I recently watched a quick clip of a social media expert telling people to watch for what the tiles look like on their Instagram feed.
I say, empty out the contents of you, yourself, your soul and focus on allowing others to feed on that.
Give of your vitality, in other words, your brand of vivaciousness. We’ve heard it all before, but it can’t be said or heard enough ~ give v a l u e.
And guess where that comes from?
Deep inside where tiles on Instagram are only a tiny piece of the large and hopefully very meaningful puzzle…
To inspire visually is just one piece of the inspire, empower, entertain and educate square, but if you don’t go heavy specifically on the inspire, empower and educate pieces, it may all fall to pieces (ok, that’s dramatic, of course, but it might feel that way to you). This is how some of my clients felt before they started sharing, expressing, branding and marketing in greater alignment with their values and why behind their business…
If you give yourself permission to channel your inner Creative Heroine who knows that honesty, heart and a Herculean-sized bravery is needed to create a business that feels like a true extension of your life, the rest truly takes care of itself.
If you speak from the heart and keep showing up with all you know and feel, always focusing on them vs. you (what do they need to hear? how do they want to experience their transformation? why is it so important to them?) from a place of both experience AND love, you will be taken care of.
A brand with a true message.
…a movement…
Your brand and this movement is created, day in and day out, when you allow yourself to tap into courage to be all of you as you focus on them — in that light, say what it is that you really want to say…tell the stories you want to tell…give generously without worrying about if it’s too much or not…
In a business-turned-movement like this too much doesn’t exist. You’re never too much, your stories are never too much and your multi-passionate or multi-dimensional ways are never too much…you are and IT is all just enough…
In short, generosity and depth beyond the looks of your IG tiles is what looks most gorgeous on you…
Join us for the May 17th 11am – 1pm Pacific Your Brand Lab: Working with Inspiration, Education, Entertainment & THE REAL YOU where we will discuss this in more active detail.
REGISTER for your fancy and footloose free training here: www.michelleghilotti.com/brandlabtraining.
We will be covering authentic branding from the perspective of:
• Purpose — how do you tap into your one main business-turned-movement purpose…
• Moving from Problem to Solution…
• Your Top Stories…how to keep telling more and more of them (stories are your marketing).
• Getting Over the Hump: how to get over the hump of sharing your most vulnerable stories (I can feel you know it’s time to go there).
• The Top Four Brand Elements (even though I was an ad girl prior to starting MGI and connected with what was needed to advertise/market/brand and truly connect, I wish I would have known these when I first started out in 2011)
• What Truly Connects in An Authentic Brand Story
• The Six Keys to a Great, Authentic Brand
• What Blueprints Don’t Tell You About What Works, Sells and Engages in Your Branding & Marketing
• Internal Brand vs. External Brand and How They Are Connected (blurring the lines between business and life)
• And more, such as this ~> one lucky Creative Heroine will WIN the Brand to Success program which will help you, step-by-step, create and launch the most important offline and online elements of your brand…
See you there, Creative Heroine!
Until we connect again, enjoy your business, enjoy your life…
Michelle Ghilotti
Couture Brand Creator & Success Coach
p.s. Spend time with us Wednesday, May 17th from 11am-1pm Pacific and continue on your path of creating a real, honest and purposefully profitable business with a radiant, engaging brand to match: www.michelleghilotti.com/brandlabtraining. Note: be on the lookout for the workbook we will send you a day or two before the training!
How to Be More You = BRAND Growth
I found this share from almost three years ago and had to send it to you again. I trust that it finds or meets you where you need to be found/met…
~
Someone asked me the other day what this last year felt like having turned 40. Hasn’t it been amazing? 40 is GREAT.
My answer: Yes! I feel like I’ve dropped into me.
Truthfully, though I’ve felt this “dropping into me” every year in life, I’d say that the last 4-5 years I’ve experienced the biggest quantum leap in celebrating this comfort in my own skin. You too?
