Yikes. I hate cold calling at the best of times. But I sucked it up, said I’d do it, and hung up the phone. Over the next few days, I worked my way down the list of numbers. Again and again, I encountered people who were kinda pissed at me for calling. I’d interrupted their day and was trying to sell them something they clearly didn’t want.
I remember sitting in a meeting one day, with the event crew, looking around the room thinking ‘I don’t even know half these people. They don’t know me. I’m working on an event I don’t even recognise and building something that doesn’t resonate with our brand whatsoever’. We’d gone from running award-winning boutique eco surf music festivals to producing 15,000 capacity shows with commercial lineups & massive scale infrastructure that was about as far away from ‘intimate’ as you could get.
It felt like a runaway train. Like we were too far down the track to do anything but push on.
I found myself inspired to write this post after spending a couple of days with an old friend. He’s one of those buddies that you don’t see for months/years on end, but somehow hang out for 5 minutes and just pick up where you left off.
We worked together years ago teaching kids to surf, and we’ve both been on pretty interesting journeys since. But we’ve always kept in touch, and whenever we’ve been in the same country at the same time, we’ve managed to hang out and catch up with each other’s adventures.
We build trust and resonance with brands that speak our language.
We breathe a sigh of relief when someone can explain something to us in a way that doesn’t make us feel like we’re an absolute idiot. Think back to your school days… We’ve all had that one teacher who made learning feel fun. Whose lessons seemed more engaging & interesting than the rest. Was it because the stuff they were teaching, was easy? No, it was the way they chose to communicate.
Just last week, I came across this awesome quote from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (an American poet with a rad name)
‘Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare think’.
It seemed super relevant to me after that surf lesson, and even more so when I thought about how we could apply that to entrepreneurship. I work with so many clients who struggle with (the super common) Impostor Syndrome. Where, despite external evidence of their competence, they still hold this belief that they are, in some way, a fraud, and that they’re not good enough at what they do.
You see, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that you’re probably doing in your business, day to day, that really doesn’t fit into your ‘core genius’ category. It’s just the stuff that has to get done in order to keep your business moving in the right direction. It’s the kinda stuff that you wish you could ship out to a VA or an intern. These are the tasks that crop up on your to-do list every single freaking week.
