Bonus Episode: Why Visibility Feels So Hard (and Why It Matters)

Welcome. I am marketing expert and business coach Melissa Kellogg Lewicki, and this is the Doing Business Like a Woman podcast, where we are exploring and teaching you how women are reinventing the way business is done and money is made to help you create greater impact and financial freedom one business at a time. Hello, hello. Hi friends, how's it going? I hope you're doing well today. I'm doing great. I am really excited to be with you here today. We're going to talk about visibility. Ah, uh, I'm always interested in like what is the inner, the inner reaction or the feeling that you get when you think about visibility. Okay. So we're going to talk more about that today. And I have a story for you about visibility. I have a couple stories actually, and I, if you're new here, I thank you so much for stopping by. It's really nice to see you and meet you. And my name's Melissa Kellogg-Lueck, and I'm the CEO and founder of the Avanti Business Academy for Women. And my passion is helping more and more women entrepreneurs to achieve wealth in all of its forms through entrepreneurship. And I am a marketing coach. I love teaching and coaching around marketing and helping women to connect and communicate with their best fit clients to increase their impact and bring in more revenue and income to their business. And that's what I'm all about. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I am running a series this year about my 20 lessons from 20 years I've been in business. I had my own business for 20 years now, and I have learned a lot through the school of hard knocks. And so I really have been having so much fun sharing. It's hard to really narrow it down to only 20 lessons because there's 20 million lessons, but we're just going to do the best we can. And today we're going to be talking about visibility because I just launched my Visibility Challenge. The doors are open for the Visibility Challenge. And we are kicking off on March 23rd. So I'll tell you more about that in a little bit. But what I wanted to tell you about first is I have a story, I have some stories here, but I wanted to share the story with you behind why I am launching this visibility challenge and why the work is so important for our growth. I think as a leader and as a CEO, but definitely as a marketer and marketing ourselves and our services and our business, right? So why this is so important to me to be talking about visibility and teaching visibility is because I used to be petrified of visibility. And I've been in the marketing industry, marketing world for my entire career. So I know it sounds funny, but it's true. I, in the early years of my business, early years of my career, of course I was marketing other people, marketing my clients and marketing for my employer. And so it wasn't about me, right? It was about them. And I was coming up with ideas and campaigns and so forth to market them. So that was very comfortable. I— that was great. But once I became the face of my business and I had to say, this is what I think and I believe and what I'm going to teach and the value that I have to offer, that was felt very vulnerable. And so I don't know if you can relate to that, but I used to be petrified of visibility, any kind of visibility. If you think about what is visibility, like writing an email was— is visibility, right? Putting your ideas onto the page and standing behind them can feel very vulnerable and very visible. And I think I always think about Nicole Kidman, how she talks about As a tall person, she's very tall and how she was raised with the saying that the tallest poppy gets their head cut off. That's how you feel when you're visible and you stand up for what you believe and you stand up for the value that you have to offer. It can feel like you, you are at risk of getting your head chopped off. Right. And so I used to be very scared of being visible. Like literally I say petrified and in a very intentional way because I literally felt frozen to stone. Like I was a petrified person, right? And I was scared of what other people thought of me. I was definitely a people pleaser to the core. I'm still a recovering people pleaser, but once I became a coach and I wanted to help more people and go bigger in my business, I knew, I realized I had to get over this. But every time I wrote something or posted something or God forbid, tried to go live or record a video, I was always thinking about all the people that could be hearing this or seeing this or reading this. And I was thinking about them in a way— I wasn't thinking about my best fit client or my future clients or the ones I absolutely love. I was thinking about all of my critics, right? All of the people in my life that were disparaging of my little business or didn't understand this entrepreneurial thing I was doing or not supportive or people that I really wanted to think highly of me, but didn't, or I didn't know how do we ever really know what other people are thinking. But so I would just get tied up in knots thinking about those people and what I should say or shouldn't say in order to please them. And when I'm, when I was doing that, I wasn't even thinking about my best fit clients, right? I was thinking about how can I attract clients