Bringing Your Personal Experience to Your Program

Consumers today are more intentional than ever before…

But what does this mean for your online business?

That consumers today want to know the people behind the brand BEFORE they buy.

This is why I call self-disclosure the “lifeblood” of the online space.

Being open and transparent about who YOU are can help your audience build trust with you, connect with your offer, and at the end of the day increase your impact and your bottom line.

Tune in to the latest podcast episode to learn the best way to inject personality and personal experience into your online offer.

CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!

Show Notes:

Hey Risers, welcome to episode 154 of Empathy Rising. I just realized doing some basic math here that it's been a year, well a year and two weeks, since the hundredth episode of this podcast. It's just crazy how not only is this, you know, a library of content for you guys to go back through, but it's also a kind of interesting way of marking time. So here we are one year past the hundredth episode. That means in another year we'll be at 200 episodes, which is crazy. 

I wanted to share kind of a funny experience. I think it's a vulnerable experience and a lot of people are scared about, and I'll admit I was upset this morning and now it's four in the afternoon and I'm laughing about it, but I wasn't when I woke up. 

So those of you who know I am launching a second business, my own Side Hustle, if you will, it's a program called Rooted and it is lifestyle-based and spiritual-based and witchy, divine, feminine, magic-based. If you're interested in checking it out, you can head over to marissalawton.com/rootsquiz to find out more about it.

But I am... basically it's a new business because it is a brand new offer for a new audience. If I was launching a new offer for you guys, which of course you're more than welcome to come and participate in Rooted. I would love that. It's not going to be therapist-specific. It's beyond, right? 

So that's why I considered a new business and not just a new offer, but I am promoting and growing my audience and marketing over on TikTok, which is super fun. I actually have an episode coming out about TikTok in a couple of weeks. It'll be in my next batch of recordings. I already have it planned out, so I'll share more about my journey over there and I'll share like how it works and tips and tricks and what I'm using it for and that kind of stuff. 

But I did want to say that I got my first TikTok troll, which is something as we get into marketing, a lot of my students are like, but what about trolls? I'm apprehensive about putting my message out there. What if people have something to say, and/or something negative to say? And what we do inside of Side Hustle is we come up with an SOP which stands for standard operating procedure. 

Maybe we should call it a troll operating procedure, a TOP. But just kind of coming up with: Is this something I respond to? Is this something I ignore? Is this something I delete? Is something I block? All of that kind of stuff. And I basically had to enact my own SOP or TOP today. 

So a little backstory. I posted a video of me getting a pedicure. It's, like, not even my face. And of course, that's the one that goes viral. Right? It has like 14,000 views right now. And the ones that I... or my face or me talking have like 300 views. So go figure my feet would go viral. I thought it was TikTok not only fans, right? I digress. But somebody on TikTok—you can stitch a video. 

So somebody took my video and then they added their own video to the back of it. And they called me names. And they called me an omega and they called me... I'm laughing cause it's funny. Now they call me an omega and they called me a Mitt Romney girl. I had to like Google both of these. I didn't even know what they meant. Apparently, omega is a way of saying somebody is submissive and read it. And this is a fricking video of my feet. You don't even see my face. You don't even hear my voice. I don't even speak, but they call me an omega, which means to be submissive. 

And then a Mitt Romney girl, from my understanding, was about like white fragility and white tiers and that kind of stuff. But if any of you know more about this than I do, feel free to like leave a comment in the Facebook group or send me a message and be like, hey, so this is what it actually means. Cause I didn't know, but I was really upset this morning that something I made and something that was supposed to be a light-hearted video. 

And my whole content is about, like, women rising, right? Part of my personal brand is this rising concept. Hence Empathy Rising. Well, Rooted is about women rising. And here's like a woman calling me names. And so I had a hard time with it. Now I'm laughing, but I did have to like put my phone down, walk away, kind of do some grounding because I wanted to like, you know, respond or rather react to the situation, but I didn't. 

I'm very proud of myself, and it's super interesting to be back in the beginning stages of business, and to be doing this all not for the first time, for like the fourth time for me, but from the beginning again, like starting with an audience from scratch, starting with an offer from scratch in a new landscape, like to talk was not around when I started the therapist business and it wasn't around when I started the mom coaching business at all.

