Our next Marketing as a Creative + Spiritual Practice call will be June 8 and the theme will be vulnerability. (These calls happen every month inside Dream Book)

When I first announced this theme, one person asked something like “But can’t we just show up and say hi? Do we really have to get vulnerable in our marketing?” And I realised I needed more of an explanation.

NO you absolutely do not have to “get vulnerable” in your marketing!

But for a lot of us, ANY kind of marketing, ANY kind of visibility FEELS vulnerable. And that discomfort with feeling that vulnerable can keep us from wanting our work to be more visible in the world.

So how do we handle it?

There are actually a lot of things you can do - from the practical to the esoteric, which we will explore on the call on June 8.

Approaching marketing as a creative and spiritual practices gives you space to really explore this, understand your own feelings and needs and get creative about what to do with it all.

I’ve been doing Marketing as a Creative + Spiritual Practice call every month since November. This has helped me shift my inner relationship with marketing.

I’m 2010 when I decided to turn this work, which I had been doing evenings and weekends while working a “real job” lol, into my livelihood, I did take a lot of business classes to help me figure out how to do this.

Most of these were through a spiritual and/or creative lens. So - learning conventional marketing and sales tactics but through a lens of “how do we do this in a way that in in alignment with our values and feels creatively alive?”

But still - starting with a conventional approach to marketing and sales and then making adjustments to make it fit better.

And I won’t pretend like that didn’t help me, of course it did. And I still have my class available - the Creative Business Incubator - where I share how I set up my business in the first year.

But now I’m wondering - what if don’t need to start with that conventional approach to marketing and sales?

What if we start from a place of trusting our gifts? And trusting ourselves with our gifts? And trusting our own creative instincts about how to share those gifts?

That stirs up a lot of stuff. It definitely feels VULNERABLE AF.

Starting from conventional sales and marketing tactics can feel like a bit of a safety net. “Well this works for people so it should work for me”

Except we all know things that used to work don’t work as more anymore.

The market has changed. The economy has changed. The world has changed.

And I don’t believe we should be taking huge risks with our livelihoods. But I also believe that we need to make space to explore this. While things are changing so much - what else could change?

I believe you are a trustworthy steward of your gifts and that a part of HAVING those gifts is HAVING the ability to offer them in a way that they can be received.

AND I believe that this is a skill that takes time to develop. You took time to develop other aspects of your gifts, this one needs time too.

Marketing as a Creative + Spiritual practice asks you to sit with all of this. To listen to your own values about how you put your work out there. To get creative about how to share all of magic that you have to offer.

I’m having such a great time on these calls. I hope to see you at the next one.

(If you join now, you can still get the replays from past calls! I suggest watching at least the first one before attending this class)