How to Tap Into Your Creativity and Ignite Your Creative Muse
How to Tap Into Your Creativity and Ignite Your Creative Muse Creativity often feels like an abstract concept, yet itâs a vital part of our human experience. It’s about bringing something new and unique into existence, something that has never existed before. Every person has a unique lens through which they view and experience the world. Creating and expressing yourself through the creative process allows you to share this perspective with others and discover who you truly are. Creativity is not about perfection; itâs about sharing who you are in this very moment. When you view creativity as a journey of self-discovery and expression, you grant yourself the freedom to experiment, try new things, and release the pressure to create something perfect. Embrace creativity as a process, and you might be surprised at where it leads you and who you become along the way. My Personal Journey with Creativity Recently, I struggled with my own creativity a lot. I was exhausted from work, juggling multiple tasks every single day, striving for perfection, and spending my free time distracted. I leaned into my fears too much, didnât allow myself to experiment, and put immense pressure on myself. I tried to control the creative process with my analytical mind, imposing limitations on what I thought I was “supposed” to create. I forgot to ask myself what I wanted to create and what brought me joy. All this prevented me from enjoying the creative process. I didnât allow myself to be still and create more silence and space in my life. Yet, I realized that the source of all great ideas comes from moments of rest and enjoyment. Have you noticed how great ideas often come when you least expect them, when you’re relaxed and present? You donât need more inspiration or extraordinary events to start creating. Sometimes, the simplest things can trigger powerful creative ideas. When youâre relaxed, present, and aware when you pay attention, you start to have all the greatest ideas. You donât need to â’search for more inspirationâ’, you donât need more information, or have extraordinary things happening in your life to feel inspiration and start creating. Sometimes itâs the most mundane and simple thing that can trigger a thought, an emotion, a memory that is so powerful that you canât help but need to express it through your creative work. But are you aware and present enough to notice it? Or do you distract yourself constantly, try to avoid boredom and constantly watch over your shoulder what somebody else is doing, instead of digging deeper into who you are and asking yourself what you really want to create? Embracing Boredom Fall in love with what you create Another thing that helped me is to let myself to be bored, be still, donât try to search for distractions all the time and stimulate my mind constantly. When you create more stillness in your life, ideas often appear in your head spontaneously, without effort, without you having to force anything. I have a difficult time dealing with boredom myself. I often seek distractions, but now I’m learning to sit with my boredom and be aware when it happens. I believe that without boredom, there is no creativity. Allow yourself to be bored, be present, and donât seek instant gratification. When you enjoy the process of creating, it reflects in your work and influences the end result. Your energy, state of mind, and presence shine through your creations, attracting and touching others. How often we just create something with hopes to get somewhere, to receive the praise, the money, the recognition, which makes the process of creating itself so hard to enjoy. When you donât enjoy the process itself, when youâre not vibing with yourself, itâs usually reflected in your creative work and influences the end result of your creative work. This directly influences your energy when youâre creating something, as your state, your energy usually shines through the things you create. And when I personally see a person who is so devoured by the process itself, so present, so open, I canât help but be attracted and touched by the things that she creates. What about you? What makes you stop and enjoy somebody elseâs creative work? Have you ever thought about it? Nurture your energy and be aware Nurture your inner self, and your energy, and pay close attention to how you feel when youâre creating. As itâs exactly this energy that will allow you to create something great. Your high energy state makes art inevitable and touches people around, even if they cannot sometimes explain logically what attracted them to your art in the first place. We would like to rationalize and analyze, and explain everything logically, but many things in our lives happen unconsciously and cannot always be explained logically. Too often we try to control a creative process with out analytical mind, when in fact, your analytical mind has nothing to do with creativity, it can though, help you to bring something to life, once you start and act on your idea. I really like this idea, that I read for the first time in Elizabethâs Gilbert book called âBig Magicâ – âAll the ideas are already exciting in the universe, and itâs not you who are directly responsible to investing them. They come to you when youâre ready to receive them, very briefly, when you are aware, when you pay attention, when youâre present. And if you have an idea, but you donât act on it, it will find somebody else who is ready to take action on it and bring it into life.” I found that seeing all creative ideas this way allows you to detach yourself from the outcome. If your idea works out – great, but if it doesnât itâs fine too, as it wasnât completely your fault. So if youâre constantly searching for ideas, and forcing a creative process it isnât the best strategy for creativity, what should you do
How to Define Your Core Values to Build a Purposeful Life, Business, and Personal Brand