So starting, you know, a brand new online business in 2022 is way different than when I stepped on the scene in 2014. And then even when I started this business in what, 2017. So it's fun and nerve-wracking to be back in the beginning, but I will be sharing all of my journeys, and what's really cool is the Side Hustle students get to see me launch twice this year. They'd get to see me launch Side Hustle again, which is kind of a tried and true a well-oiled machine at this point. 

But they're also going to see me launch this brand new offer to a brand new audience, just like they are. So it's really neat to be in that program to not only learn from me but to also like watch me as I build my business and as I launch and all of that stuff. So it's pretty neat. 

Today, I shared this personal story for kind of a meta reason. Cause we're going to be talking about bringing your personal experience to your program and to your business. And I think, you know, one of my favorite parts of online business and in my opinion, one of the best aspects is freedom, right?

If you've been paying attention to the last, like, I don't know, like 10 episodes where I've been kind of going off on the therapy industry, the autonomy, the ability to behave in a way that you choose that it's not governed by another body that is not restricted on what you can and cannot do. That is one of my favorite aspects of the online stuff.

And the truth is I do believe that therapists are changing where the therapy industry is lagging behind. Right? We see that more and more therapists are operating outside of the medical model, moving to private pay, moving to, you know, not taking insurance and all that stuff. But then we also see the medical model and the medical industry clawing back at that—not happy and making extra restrictions and having extra hoops that we have to jump through whether we take insurance or not.

And we also have things like national licensure, which all of the big four licenses have been advocating for years, decades, we still aren't seeing it. We're seeing a little bit of progress there, but you know, not the kind of progress I thought we would have by now. Back to insurance companies, you know, threatening to stop covering telehealth, so many months after the pandemic and all of that, shaking out how it's landed. 

And all of that is really kind of the external stuff, but even in the way that we practice, so many of my students, when we start talking about like the difference between coaching and therapy and this and that, I see so many of my students are like, "oh, I'm doing that already. I'm doing that". Anyway, a lot of us are taking a coaching approach inside session even though we are billing it—getting underpaid for it—as therapy, and we're adhering to all the rules and regulations of the therapy industry. 

One of the biggest ways that I see this come up is actually self-disclosure. When I ask my students currently, and I think even in the five rounds, five years of running this program or not five years, six rounds. So that's three and a half years of running this program, this has changed even from when I would talk to clinicians in round one to now when I talk to students in round six, the idea of self-disclosure and how many of us actually self-disclosure in session. 

Yes, in the nature of like, it has to be therapeutic and it has to make sense. We're not making the session all about us. We're not centering ourselves. The client is still, you know, client-centered therapy or whatever. But how many of us feel it's important for our clients to know us and to build some sort of rapport with us beyond the blank slate? Like it's almost a no-duh, like a no-brainer now. 

But several years ago, and of course, further back than that, it still felt uncomfortable. I think more and more clinicians are doing it in session. And then I think where it gets even more nerve-wracking is doing it in your market. Being visible, telling stories about yourself, sharing personal disclosure on the internet for all to see in all to know, especially while you're trying to maintain a practice at the same time. Because then it's like, well, what if my clients see it and all this stuff?

So, I'd say that most clinicians I work with and most students of mine do use self-disclosure more than what we would think is appropriate or whatever. And that's where I'm saying that clinicians are changing even though the clinical industry maybe hasn't caught up to it. Now, self-disclosure is the lifeblood of the online space. It is necessary, I believe to share yourself and to share your journey and your why and your reasons behind things and just your personal experiences in your branding. Right? Even if—we're actually working on this right now, in Side Hustle—even if you are building a business brand. 

The consumer and the people who buy from you still want to know the person behind that business brand. It's why we know people's names like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, even though they were in charge of some currently or formerly in charge of multinational corporations in the biggest corporations in the world, we still knew these people's names. And that trend is only getting stronger and stronger as consumers become more conscious as consumers become more savvy.

So I personally don't know anybody who buys a coaching package or purchases a program where they don't feel a connection with the coach themselves or the course creator. I wouldn't buy... let me qualify that I would buy like an ebook or I would buy cheapo course, you know, $97 course or something like that without really having to know the person, but any type of program where I'm going to invest a substantial amount of money in any type of program where I'm going to be spending any kind of time, even like a monthly coaching call or a monthly meeting. 