while at the same time not saying anything that these critics would think is bad. And so I just would get tied up in knots. It would take me hours to write an email or write a post, and it probably was very bland and sanitized from all the things I wasn't supposed to be saying to try to please everybody. And so consequently, it didn't really create much results. Right. And it took a lot of time, a lot of cognitive energy. And I don't know if any of you can relate to this. If you can let me know, Am I the only one here? But I don't think I am alone in this because a lot of women that I talk to can really relate that are in this place where they want to be visible. They know they need to be visible, but they just can't get over thinking about what everyone else is thinking about them. And so often what we will do, what I see people do is they go and try to solve for this by learning to be more perfect, learning to be a better marketer, more perfect at marketing, more perfect at posting, or more perfect at video, or more perfect at whatever, copywriting, or prettier on camera, or a better speaker, better storyteller. Like, we learn all these things trying to be more perfect, and obviously there's nothing wrong with learning those skills, but not from a place of trying to solve for— I'm worried about what other people are going to think about me if I step forward and do this, right? So we go out and we buy all the courses, hire all the people, and we're still feeling like we're not perfect enough, not good enough, right, to, to be visible. And so really what is going on is the real problem is inside of us. It— we don't feel safe. Visibility doesn't feel safe. It's very confronting and scary, but it's because of what's going on inside of us, like what we're making all of this mean. For me, it's that I was trying to please everybody and I wasn't pleasing myself, right? I wasn't pleasing my mission, my calling. And, and so I knew if I was going to be able to grow my business, I had to deal with this. I had to get over it and get over it. So funny because we're never really getting over it. I was just talking with a client yesterday who is earlier on in her business, and I'm telling her how I still feel fear. I still, when I turn on the camera, have some of that mind eraser where I forget everything. So I have to have notes here. So it still affects me, but I have decided to grow my capacity to experience all the discomfort that goes along with it and do it anyway. And, and some may say maybe it's because I'm middle-aged and I don't give an F anymore and I'm in that phase of my life. But I do remember the time I was about, it was in 2019 when I really intentionally decided to overcome this. And this may sound like a silly example, but this is really where it all started with me. I was doing some of the internal work and I wanted to practice not caring what other people thought of me. And so the way I decided to do that is we had just bought a new house and we were moving from our former house, which was in the same area, to a new house. To the new house. And so in order to do that, and my husband, I think, was traveling. So we had this period of time where I was just going to be like packing up the pickup truck and like shuttling things over as much as I could. So I was making this drive from the old house to the new house every day. And as part of that drive, there was construction. And for the construction in that construction area, the road narrowed down from 2 lanes down to 1 lane.. And so I knew, cuz I used to live in a metro area, that the best way to merge traffic like that is to do the zipper, right? Where everyone— where you follow both lanes all the way up to the merge point and then everyone just merges in. It's called the zipper. And it's a very effective way of merging traffic without people stopping and getting backed up. And but where I live, That's not the common practice. The common practice is as soon as you see everybody pulling over into one lane, you're supposed to get into that lane, that one lane, while that second lane is wide open and everyone gets all backed up and the traffic gets all backed up and it just causes delays for everybody. And so I decided that I was going to practice my not, or my growing my capacity to feel the displeasure and the, the judgment of others and still do what I know is right by practicing the zipper method, even though everyone else in traffic was not. They were all backed up. And then here I would go driving by in my zipper method to merge, and people that were waiting in line would get so mad. They would give me lovely hand gestures. They would roll down their window and yell at me. They would drive their car to try to swerve it out into the lane to try to get in my way. And the first time I did this, like, I could feel viscerally the, you know, the panic, the fear, the— even now, if I start thinking about it, I want to start shaking, right? Just the nervousness of, oh my gosh, these people are gonna think I'm crazy person, that I'm awful, that I'm trying to hurt somebody, or I'm going to get a bad reputation in my new town, and all these awful feelings, right, and thoughts. But I knew if I, I wasn't harming anyone, I wasn't breaking any laws, I was actually setting an example of how to make this lane situation