How to define your core values to build a purposeful life, business, and personal brand It has been a while since I wanted to write this blog post and speak in more depth about values and the role they play in our everyday lives and in our businesses. Defining my core values was the most important thing I did for myself and my business. It changed completely the way I show up online, the content I create, the way I run my business, and how I feel about myself and my personal brand. I find that it’s not spoken about in the online space enough. Everybody is speaking about building a brand foundation, following strategies, and blueprints that will help you to get exactly where you would like to be. The problem with this approach is that it’s too general and it doesn’t take into consideration your unique personality. There can be some universal truths and universal information, but you always need to trust yourself first and check out if it feels aligned with you. It’s probably hard to accept, but there is no unique strategy or magic pill that will work the same way for everybody. It might work for some people, but there is no guarantee that it will work for you. Without knowing yourself, what you value in life and knowing exactly what you would like your business to be about, you will be lost, you will compare yourself, and you will be living by false, somebody else’s values because you didn’t take the time to figure out your own. And then you will wonder why you feel unhappy, why you hide, why you don’t take action, why you don’t embrace yourself, and why your business doesn’t work out the way you want it to. The moment you define your core values, know exactly why they’re important to you and you start taking action every single day based on your values. Your actions start to feel more aligned, and effortless and your life starts to feel more purposeful. Why your core values are important Values determine how you will behave throughout your life. They are like your personal inner compass that guides you, helps you to set a direction, and helps you to stay on track during your journey. Knowing and living your core values is essential for your happiness as a human being. Different people have different values, and it’s wonderful. Your values will be unique to you and different from any person in this world. Isn’t it amazing to have your personal blueprint for your happiness and well-being? Your values define your authentic self. Your most authentic and deepest self is driven by these values. It’s your values that fuel it. This highest self wants more from life and it can help you to live an extraordinary life if you let it guide you. When you take action based on your values, often it may seem effortless, more natural and joyful. As it’s aligned with your inner authentic self. You’re not imitating anybody, pretending to be somebody you’re not, not trying to play a role or striving to be liked by everybody. No wonder values make it so much easier to get into the flow state. It’s very hard to build an aligned and sustainable business and personal brand when you don’t know what your values are and when you don’t infuse your personality into your business and brand. It’s not easy to tap into your subconscious mind and discover your core personal unique values. I hope that you’re ready to make inner work, to dedicate time and effort to discoverer your values. How to discover your top core values âYour values create your internal compass that can navigate how you make decisions in your life. If you compromise your core values, you go nowhere.â â Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart There are many techniques you can use to help you to discover your values. The simplest one is to find a basic value list on the internet, go through it, and choose the top 10 that resonate with you the most and that feel the most aligned. It’s the first step. Remember that there is no such thing as ”right” or ”wrong” values”. You might want to go through several value lists as they all might be different and contain different values. Often after doing this exercise you might discover that there is a huge gap between your values and your actions. Don’t freak out, and don’t beat yourself up. It’s just a reminder that nobody is perfect and that if you never spent any time in your life figuring your values out it was impossible to be guided by them and aligned all your actions to your core values. Then I will recommend spending time every day or every week to journal about them, to think about why they are important to you. The reason you would like to spend so much time thinking and journaling about them is that often we pick up values because of social and cultural pressure, or adopt some from where when we were children. It means that some of your values can be inauthentic and it’s okay. That’s exactly where self-discovery work and journaling will help you to really think deeply about your value list and choose the most authentic values that resonate with you on the deepest level. Don’t be in a hurry, don’t rush. Sometimes it takes time and effort to dig really deep to be able to discover your core values. It’s a process. As you grow evolve and find out more about your authentic self you might find that your values are changing and evolving with you and it’s okay. It’s not a static list that you create once and leave it out there. You need to go back to your list regularly and go through it. See how every value feels and if it’s aligned. My values changed quite
10 Design Principles to Elevate Your Small Business Website
10 design principles to elevate your small business website Design isn’t a precise science. Different people will react, interact, and behave differently on your website. It’s almost impossible to be 100% sure what users will do on your website, and that they will find it aesthetically pleasing. In my old blog post, I already touched on the topic of simple principles to make your website look more professional even if you’re not a website designer. However, there are still some simple design principles that were investigated, created, and tested by thought leaders in the website design industry, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and other professionals. By implementing these simple rules you can make your website more clear, more user-friendly and more aesthetically pleasing. Your small biz website will look more professional and will create a better overall impression among your prospects. At the end of the day, you don’t spend your time and money on creating a website for your business just for the sake of it, just to look at beautiful pictures and graphics. Most likely you would like your website to do something for your small business. Whether it’s getting more visibility, establishing expertise, booking more clients, getting more email subscribers, making people contact you or booking a call with you. So what actually creates a good website design? Clear and seamless navigation menu I crossed so many beautifully designed websites, but the navigation was horrible. I couldn’t understand how to navigate the website, and where to click to find the page I needed. It’s frustrating, and I don’t have time to figure out how to navigate the website, so I leave. Your website users expect to find a navigation horizontal navigation menu, not on the left, not on the right, not a hamburger menu (except if it’s a mobile version), and not in the middle of the page. You want to make sure that your navigation menu is simple, predictable, and intuitive. Don’t make people burn thousands of calories searching and figuring out how to use your navigation menu, because most likely they won’t do that, they have better things to do with their time. A standard navigation menu will make your website easier to use. It means a lower bounce rate, more pages per visit and higher conversions for your small biz website. Here are two examples of menus: the first one is a good one and the second