I need to know that person. I need to know if it's worth it. I need to know if I have an affinity for them. If I even see myself in the same room or virtual space as them, and if that's a no, then I'm not going to buy. Right? So this is a really important distinction to carry forward. 

And we also think about the difference between a therapy client and a customer. The therapy client is coming from a place of need, where the customer for an online program is coming from a place of want or desire. So when people desire to spend money and want to spend money, it's a much different buying decision and a much different buying process than when somebody needs help and needs to spend money to feel better or whatever.

So that all goes into saying that bringing your personal experience, not only to your marketing but to your program itself, I believe is absolutely essential. But today on the episode, I'm just going to give you some things to consider and think about. So hopefully you would kind of open up to the idea and have a little mindset shift about vulnerability, about visibility, and about sharing your personal experience.

I think this comes up for me personally cause many of us are creating business-to-consumer programs where they're lifestyle-focused, helping people with personal growth, helping people relate to others, or helping people just in their life. Right? So what I want in my life situation, not a business situation. 

I think back to when Sawyer was born and many of, you know, she was born with a birth defect and it took us... so she was diagnosed well, not really diagnosed. The process started at her eight-week appointment, and then I guess the diagnoses started to come when she was about 11 weeks. So before she was three months old, all of this started to happen, and with her diagnosis, there's so much that was just like "we have to wait and see how she develops. We can't tell yet because she's a baby and she can't communicate to us". And it makes perfect sense. 

But in that moment of time, getting a rare diagnosis... I did go on a Facebook search for Facebook groups, and there was one Facebook group with like barely 200 moms in it. And there was not enough information even in that Facebook group. And when I Googled or looked on Pinterest or looked on anything, there just was no information about this diagnosis. 

If I had met a mom in person or had been able to read a blog online from a mom who had maybe a five-year-old with Sawyer's diagnosis and could say here's what to expect, here's what to ask at this doctor's appointment, and basically just to tell me it's all gonna be okay. Like, even if Sawyer had ended up on the worst end of the diagnosis, just to have somebody who had been there to tell me and to kind of model for me and to be a couple of steps ahead of me, it would have changed my life. It would have made that year and a half of my life that was miserable. It would have made that a completely different experience. 

So while in therapy and in the therapeutic industry, we absolutely have some ethical ramifications about visibility and maybe even potential legal or at least like, you know, professional ramifications in the online space. This is me just giving you 100% permission to drop the wall, to drop the boundary. Well, maybe not the boundary. To prop the barrier. Let's use that word to drop the barrier, and to drop the curtain, and to stop being a blank slate and to get out there and because all of us have a reason for being in the space. 

For most of us, it's to help people in one way or another or to share knowledge or experience that we have in one way or another. And in the online space, you have 100% freedom and 100% permission to do that. Here's what happens in the online space when you do that. When you don't share personal stories, personal reasons, personal experiences, you end up with programs that create a distance between you and the buyer. And in therapy, That's what we're going for, right? 

But in the online space, it's not. We are allowed to be friends with our students and friends with our clients. I typically don't like... that's not true. I have friends, for instance, Amber Lyda, Leisha McDonough. These are people that you might know. We are friends and we have paid each other. We have exchanged time. We've bartered, we've swapped with each other with an existing friendship in place. 

Typically with students I don't... I'm always friendly and cordial and approachable with my students, but usually it's after the program graduates, I'm like, hey, you know, I realized we had so much in common. I'd really love it if we were able to, like, kind of spark a friendship up after the graduation. Or if students reach out to me and they're like, hey, you know, I graduated, are we allowed to be friends now? I'll be like, totally. You know? 

So I usually do wait until the student-teacher relationship is over, but it's totally okay. And so when your program is completely lacking any personality, when it's just like by the book teaching, or you know, theoretical examples and that kind of stuff, it creates an immense amount of distance between you and the buyer, the student, the member, the client, whatever you're going to call them. They are going to feel let down. They're going to feel disappointed, and they're only going to feel half-served. 

This happens because of two reasons. It happens because there's a lack of trust. They don't know you enough to trust you to open up to you to be vulnerable to you. And so there's no reciprocal relationship. A lack of trust in the online space is always going to equal low sales. People are not going to pull out their wallet and want to buy something. 

