech wizard. I’m there to listen to them cuz they have important expertise to share.

And when I see they’re human, it makes me feel like I can trust them more because they’re not some God or goddess that’s way above me. They’re somebody I can relate to. When I hear somebody stutter, when I see someone owning their imperfections, when I see someone showing up and doing a life when they make up on, I’m like, girl, you girl, you’re my kinda woman.

That’s the kind of response we wanna get from people. So do the an and then what exercise and recognize you are so, so far away from the fear that you are terrified of. And then let’s turn it on its head. Let’s do a positive, and then what? And then what towards all the things that being more visible can bring to you.

And it’s amazing. It really is amazing. And like I say, as I’m often referencing, it’s that compound effect that as you do more of them, you’ll naturally get better at them. You’ll find your groove and you’ll find your people and everything will become infinitely easier. And once you’ve mastered that, it’ll be tackling the next level of visibility.

And you’ll do it with so much more ease and courage because you’ll know you can do difficult things. So there we have it, guys. Visibility is your superpower. Do not neglect it. People want to get to know you. You are a personal brand after all, personal. Person. Okay. Let people see the person in your personal brand and it will really elevate all of your results.

Well, that is all I have to say about that subject today. If you wanna add anything to the conversation, like I said, look me up on Instagram. I always love to hear from you. And next week I’m gonna be talking about the five reasons why your offer isn’t flying, right. So if you have an offer that is getting a tumbleweed response right now, didn’t you fear yourself?

Oh my gosh, sorry. I’m going off on tangents today. If you’ve got an offer that isn’t flying at the moment, this is going to be exactly what you need. Really looking forward to sharing all of that with you. And in the meantime, reach out to me on, I. And if you like today’s, uh, podcast episode, please don’t be shy to give it a review. They help me reach more people and help more.