move along better for all of us, right? And, but when you step out and you're doing something that's counter-cultural to those around you, you are, it feels very risky. And so day after day, as I was driving that pickup truck multiple times with stuff in my truck, moving it to the new house, I would do this. And as time went on, it's like exposure therapy. I— the displeasure of others began to matter to me less and less. And not that I am suggesting that you do something like this, but I do believe we need to challenge ourselves to grow our capacity to feel that discomfort and do the thing anyway, especially around visibility. And so that's what we're going to be talking about And I'm not going to be making you do crazy challenges like this in the visibility challenge. That's what it's not what it's about. But I am going to challenge you to go inside. We're going to work in this visibility challenge from the inside out. So I'm going to tell you in just a moment what the outline is and what we're going to be doing. But, but really, that is the work, the internal work we have to— what I've learned, what I learned from my Zipper Challenge, Traffic Challenge, is what I'm going to teach you during this visibility challenge, that it starts with you. It starts with you creating safety within yourself first. And because at the end of the day, we don't need other people's understanding. People— we don't need other people to understand us or accept us in order to make progress towards, what means most to us in our life in order to make progress in our business, in our calling, in our goals, right? We don't have to have other people's permission or understanding or acceptance. And it's the same thing is true for visibility, right? We're not going to please everybody. And the more people we become visible to, the more people are going to have ill will and bad opinions about us. And if we believe so strongly in the work that we're doing, in the value that we're offering, the impact that we're having, that belief and that strength in that calling can help us to overcome what these other people might be thinking about us. And so that is the work that we're going to be doing in the Visibility Challenge. And I really want to— I'm really passionate about helping as many women as I can get into this and start doing this work. Because when you do this work, when you're not living your life for the acceptance and understanding of other people all the time, that's when you have real agency over your life, over the work you're doing, over the impact that you have. And that is what makes you resilient, right? That's That resilience is the ability to take any of that criticism from others and, and stop comparing ourselves to others and get back to your flow, get back to your zone of genius, your authenticity, and doing the work that really lights you up and makes you feel most alive. And when you approach marketing from that lens, it becomes so much more fun, more easier, simpler, and much, much more effective. And so I love the change I've seen in myself because I no longer think about those critics when I write or create. I think about you. I think about my future best fit clients, the women that I want to serve, the women that I'm going to help create wealth in all its forms through entrepreneurship. Those are the people that I'm thinking about when I create now. And so it makes being visible to you and for you so much easier. And so that is my visibility why. And you are going to come up with your own visibility why in this challenge, and we're going to create it something that's so impactful and so strong for you that it helps you get over the thoughts about thinking about what others might be thinking, right? And then also I was thinking about this last night, this conversation today. And my other visibility story that I wanted to tell you is that I really feel compelled, and part of my why behind being visible and sharing my thoughts and sharing what I'm learning every day is to preserve and pass on my thought leadership. And my intellectual property so that it lives on beyond me. And that's the other thing that happens when we get to middle age, I believe, is that we start to think about our legacy. What's going to be left behind when I leave this planet, right? And when my life is done. And it makes me emotional to talk about it, but as I watch my parents age and my father is in cognitive decline. And I think about, for myself, my brain and the ideas, the concepts, the frameworks, everything I've created throughout my career. I don't want to lose that, right? If I lose that to my physical disabilities as I age, then I don't even know. I feel like life becomes less meaningful for me because that, that intellectual property and intellectual, my thought leadership that I want to pass on, I want that to live on. So for me, that's another why for my visibility is that I want all of that to not get stuck inside of me in my head. I want to share it. I want to put it out into the world and So it can grow and thrive and become greater and more valuable ways to help women entrepreneurs. So yeah, those are the whys that get me here to turn on the camera, right? And go live and, and speak honestly and openly because it is, it can be very scary and feel very vulnerable. And