Remember, they're not buying from a place of need. They're buying from a place of want. They are not going to pull out their Bo their wallet to buy something they want. If they don't believe that you and or your program are going to get them what they want. And for the sales that do come in, you're going to get mediocre commitment because if they don't trust you, they're not going to show up fully. 

They're only going to put themselves out there 10%, 50%, 60%, 70% maybe, but they're surely not going to put themselves out there 100%. So they're not going to commit to the program and they're going to end up getting poor results. And you're going not going to get great testimonials or you're going to get maybe even negative feedback. And then that's going to make you feel like crap, right? So without opening up, it's impossible for you to establish trust with the client or not with the client, with the consumer, with the customer, and therefore your sales will be low. And the sales that you get will have a mediocre commitment. 

Ultimately it all stems from a lack of relatability. If you're not relatable, then they can't trust you. So what's underneath all of this is this relatable factor. This brings up the concept of the Guru vs the guide. And I do have a full episode on the Guru vs the guide, and it's quite far back in the episodes it's like in the twenties or thirties or something like that. But I do have a full episode on this, and perhaps it's something that I can kind of do like a second edition of and kind of revise. 

But a guru vs a guide is the concept of when you are leading somebody through something, it's the place of leadership and the type of leadership that you take. So a guru, if you imagine, like, we're in Mount Everest and we're climbing the mountain, right? The guru is somebody who climbed the mountain. They, you know, they had the physical strife, the emotional strife, the mindset strife. They went through it all, but when they got to the top of the mountain, they sat down and they said, I have made it. Now you can come and ask me all of your questions. 

The guide there is the opposite, is somebody who climbed the mountain once and then decided that they were going to turn around and lead more people and lead people with them. And then they drop those people off at the top of the mountain. They're like, yeah, you've made it awesome, and my duty is now to go back down the mountain and get the next group of people and to lead them back up. 

So the guru climbs the mountain and sits down and says, they've made it. The guide is still in it with you, and it's a very different feeling to be walking alongside a guide who has done it before, who can still say, watch out there are the snakes or watch out this is a sign of an avalanche or whatever. But who is standing there with you? And with the potential avalanche coming down, it's just a totally different feeling to be the guide and it's also a very different feeling to be in a program with a guide than to be in a program with a group. 

When you've established a guide relationship, that's what's going to give you relatability because you're in the thick of it with them. And so people are going to believe in you. People are going to relate to you, which then again leads to the trust, which is going to lead to more sales and better results and, and very little distance boundaried... that let's call it boundaried closeness with your students or your coaching clients or anything like that. So it's coming from a much stronger place of relationship.

There's a difference, as we know, between learned and theoretical experience. This is what we get in grad school, right? Versus the lived and the gained experience, what we get when we're actually practicing with clients. And when we share the learned and theoretical experience, that's when we're seen as a guru. It's like, okay, cool. They know what they're talking about intellectually. 

They can conceptualize what they're talking about. I trust that they're in the know, but in the know is a very different feeling than like, I don't know how to say this then, like in the... in the being. In the knowing is very different than in the being, right? 

And so when you're sharing from not only learned experience, because of course your clinical background is going to inform your side hustle 100%, but also when you're pulling in the lived experience and you're pulling in the gained experience, man, that's what's unstoppable. That's what's going to get you loyal customers who come back again and again who refer you to their friends, their colleagues, to whatever who are become your street team and just are hyping you up all the time. It's because they not only believe that you know your shit, they believe that you live your shit. You walk your talk as well.

Alright. So how do we establish this in our programs? And I have two tips for you today. And the first is kind of like a mindset tip or like a shift. And the second is how I teach this. So the first tip is the. It's not hierarchy. I think when we think of people who have been in the online space longer than us, or who have a bigger audience than us or whatever, we see it as a pyramid where like we're on the bottom of the pyramid and then they are above us. They are better than us, more established than us. They've got it more together than us. They've got it more figured out than us or something like that. 

There's kind of this concept of like paying your dues a little bit like, oh, they've paid their dues longer than me. They've earned it more than me. And the keyword here is more like more knowledge, more followers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what I really encourage my students to do is flip the pyramid. So it doesn't go from bottom to top, but a flip it horizontally. So it goes from just further back to further forward. 