one is quite weird and confusing. Overall consistency When I design my first DIY website I knew nothing about consistency. Probably that’s why my first website looked pretty bad, but well, it was still a valuable learning experience that trained my skills a lot. Consistent design and usability make your website whole. It improves your website’s usability. When your website visitors learn how to use one part of your website, they can easily apply this knowledge to using another part of the website. They won’t need to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use every single element and page of your website over and over again. You want to make your website as simple to use as possible. Consistency includes everything starting from consistence use of colours, fonts, buttons, style of forms, placement of icons, spacing, photo style, and navigation. When you create a website for your small biz you might want to keep in mind several types of consistency: Visual consistency – the way your website looks which includes consistent use of colours, fonts, photos, and other design elements like forms, buttons, boxes and columns. Content consistency – your voice, the quality of your content, and brand messaging are the same all over the website Functional consistency – the same elements like buttons, link, forms, and any other types of animation always works and looks the same way. Visual Hierarchy The information on your website should be well-organized and easy to digest. Visual hierarchy allows the organisation of the content in such a way that the most important information receives the most attention and the least important information receives the least attention. Visual hierarchy can be implemented through variations in size, value, colour, spacing, placement, white space, alignment, and movement of different elements on your website. Wise implementation of the hierarchy principle will help you to guide your website visitors through the website and make the content easier to understand and navigate. You can try to do a small test on your website and see if something grabs your attention right away. If you feel lost, and can’t figure out where to look first, most likely your website’s visual hierarchy needs some improvements. The most common way you can do that is by using different sizes of fonts, and brighter colours for the elements you would to emphasize. Balance Balance is important in everything including your website design. Our brain favours balance. When content and design are uncategorized and chaotic, it’s confusing and hard for our brain to make sense of it, so it creates tension. If your website visitors feel this way while browsing your website, it will inevitably leave to lower conversion and a higher bounce rate. Balance occurs when all the design elements such as colours, white space, icons, and textures, are well organized on the page. When it happens it creates a balanced composition. When your design is balanced and there is no particular element that attracts more attention than any other. When you create your website, a simple rule of thumb will be to really pay close attention to how you distribute elements on the page. Make sure the elements are not too close to the edges of the web page, and that there is a proper alignment. And that you intentionally use balance whether it’s symmetrical or asymmetrical while keeping in mind your website user and the tasks she would like to accomplish on your website. Simplicity is key All decisions making demands a lot of mental effort. Have you ever noticed how exciting it can be to
What Creates a Strong Personal Brand
what creates a strong personal brand? You already have a brand whether you realize it or not. So why not try to make a better one? Everybody these days speaks about building a brand, but I would say that it’s better to become your brand rather than build one. Do the hard work of becoming the person you’re trying to sell to people. Embrace your journey, accept all hard work and challenges with courage and integrity and stop searching for shortcuts and following somebody else’s step-by-step roadmaps. The credibility is found in the way you live, but not by teaching and providing endless tips that are just a theory. Your personal branding it’s not just choosing 3 colours and 2 fonts, creating an avatar of your ideal client, and creating your offer. These are still valuable steps that are needed to be worked on and identified, but your personal brand is so much more than that. Your personal brand is YOU first of you, and the representation of your unique identity. So what actually creates a strong personal brand? Your values In my previous blog posts, I touched slightly on the topic of values and I will be coming back to it in the future. As your values not only determine how you live your life, behave as a human being, and what you want to stand for in life, the principles you want to live by, the personal qualities and characterstrengths you want to cultivate, but also how you show up, what your personal brand stands for and the way you run your business every single day. It’s crucial for any human being, even if she is not a business owner, to clarify her values, and to come back to them regularly, to revise them. Values play a major role in developing your confidence. They provide you with inspiration, sustain you on your journey, and provide fulfilment in your everyday work. Sometimes achieving your goals might take a lot of time, by you can still choose to be courageous, curious, authentic, and persistent. In other words, you can choose to live in alignment with your values every single day of your journey. The same goes for your business and personal brand. How do you want to show up? How do you want to serve your clients? How would you like people to feel when they interact with your brand? What would you like to stand for? It’s vital to clarify your own values so that you could do the same for your business. It will make you stand out (as your values are unique to you), be more fulfilled, and happier, serve better your clients and show up with amazing energy, as you are living your core values. Here is a basic list of values to just give you an idea. You can find many more extended lists of interest if you’re really interested. Try to pick at least 10 values, think about why did you choose them, and put them in the order of priority. Loyalty Spirituality Humility Compassion Honesty Kindness Integrity Selflessness Determination Generosity Courage Tolerance Trustworthiness Equanimity Altruism Appreciation Empathy Toughness Self-Reliance Attentiveness Your brand & business story A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumerâs decision to choose one product or service over another. â Seth Godin  Storytelling is more natural to us than we might think. We have been telling stories to each other for thousands of years before we even developed any means of writing communications. We use stories in