Which leads me to this and it’s something I’ve shared with you before ~ our greatest authentic brand and your greatest happiness depends on you more fully “dropping” into you.
It depends on:
Expressing more of who you really are…
Doing this includes a level of transparency that leads to trust…
It includes a big dose of true human to –> human (not business woman to –> human) connection that leads to long-lasting relationships and the growth of our business…
It includes an extra serving of detachment (non-attachment for us yogis) from what others, especially those that don’t fall within our ideal client or friend sphere, think.
Becoming even more you is what creating a great, authentic brand is all about and it’s what being in alignment is about.
Your leadership, greatest brand and greatest happiness depends on how aligned your thoughts, words and actions are.
And it’s what your business and bliss depend on. Being the kind of leader who shows up as 150% herself every time, whether it’s via her newsletters, how she speaks and holds herself at a dinner party or in a VIP day with a client.
Sure there’s a level of elegance and professionalism that allows clients to feel supported, organized and well taken care of, too, however, we need not be a different person in our business than we are in our personal life. (For years after leaving the corporate advertising world and starting my business 14 years ago, I used “is this professional?” as my communication filter and boy was I wrong. I couldn’t find myself anywhere within my brand or expression).
Enter the wisdom that comes with time and asking the right questions: I now know that the filter to use is definitely “Is this in alignment with my mission, values, message and with what I say I most desire in my life?”
How would your brand communication change if you used this filter too?
How to drop into you (3 tips):
3. Understand that you will not appeal to everyone; you will polarize (please be polarizing). Not everyone is meant to be your client or best friend, for that matter. With this understanding and acceptance that some will be repelled by what you have to say and how you say it, you can more easily shout what your movement and message is all about from the mountain tops. As the kids say, YOLO.
2. Get still. What makes you truly happy? Keep listening, go on that daily hike, buy the guided meditation app (and actually use it)…find more time to just BE vs. DO. Being driven and action-oriented is valuable as entrepreneurs and so is taking time to sit by the lake, river or ocean pondering what it is that we really want and who it is that we really want to be and gift this world…
1. Write your most transparently elegant Facebook or blog post yet (that delivers true value to your community AND that really shares more of who you really are!) and, after spell-checking, without further delay, push send! Many times dropping into more of who we are takes some cold turkey’ing it. So, what do you really believe and truly value? What have you wanted to say or share but haven’t for fear of what others might think or say?
No one is watching you or judging you as much as you think they are, I promise. They’re too busy thinking about what to say or not to say in their next Facebook or blog post. 🙂
Enjoy your business, enjoy you life Creative Heroine!
Have a beautiful dropping into YOU rest of the week.
Life is good,
Michelle Ghilotti
Couture Brand Creator & Success Coach
p.s. Save the Date on May 17th for MGI’s a free Authentic Brand Training (and clarity around how to express your thought leadership) coming up on May 17th 11am – 1pm just for you, the MGI Creative Heroine community. Plan to show up LIVE and potentially win a digital copy and workbooks from Brand to Success, my signature how-to branding program that shows you how to create and launch your most powerful personal brand yet…more info and the call-in number to come, so keep your eyes peeled. xo
Say THIS instead (Authentic Brand Training date)
You’ll rarely ever hear me utter those words because I believe that everything I do is what I get to do, not what I have to do. This means even picking up after my pup, Holland.
Instead, I feel and say that I have a full life. That’s what feels more true for me.
Life is good, it’s a beautiful and full life…
The words we choose carry with them an energetic weight. They can either bring us down or help us feel up…light and UP for it all/UP for whatever amazing thing is coming our way (psst, there’s always something out for delivery)…
Do you want to be busy or would you like to have a purposeful, full life?
Say what it is that you actually want and more of it will find its way to you.
