A discussion on a leadership conference call earlier this evening, where a business leader/entrepreneur feared that by using her authentic langauge with her cleints she would not be taken as seriously in the business community, inspired me to write the following:
For inspired entrepreneurs: In being true to yourself, finding your passion, and structuring it into a business, how do you market yourself - and be authentic to the language you think, live and engage - without sounding "woo-woo" in a business world that thinks and speaks mainly in jargon, buzz words, and often empty mechanistic terms?
Be fully present to what you genuinely have to offer and speak from that place. Those who are best suited for your message will hear your message. They will resonate, even if the words are less familiar - because you are speaking to the human underneath the buzz words. If you confine your message too heavily into everyday business speak , it is like freezing the substance of what you have to offer...it can't move and grow and generate. It ceases to contain the life energy of inspiration, passion, and newness. People are drawn more to the energy and enthusiasm underneath the words than the words themselves. In other words, believing in and embodying what your are saying and doing will naturally engage others.
Engage in living language - that which is alive with natural exuberance, creativity, and new possibilities. Impassioned language is larger and more encompassing than professional buzz words. It may contain them at times, but it goes beyond them. Buzz words are inadequate to express the aliveness, potential and capacity of what you have to give. There is so much advice out there on how to communicate what you have to offer, and while that is valuable, it is seriously incomplete. There is also a place within our selves - where our dreams, creative ingenuity, and enthusiasm exist - that can only be cultivated and expressed from within us, and has its power in our own words...the place where external advice gives way for inner authority to emerge.
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