our everyday communications. Storytelling can be a powerful tool in your business. The reason why personal stories are very important is that they make you stand out from the crowd. Your stories are your unique selling point, and nobody can compete with that, as everybody’s stories are unique. A story is a great way to combat the noise, because it combines the information in a way that people will listen, and engage. Another reason why stories are so effective is that they help our brain to understand and process information easier. Our brain is lazy, it doesn’t want to burn too many calories to understand something Telling stories is vital in your business. And it doesn’t mean that you need to write 5 pages of your autobiography or bore your prospects with every single detail of your life on the about page of your website. What stories can you tell about your business? The business story, the story of why of your business. Why did you start your blog, your Youtube channel or a podcast? It should be something that is coming from your core. Founder story in other words it’s why you decided to do what you do, and what life event or realization lead you to where you’re now. Don’t overthink it. Be honest, share something that deeply triggered you, or pushed you to start your business. Your client’s story – simply testimonials of people you worked with. Your brand statement Your brand statement it’s a promise you give to your potential prospect in other words the problem that you solve with your products or services. You do need to spend some time thinking about your brand statement, crafting it, adjusting, and testing it. Although, good brand statements cannot be created by only sitting, doing nothing and just inventing the words you think your potential clients want to hear. As I mentioned earlier you will need to do the hard of developing yourself, clarifying your values, and actually figuring out who you are, what values would you like to provide to people, and getting really good at your craft (which means starting taking action, developing new skills which can be hard and uncomfortable, putting yourself out there before you have everything figured out). Through doing the actual work you will start to get more clarity of what you like, what you don’t, what differentiates you, and what lights you
How to Infuse Your Personality to Create an Authentic and Aligned Personal Brand
How infuse your personality to create an authentic and aligned personal brand. More and more people start to speak about the importance of branding and building a personal brand for your business. I think that there are too many rules, shoulds and shouldn’t when it comes to your personal brand. Yes, you need to know your audience, yes, you need to have your brand statement figured out, and yes, you need to know what problem you solve with your products and services. But do you know what you stand for? Do you really know yourself? Do you know how do you want to be seen in the world? Do you live according to your values? Do you even know what your values are? All these are very important questions that you can answer only through doing deep self-discovery work. It’s absolutely vital for building an authentic, aligned, and sustainable personal brand. To my mind it’s a never-ending journey of self-discovery, trying, experimenting, and pivoting, until you find what is aligned and feels right for you. Taking action and trying will build your courage to put yourself out there, as well as build your confidence. Adopting other’s people strategies might work for some people, but it didn’t work for me for example, that’s why I kept carving my own path and searching for answers. It’s how I ended up discovering website design and rebranding my business model from scratch. It goes without saying that self-discovery work is the foundation of your branding. Because it’s you who run your business, and you need to enjoy your everyday work and feel proud about what you do. Because when you don’t, how the hell are you supposed to keep going when things get tough? When you don’t see immediate results? When do you fail? There is so much noise on the intent these days, everybody tells you what you need to do, what is the right way to create the content, and what is the right way to run your business. But who knows better than you how would you like to do things?? Another danger when you’re not willing to do the self-discovery work is drowning in comparing and watching other people, as you don’t really know what is aligned and acceptable to do for you. You can try other’s people methods, and strategies, but most likely they won’t work for you. And you will end up beating yourself up and wondering why you’re not as successful as other people. But believe me, if beating yourself up was working, wouldn’t you and your business be perfect by now? Don’t forget that you’re a unique human being, a miracle of the universe, and only you know what is right for you. As much as we would like to find a formula or quick fix to run and build our businesses, often it’s a road that leads nowhere. Unfortunately or fortunately there is no quick fix or a “right way” to do things. You need to embark on your journey, get lost, embrace your journey and adventure and find out what makes sense and what works for you. It’s the beauty of not having a formula, you can invent your own path and your own rules. If you find the courage to be vulnerable, ask questions and search with curiosity and an open mind, you will find your unique way to build your personal brand for your business, express yourself through it and connect to the right people and run your business with joy. How my journey of building a personal brand looked liked My journey of building a personal brand was very far away from a smooth one. I used to have a lot of self-doubts, fear, and anxiety and felt lost very often. It took me a lot of courage to choose to listen to my gut, and inner voice and let them guide me. I chose to believe in myself, embrace my journey and see where it will lead me. I used to follow many people who spoke about personal branding and help people to build brands. I even used to work with a branding coach to build my first French language business. And I discovered the time that most of the approaches were not deep enough, there was not enough stress on my personality or self-discovery work, but just some general work on defining my ideal audience, my offer, my brand statement. But what about me? What about my values? Is it me who decided to choose my niche, or is it something that was dictated by my education and that I had some experience in it? Or maybe my limiting beliefs didn’t let me dream big, and dare to find my true life purpose? And the answer was for me that I exactly chose to teach language as I had a diploma and some experience, but deep down in my heart, I knew that I wanted to do something different. But I was so afraid to admit it. So after building my first business, I realized that I hate teaching, and I was blocked as I had my brand, and website ready. I ended up having a lot of anxiety, fear and unwillingness to show up and create content. I think that I still learned a lot, developed my skills, and it’s what led me to my starting my second business. It’s proof that everybody’s journey is different. If you too feel lost, anxious, and not really sure how to show up, or what type of content you can create for your business, you feel that you don’t enjoy what you do, or lost yourself imitating others. It’s exactly the time to question the way you do things and look inside to find all the answers. We all have answers inside of us, we just need to be open, ask questions, be curious, be willing to try, quieten the noise, do inner work and take action to find the
