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If you’re wondering how to best market and create content in the current climate, here are seven ways to serve as a leader right now for your customers.

7 Ways to Serve as a Leader Right Now

If your week has been anything like mine, it’s been a mixed bag. I think I have whiplash after being bounced and tossed around the emotional spectrum like a pinball.

I got a lot of great responses when I asked what topics you would like my insights on right now. I was happy to see that a lot of people wanted to hear about some ways to show up and serve as a leader right now.

I’m also working on content about how to make your business more resilient and how to quickly replace lost income. (Hint: #3 and #4 below are a great way to prepare for that.) More on those topics soon.

If you’re wondering how to best market and create content in the current climate, check out the resource I share in #4 below.

With that, here are seven ways to show up as a leader right now for your customers, clients, and audience.

1) Keep Showing Up (Show Up More)

It would be understandable to hole up right now and attend to yourself, your family, and those closest to you. And if that is what you need, that’s just fine. Read more

I’d like to offer a few insights about how you can weather these uncertain times in your business and fortify your business for the future.

5 Ways to Navigate These Uncertain Times

It’s been a crazy week. It feels like head-spinning news and changes are coming at us at the speed of light bringing with it a good deal of uncertainty, and therefore, anxiety.

To be honest, I’ve had a few moments where I’ve felt like throwing my hands in the air and screaming.

What’s the use right now of doing anything if the ground is going to shift underneath me every two minutes?!

Thankfully, after taking a few deep breaths (and occasionally throwing on my kickboxing gloves to throw a few punches), I calm myself down.

Today, I’d like to offer a few insights about how you can weather these uncertain times in your business and fortify your business for the future.

1) Use This Time to Diversify Your Business Model

The other day I was brought on a podcast to talk about the importance of having multiple ways to sell your knowledge and generate income. The audience consisted of a number of public speakers who were suddenly facing months with very little income due to canceled conferences.

If you’re in a situation where some of your income is evaporating, now would be a good time to use my Lean Launch Method to get something to market quickly, especially something virtual that can replace any in-person gigs that have been canceled. Read more

Here are four useful tools and techniques that can help you uncover your unique voice as a thought leader to stand out in your industry.

How to Uncover Your Unique Voice as a Thought Leader

In 1994, my brother and I started our first garageband. Spillway was our name (don’t ask me why).

We would set up in my parents’ basement and thrash about, banging the drums and crunching chords on the guitar, essentially knocking off of the popular grunge sound of the time.

Our first song was an “approximation” of a Stone Temple Pilots tune. Our next was a loose rip off of Rage Against the Machine.

Without a doubt, we sounded like hundreds of other garagebands playing in their parents’ basements, all of us borrowing liberally from the popular rock bands on the radio. But we had to start somewhere. This is the creative process of discovering one’s creative voice.

Much like writing songs, creating content and sharing your ideas online is an expression of your unique voice.

To find your own style, your own voice, you often start by mimicking the voice of others. You experiment. You put in your reps. Bit by bit you uncover the elements that make up the fullest expression of who you are, the things that set you apart from others who do or say similar things. Read more

Do you ever suffer from this entrepreneurial malady?

Do you ever suffer from this entrepreneurial malady?

Putting yourself and your ideas out there for the masses can ironically be a lonely business at times.

You sit in your home office wrestling with decisions, wishing you had someone who could jump in the ring with you, even for a moment, so that you don’t have to bear the entire weight of those decisions alone.

You have the freedom of choosing your own path and yet you feel adrift in an ocean of possibilities with nobody to help you choose where to navigate next.

Even if you have a team, you can still feel alone as a leader with nobody to talk to who feels the same pressures, has the same kind of vision and understands the nature of your day-to-day journey.

To succeed, we all need fresh perspectives to shine a light on our blind spots.

We all need consistent feedback both to push us further as well as to remind us how far we have come.

We all need a safe place to share the real struggles of entrepreneurship and thought leadership with those who understand. Read more