It’s a welcome shift…
Enjoy your business, enjoy your life!
p.s. Save the Date for MGI’s free Authentic Brand Training (and clarity around how to express your thought leadership) coming up on May 17th 11am – 1pm just for the MGI Creative Heroine community, xo. Show up LIVE and potentially win a digital copy and workbooks from Brand to Success, my signature how-to branding program that shows you how to create and launch your most powerful personal brand yet…
Today, I unfriended her…
Today, I “unfollowed” (but didn’t “unfriend”) an idea I’ve been working on since 2012 with awesome writing coaches (Jen Sincero), thought leaders (Gabby Bernstein), uber fun and laser-focused editors (Paula Tiberius) and, as of late, all-around creative geniuses (Karen Barri Salmansohn). This is as much a love note of gratitude to them as much as it is a love note to you…
As creatives, it’s not easy to set one of your babies aside to care, full-time, for another one.
I know you feel me…
We ask:
• But, how will that one idea get fed?
• Who will rock that baby when it’s not well?
• Most importantly, who will continue to teach or “mold” them into coming more fully into their best and truest selves; to express themselves clearly, powerfully and elegantly? How will they grow up to be who they were intended to be; WILL they ever grow as they were meant to???
TODAY’S MANTRA/MOMTRA: I may unfollow this idea today, but I don’t unfriend it.
Here’s what that means –> Just because you may have to or want to let go of an idea in your business, it doesn’t mean you have to fully unfriend or, in essence, block her from your life.
It doesn’t mean that you can’t go back to her in the future.
In fact, it doesn’t mean that she won’t continue to show up throughout everything else you do, because she will. Energetically and in vibrational tone, each idea you from this day forward will have living inside of it, this idea that you are saying see you later to.
The one you are allowing yourself to part ways with will live and does right now already live inside every other idea you end up birthing…
It’s the way life, energy, creativity and ideas work. You can fight it by lamenting or worrying about if it’s right or not, but you’ll just be fighting your natural creative power which is your very reason for living and breathing…
Whatever was created by you will always
instruct what will continue to be created by you…
Again, we never actually fully let go of an idea because each idea is always part the next, and possibly greater, idea or expression. So, let’s:
• Thank ourselves for having the dedication to the idea for so long.
• Acknowledge what a solid part of the writing/creation/entrepreneurial journey it’s been for you and that you couldn’t have done it without it…
• Thank the idea — this beautiful energy in physical form – and tell it that you will either see it in a new form soon (likely, you already are). Give gratitude for all its shown you and for all its done to continue to stoke a fire of creativity, transformation, mastery and refinement in you…
Let go if you can feel it’s right and, as you make the decision, know this:
3. As writers/creators/entrepreneurs, we can love our ideas, but being attached to them in fear that more won’t come or that you “have to go through with it” because you’ve put so much time into it doesn’t help the birthing power of more ideas that you will ultimately be known for.
Allow your ideas to be like water, they come and they go…love them and see them off, either out into the world as you officially birth it or as you let it go to instruct yet another, more refined or more deeply aligned idea…
2. As creative women, remember that not all ideas are actually meant to be birthed, or birthed in the original way we intended them to be. Some are seedlings or carrier ideas, in other words, ideas that are the seeds to other great expressions of who we truly are and what our work is about in the world. Work on ideas with genuine fervor, even if you know they may not be birthed out into the world, as it (and they) are all ultimately part of your mastery…
1. As humans and entrepreneurs, letting go is as important as letting in. In other words, the more we can practice doing this in our business happenings, remembering the life present in our ideas is as impermanent as our breath, the more we are able to find the soul strength to keep moving forward– on ANYTHING. Letting go, the practice of surrender and, ultimately, resilience are keys to our success and will be the reason to more ideas continuing to find residence within us.
If you’re in a season or moment of moving on from an idea in business or in writing that you’ve loved and nurtured for a long time, I’m sending you love and, more than anything, excitement for what’s to come.
I know something amazing is coming for you and I can’t wait until YOU find out what it is.
Enjoy your business, enjoy your life!