How to Speed Up Your WordPress Website
How to speed up your WordPress Website I spent a lot of time learning tech stuff when I was trying to build my first website. It was very difficult to take into account every single aspect of a well-performing website, as I was learning everything on the go. Of course, I missed a lot of essential things. I was so focused on the look of the website, on beautiful pictures, graphics, beautiful design layouts, colours, and fonts, that I completely missed the strategy and tech part that was essential for a well-performing website. More and more people start to talk today that a working, strategic, converting website is so much more than just visuals. And I cannot agree more! So does your current website or a landing page provide your website users with the best user experience? Does it load fast enough? Did you test your website speed before launching it? Is it easy for your website visitors to find all the necessary information and don’t think too hard? If you answered no to some of these questions, you might want to come back and fix some of these things so that you could finally start getting the results you were hoping for. WHY YOUR WEBSITE SPEED MATTERS Loading speed affects directly your site’s user experience, the number of page views, SEO ranking, bounce rate, conversion rates and the number of clients you will get. People don’t have time and they are very impatient, so if your website loads for ages, they just leave. However, sometimes when you’re someone who struggles to understand the tech, it can a challenge to improve your site’s speed, especially if it wasn’t you who built your website in the first place. But it’s still possible and honestly, not that complicated. I will share some tips that helped me to improve my website’s speed tremendously. HOW TO MEASURE THE SPEED OF YOUR WEBSITE AND FIND OUT WHAT SLOWS IT DOWN There are many great online tools available these days that you can use to measure the speed of your website as well as uncover the issues that slow your website down. PageSpeed Insights is a free Google tool that analyzes website performance for both desktop and mobile devices. It’s easy to understand, and it’s not overwhelming. It gives you all the necessary steps you can take to improve the speed of your website. GTMetrix.com is another great free tool that you can use. It provides a great description of all issues on your website and how you can resolve them. WebPageTest.org is a bit more advanced tool that shows in detail what happens when your web pages are loaded. There are many other great tools, you can find whatever is easier to use for you. Feel free to go and explore other tools by yourself.  HOW FAST YOUR WEBSITE SHOULD BE? A good website speed should be 3 seconds or less. If there is nothing on the screen after 4 seconds of loading, more than 25% of people will abandon the page. It’s important to pay attention to the mobile version speed of your website as well. You can check Google’s recommendations for mobile users. Website speed is a very important metric for Google’s SEO ranking. So you might want to spend some time improving your overall website speed. WHAT STEPS CAN YOU TAKE TO IMPROVE YOUR WEBSITE SPEED? Make everything simple I know that we all as small business owners get caught up in all those fancy website features, we would like everything to look beautiful, shiny, and perfect. As much as the visual aspect of your website is important, you might want to ask yourself a question all these fancy elements help your website visitors to achieve their goals? Does it make your website slow? Is it easy to find the necessary information? Are there any elements that might annoy your visitors? Or maybe there are too many distractions and it takes an enormous amount of energy for your website visitor to understand what to do on your website. If you answered yes to most of those questions, you might want to: – Remove things that are moving by themselves – Pop-ups, usually pop-ups hurt the user experience a lot. – GIFs – Huge banner images, and background images, when you can use just colour for example instead. If your website is quite clear and simple, but you still see that there is an issue with loading time, I will provide you with other actionable steps on speeding your website up. CHOOSE A GOOD HOSTING PROVIDER Bad hosting can ruin your website speed a lot. So it’s important to spend some time and choose a good hosting provider, even if it sounds sooo boring. There are many great hosting options for building WordPress websites out there. You can make mall research to choose the best one for your needs and budget. There are many great articles and online resources you can use to help you with your choice. I personally use Bluehost and have been using it for 2 years already. It’s very affordable, has different plans available, great customer support. So I think that I will stick with them for some more time. But feel free to choose what suits you and your website goals best. OPTIMIZE ALL THE RESOURCES ON YOUR WEBSITE – Use Zip compression for big files. – Don’t host huge audio and video files directly on your website. It can affect the speed of your WordPress website a lot. Instead, you should use an audio and video hosting service like YouTube, Vimeo, DailyMotion, SoundCloud, etc.. – Optimize all the images. Huge and heavy images can hurt your website performance. Images optimization consists of 3 main steps: 1. Optimal file format. The format like this for example – jpg, png, jpeg. 2 Optimal image size, based on how you will be using it, not bigger. I usually use Canva to download the image with the right height
Complete Rebrand and Website Redesign of New Business