that doesn't ever go away. But I think your calling and your strength, your inner strength can overcome that easier and easier when you do this visibility work. So I want to invite you to become, to sign up and become part of this visibility challenge. We're starting at the end of March, the last week in March, March 23rd through March 27th. Monday through Friday, we're going to have 5 live online sessions. They will be recorded. So if you can't make it, we will have those recordings to you by the end of each day. So you can stay up on the work that we're doing. And this is what it's going to look like. So day 1, we are going to explore and create a lot of awareness around visibility. We're speaking around about visibility around marketing. And what that means, what you make that mean, and identify where you are. I have created a visibility scale where we can have awareness of where we are. And because we're all going to be in different places, right? Visibility is tough for me now, even having been in business for 20 years. It feels different for me than it may be for you if you are earlier in business or even later in business. So we're all going to be in different places. And this, this visibility challenge is for everyone. I have created it and curated it specifically so it will fit you if you're brand new to marketing and visibility, or you've been in it 20+ years, 50 years, or whatever. It still is going to be valuable for you because we all have an edge, a ceiling that we're bumping up against. And so what I want to be teaching you is how we can continue to grow. No matter where you are. So that's day 1. Day 2, we are going to talk about how to build desire that is stronger than your fear, right? So really talking about, and you're going to come up with your, your own visibility philosophy and your visibility why and why it's important to you. And we're going to, we're going to create that. And then on day 3, we're going to talk about growing your capacity to show up even when it's scary, even when it feels vulnerable, even when you think about the critics. And you'll learn how to really create that inner safety, that inner strength that's going to help you step out in leadership as the CEO, as a marketer, and as a leader in your industry, in your organization. That's day 3. On day 4, we're going to be creating. And then, so we go from the internal, then we're going to go to the external, to the out, the, the strategy. So we're going to work on the inner, and then we're also going to work on the strategy. So day 4, we're getting down to creating your visibility strategy. And I'm going to talk about and teach you what actually works and what the research is showing now, how to be visible and the ways that you need to do it, the ecosystems that you need to be a part of in order to get the greatest return on the time and the energy of visibility that you are putting out there. And then day 5, we're gonna wrap it all up by pulling it all together and creating your 90-day visibility plan. So you will walk away with your own blueprint roadmap, whatever you wanna call it. So, you know exactly how you're gonna implement it throughout the, the next 90 days. And so I'm really gonna give you a strong foundation over these 5 days, and then we're gonna launch you into the next 90 days. And then As part of this, if you want to continue on and do this work together in a small group coaching format, this also will serve as the opening for my Q2 90-day marketing accelerator. While we do this work together as a small group, you have me as your coach. You have fellow women entrepreneurs that are in the trenches with you doing the work at the same time.. And so I will be talking more about how to be part of that. And so, yeah, so I'm going to put the link to the visibility challenge in the, the chat. And so you can grab that if it doesn't come through, I will make sure and go after we get off this live here and post it for you to sign up for that. Cause I would love to have you in there if this is the work for for you now this year and going forward. And I think it always is the work. Okay, Monique, thank you for being here. Oh, she says you rock. That's what we have today. I didn't really plan on this being this long and this intense, but I think you can see how passionate I am about this topic and really about helping all of us as women overcome as women entrepreneurs overcome the challenges around being visible, around standing up for what we believe and having the impact that we want to have. And it's work that, yes, I'm talking about marketing, but it also helps you in your leadership and so many other parts of our entrepreneurial journey. So thank you so much for being with me today. And I hope you have a great rest of your Wednesday and I will see you right back here soon. Bye! Hey, thank you for joining us for this amazing conversation. I hope that it was impactful for you. If you're interested in joining us in the 90-Day Marketing Accelerator, we will be opening up a new cohort. And so if you want to make marketing simpler for you, do it in a group setting with fellow women entrepreneurs and have fun doing it, I want you to join us. You can get all the information on my website, melissaandkellogg.com, or the link is in the show notes, and I'll see you there.