Compete Website Redesign & Rebranding for my new website design business How Everything started Before I even started my first business as a French language mentor, I was working different “normal jobs”. Back then I knew nothing about online business, website design or branding. My whole life I have been listening to others about what is ” the right thing to do”, and what ”the successful career path” should look like. I subconsciously gave the power to others and let them choose what I should be doing in this life. Then I wondered why I felt unhappy and dead inside when I was working jobs I chose accordingly to somebody else’s standards. But I guess that I wasn’t conscious enough of everything that was happening around me back then. My limiting beliefs held me back a lot and didn’t let me see the perspectives of what is possible. I had an inner feeling that I want more freedom, more creativity, more flexibility and enjoying more my everyday life, instead of waiting for weekends and vacations to live. I felt like something was lacking, but I couldn’t articulate what exactly just yet. I felt like there were something more to life than just spending 8h per day in the office with people I didn’t even like that much. By the way, I’m totally okay with people who love working in the corporate environment and who want security, it’s just not for me and has never been. I guess I let my intuition guide me and that’s how I started to discover some self-development staff. I was devouring self-development books, podcasts, and videos. I become kind of obsessed with all this. I started to realize that choosing a meaningful career path is one of the most important things that I can do for myself now. It’s not possible to think about higher staff, when the basic needs are not met and when you’re unsatisfied with what you do 8h per day, every single day. Language Mentoring I started to consider all possible options of what I could do as a potential job or business. I have several degrees in teaching foreign languages and I have already done it in the past, so the option to start a foreign language teaching business came to me naturally. I made a lot of research, and bought a lot of courses and books to help me to start, cause I had no idea what I was doing back then. Everything was new and hard. I didn’t know how to deal with my emotions, fears and insecurities that didn’t let me move forward. I put too much pressure on myself and compared myself to others who were in business for years. There was so much noise around me and listened to it, instead of watching inside and finding all the answers. So if you feel the same, don’t feel guilty cut out the noise, meditate, and stop following people who make you feel miserable. Keep asking hard questions, even if you don’t have answers yet. Believe that you will be able to figure everything out on your way. The path can only be made by walking. Being trapped in your head and overthinking everything will keep you in the same place you were a year before. Ask yourself what you can do NOW so that you could become the person you would like to be in one year. Everything we have is the present moment, and the things you do now at this moment will determine where you will be in several years. In the beginning, I was left alone trying to figure out everything by myself: marketing, website design, searching for clients, mindset, and the process of working with clients. I was doing busy and trivial work because I was too afraid to do the “scary part”. I was afraid to reach out to people first, I was afraid to have real conversations, and be rejected, and I was afraid to put myself out there. So as you might guess it was hard to get new clients, and it was hard to work and serve my clients best. I was always worried about what I will do next, and couldn’t be in the present moment, doing my work the best. Work with a Branding Coach One day when I was having really hard times emotionally because I desperately wanted to make everything work, I found a personal branding coach to help me. It was a bit too pricey, to be honest, but I still decided to go for it. During our work together I learned a lot. I had my branding and website as a French language mentor ready when we finished working together. Although, I didn’t have more courage, readiness, or more willingness to show up online. I was worried as before about people judging me. Doing the work every day felt like drudgery. I felt so much resistance inside, I didn’t enjoy what I was doing. When you do your work with this kind of energy of constant fear, lack and resistance, it’s not possible to be creative, not possible to serve your clients best, and not possible to attract new ones. That’s when I started to ask myself hard questions if I really would like to continue teaching. I started to dig deeper and deeper inside myself even more. The work that I did before wasn’t deep enough, it was kind of on the surface. There was no clarity about me as a person. I didn’t know what I was standing for, or what my values were. I didn’t ask what I really won’t be doing, what brings me joy. It is exactly when I discovered “an ultimate life purpose course”. It was very affordable and packed with value ( which is proof once again that you don’t need to invest thousands of dollars in the beginning when you don’t have it). I started to rediscover myself, read good books, do a lot
5 Types of Stories to Tell in Your Business
5 TYPES OF STORIES TO TELL IN YOUR BUSINESS I already mentioned the importance of using storytelling in your business. In this blog post, I wanted to speak about the different types of stories you can tell in your business. You can use different types of stories to inspire and create an emotional connection with your audience. You can use stories on different parts of the website, and on different pages, on your social media, on your blog. It’s a very powerful tool everybody should leverage in their business. Inspire people with your business mission Instead of a boring mission statement, you can tell a real story of how you found your business. Help your readers to see who you are. When you’re open, and vulnerable, and help your audience to find out more about you, they will connect more to you. It can be a perfect story to tell on your About page. You can speak about what inspired you to start a business, the obstacles you overcame, what exactly led you to where you’re now, lessons you learnt on your way and how did it change you as a person. Don’t be afraid to share your failures, nobody needs a perfect story. As we all know that it’s not possible to have a perfect life and a perfect business. It’s exactly your failures and difficulties that make you real and relatable. You can share things you genuinely care about, things that drive you every day and give you the power to keep going! Maybe without even knowing it, you will help or inspire somebody with your business mission. It’s so important to inspire your audience. It will lead to emotional connection as well as will drive action on your website. Share success stories or case studies of your clients Nothing motivates people more than seeing other people with the same problems get the result they want to achieve. It makes them curious, and impatient to get the same results. When you share success stories of real people and how they benefited from working with you, it creates a lot of trust among new people who arrive on your website or social media pages and they have no idea who you’re and what you do. A good success story should contain a photo of a real person, a description of problems this person had and what she wanted to achieve before she found you. The second part should be all about the benefits and specific results you helped this person to achieve. Use stories to educate You can use stories to educate, explain your point of view or explain complex notions in a simple way. Stories help to understand complex things as well as to keep attention better, than just dry facts. If you educate your audience well and share relevant information, they will be more loyal, they will trust you more and they will come to your website over and over again to get great information. It shouldn’t necessarily be real stories, it’s totally okay to use imaginary stories. You can use these stories in your blog, on your social media platforms, in education videos or in some other materials you use to attract your ideal client. Let people imagine working with you Don’t just describe the features of your services, and speak only about yourself all the time. As I mentioned before nobody wants to read it. People are searching for a solution to their problems, they want to know how they will benefit from working with you. Let them imagine what working with you will look like. Where they will be in 3 months after working with you? How they life will change? What benefits and solutions to their problem they will get if they choose to work with you? Numerous studies show that people’s desire to buy a product increase tremendously when they hold it in their hands. But if you’re a service business you can increase their desire by telling a story about your services. It will create desire and will make your offer irresistible. When you write these types of stories always keep your ideal client in mind. Try to imagine what they want, and what exactly will make them choose you over others. Share Your personal story In addition to your brand mission story, you can add your personal story. Speak more about you in relation to your business. Be human, share your struggles, values, things you believe in and things that are important to you. You shouldn’t try to please everybody, and to appeal to everybody when you tell your story. Try to be yourself, be true to yourself, and speak from your heart. When we open like this, we attract our ideal client who relates to us, and who has the same struggles or doubts. From my own experience, I can tell that it’s hard to do. It will feel uncomfortable, and you will want to hide, but don’t let these feelings prevent you from sharing your real story. When it’s getting uncomfortable, it means that you come out of your comfort zone and grow. Final thoughts Telling stories is natural for us as human beings. If you just starting out, it can sometimes feel that it’s not for you. But if you want to learn how to write good stories, you need to try and fail sometimes. Great stories will help to grow your business, captivate people’s attention, and connect to your audience.
How to Find Your Voice as a Small Business Owner
How to find your voice as a small business owner When you start to build your business it can be so difficult to find your voice, even when you know what you want to offer. There is so much noise on the internet these days. It’s very easy to get lost, follow ”trends” start comparing yourself to others. Whenever you are about to show up as an expert and provide value an annoying voice in your head will say some things like it was said 1000 times before, the industry is oversaturated, I have nothing to say, why people would listen to me, I’m not a world expert yet, I cannot do as well as that business owner, I don’t feel like showing up. After these thoughts appear in your head you have several choices: listen and accept them as truth that will later define your reality or notice them, don’t resist. But at the same time continue doing the work that will eventually bring you the results. Remember that only your actions will be able to bring you the results. If there is no action, there is no result. It’s very natural to experience these thoughts especially when you do creative work when you do something completely different from what other people are doing when there is no path that you can follow. It’s hard! It’s hard to wake up every day and do the work when nobody is standing behind your back when there is no roadmap to follow, and it’s up to you to figure everything out. There is so much noise these days about how you need to be positive all the time. The worst thing that you can do is to ignore your feelings, avoid feeling sad, force yourself to be positive, and repeat positive affirmations you don’t believe in. But we all know that it’s not possible. We all have bad days, we can feel down and it’s completely okay! What if you can just allow yourself to feel whatever comes out, notice it, see how it feels in your body and doesn’t resist? Of course, you need to believe in yourself, be gentle with yourself, don’t push too hard. But at the same time, you need to accept the fact that there will be many hard days, the days you don’t feel like doing anything, the days when you don’t feel motivated. It’s natural, there is no need to guilt yourself and blame others. Doing creative work, or building a business is hard. And most likely a lot of fears and limiting beliefs will come and it will be up to you to find ways to deal with them or let them rule you. There can be several reasons why are you struggling to find confidence, show up consistently, and find your unique way of expressing yourself. Take time to learn about yourself Don’t underestimate the importance of understanding yourself before you decide to show up. Of course, you can figure everything out on your way, but it will take much more time and can create a lot of anxiety. Take your time to dig deeper and ask yourself hard questions. Be honest with yourself. What do you enjoy doing and why? Because what happens very often you decide to follow the trends or want to do what is profitable and what most people are doing. But it’s not the best motivation. You’re motivated by external things. Your motivation should come from inside. For me it was huge. I have always thought that I can only teach languages because I had a degree and some experience in it. I didn’t ask myself whether I enjoy it. And it turned out I don’t. But by limiting myself to one single fiend, I prevented myself from seeing other possibilities. To explore and try different fields to find what I love doing. No wonder I didn’t want to show up, I couldn’t stay consistent. It felt fake like I was pretending to enjoy something that I actually didn’t. When you’re not in love with the everyday work, with the process you cannot become a master in your field and create remarkable things. Always question your old beliefs. Learn to listen to your inner voice. Allow it to lead you. What are your strengths? What are your values? What are your weaknesses? What kind of a person are you? Be honest about it! The more you discover your true core, the more confident your voice will become. Don’t be afraid to try and to fail I believe that every time you have an idea you should try to implement it right away. The idea appeared in your head for a reason. It’s important to give it a try and do something about it. Don’t let your fear of failure prevent you from trying. Even if you fail, you will learn something every single time. Only by trying and doing different things you will be able to find what you really enjoy and what you want to do. If you never try new things you will never know what you enjoy and why do you enjoy it. And it’s not possible to find your voice when you speak about something you don’t care about, something that doesn’t light you up inside. If you want to make people care, you should care about the subject you speak about in the first place. It’s very easy to see when people don’t care when they don’t love the process of their work. But they so desperately want other people to care about their business or their project. You want to be perfect and don’t accept your true self Let’s be honest, nobody is perfect and yet we keep trying to pretend as if we’re when we show up as business owners. Sometimes we search for proof of the perfect life of other people to make us feel miserable and to find proof of why we should be perfect. From my
How to Make a Photoshoot for Your Website by Yourself
how to make a photoshoot for your website by yourself Professional photos of you are so important for your business, social media, and your website. Although, it can become a real struggle for somebody who doesn’t have a budget to hire a professional photographer or even for somebody who doesn’t feel comfortable in front of the camera and other people. I used to struggle with it a lot when I started to build my first website. I used some old, bad-quality photos, or even worse I did everything possible to avoid showing my face. I found some random pictures of smiling people, books, landscapes and used these instead. It was a very very bad idea! As the result, the website looked generic, it didn’t show the person behind the business, didn’t create a connection with my website visitors. When I started to work with my first brand coach, it became obvious that I needed to start making changes, make my business and my website more personal, show my face, own it, and don’t hide! I still didn’t have a budget to hire a photographer, I’m quite an introverted person and don’t feel comfortable in front of a camera and people I don’t know either. So I started to brainstorm what I possibly could do to create great pictures for my website. I remembered that several months before I found a great person on the internet. She travelled a lot by herself and didn’t have anybody to take pictures of her, so she started to do it by herself. And invented this very cool concept called ”advanced selfie” The concept exploded and became very popular. What it means is artistic photos of yourself taken by yourself. It’s not very easy in the beginning, it takes some practice. But the more you do it, the better your photos will be. Equipment & Clothing The preparation stage is very important! It will save a lot of time and effort during the shooting day. So take some time to prepare your photoshoot properly, and you won’t regret it. Equipment Tripod Camera Phone with a remote control Charged batteries (have at least 2 or 3 properly charged batteries) Vertical L-Bracket for your camera, if you would like to take vertical photos. You can use your phone as well, but it will be w bit more difficult because you won’t see yourself Clothing Think over and choose all the possible outfits you would like to wear during the photoshoot day. Try them on, see what you like, and have them ready. Props Choose the props you want to use for making your photos. It can be anything: a laptop, flowers, cards, notebooks, books, a cup, and so on. Down below I found some examples of pictures when people use props. Get Inspired Inspiration is everything! When I started, I thought that I don’t need any inspiration and that I could invent everything by myself: poses, facial expressions, hands, and leg positions. I can say now, that it looked pretty bad. So many things have been already done before, invented, and tested by many talented people. Why not get inspired, check what other people do, and see what you like and what works the best for you. It will help you find what feels authentic to you, and how you feel like showing up. I use Pinterest for searching for inspiration. It’s a huge image search engine platform that can help you find any images you’re looking for. Create a mood board or a specific board for yourself and save all the images you like. You will have everything in one place, ready to use right away. You can also check YouTube tutorials, accounts and blogs of people you like or photographers to give you some ideas. Of course, you can use just Google or some other people’s websites if you prefer. Do what is easier for you. Possible Types of shots There are many different types of photos you can make for your website. It’s a good idea to vary photos so that they don’t look all the same all over your website. Some examples of images can be: Head Shots It can both headshots when you look directly at the camera, look away your profile 3/4 of your face Other Poses Full body poses Waist poses Knee up poses Basic photo principles Good Light Make sure that you’re very close to the natural source of light or that you have good artificial light. The photos will look so much better and will require less editing. Composition Make sure that you are in the middle of the photo or very close to the middle. This way the photo looks more balanced and more beautiful to look at. Be Yourself and Have Fun Just be yourself, do what feels like you, and have some fun. Don’t try to be somebody that you’re not. Enjoy the creative process! Editing and choosing the best photos You want to make sure that the size of your photos is adapted the best for every page of your website. Make sure that they’re cropped properly and have the same size all over your website. Check if they look good on both tablet and phone as well. You can always edit pictures a little bit too, to make them look even better. Everything is up to you. You don’t need to do anything complicated, just very simple and basic editing. You can find a lot of very simple tutorials on the internet on how to do that. My photos I will share my photos I made during different stages of my business. There will be photos of both when I started, and when I learnt a bit more about photography. Today I know that any time I need to update or change some photos on both my website or create more photos for my social media, I can easily do it by myself at home. And you will be able too!