Yeah, they've been in the space longer than you. They've just been doing it longer. They're no better than you. They don't deserve it more. They haven't earned it any more than you. They've just been doing it longer. And so when you have been doing it longer and getting better and practicing and putting in the time, effort and energy and honing your craft, just like you honed your therapeutic craft. 

Now you're honing your side hustle craft. As you have that time in, you will move ahead as well. And so I don't want us to look at things like a hierarchy when this translates to our programs. We want to think again, going back to flipping this on this horizontal. So being a couple of steps ahead, not any better than a couple of steps ahead.

You can therefore teach people who are a couple of steps behind. You do not have to be a guru. You do not have to be master of the mountain. You can be halfway up the mountain and still be able to tell the people at the bottom about the first half of the mountain. You can say, oh yeah, I sprained my ankle there. So when you're coming up here, watch out. Oh, and then, you know, another 300 feet, it gets muddy. I remember the muddy part. Here's what I did in the muddy part, and it was really helpful, so maybe you could try. Right? 

Just because you haven't gotten the second half of the mountain doesn't mean you don't have value for the first half of the mountain. So this is a big shift, especially coming from clinical where we earned our grad degree, and then we earned our license, and then we earned our EMDR certification, and we earned this, and we have so many letters after our name. That is guru mentality. 

And if you're only trying to be the best and, you know, now you're going to do the same thing in the coaching space. You're going to go get this coaching certification and you're going to go get these more letters after your name and this and this and this and this. All you're doing is setting yourself up to be an unrelatable Guru. So when you can think of acting as a guide and passing down value and passing down knowledge, that is just a couple of steps further behind you on your journey. 

We can even say, like, instead of half of the mountain, we can say a quarter of the mountain, right? You still have knowledge about the first quarter of the mountain, and that knowledge is valuable. Your personal and lived experience is valid. Great, so how do you bring this into your program? 

When I design curriculums...So this happens in Space Holder, and then it also happens in the first month of Side Hustle. When you work with me, we'll kind of look at this two different times, but we design curriculums kind of based on three different criteria. The first is a framework. A framework is for a membership site. So if you're not doing a membership site, you can completely forget about a framework.

If you are doing a framework or if you are doing a membership site, a framework works really nicely. It's not the only one, but it really only fits for that type of delivery. When you move into courses, coaching group program, VIP day, or any other type of offer, they usually fall into the other two categories, which is skills or systems.

Skills: Think of like couples, the communication skills for couples, right? So you could teach them "I" statements, you could teach them active listening. You could teach them all of these different communication skills, right? And those skills don't have to happen in any type of order. They don't have to necessarily build on each other.

They're just a collection of skills. System on the other hand is like, this part has to happen before you can move onto the next module. And then, when you do that module, then you can move on to the next one. So they have to happen in chronological order. They're often buildable. And so we start with one of these three base aspects for the curriculum, and then we layer in methodology.

Methodology is how you approach the problem or how you do the thing in your real life, and methodology can be sprinkled in with a framework. It can be sprinkled in with a skills-based program, and it can be sprinkled in with a systems-based program. But methodology is that personal flavor that you're going to bring to your program, regardless of what. 

So I consider Side Hustle and Space Holder, they're both systems because you really have to do module one before you can do module two before you can do module three, and so on. They really do have to build on each other. They do have to go in chronological order. So they're both systems. Space Holder, in the curriculum itself, you don't get methodology. 

But when you meet with me monthly on the calls, I certainly share like, oh, here's how I did this, or whatever. In Side Hustle, there's methodology weaved throughout how I mentioned that my students get to see me launch. They get to see me launch not only once this year, but twice this year: One an established program, and one a brand new program to a brand new audience. 

So in that process, I share how many people are on the list and how many people are registered for the webinar and how many people showed up and what the conversion rates were, and how much money I made. And I'm very transparent about all of those things. And so it's not only methodology of how I did it. 

It's actually like a real-time methodology of like, here's what I'm doing today. And it really brings a flavor to the program that you don't see in other online offers, especially not in the therapist space. So let's imagine that you are teaching a mindfulness course or something like that.

It would be lovely if you not only taught the modules about mindfulness, they could be skills or they could be system like they need to go in order. And if you said here's my morning routine: Every morning, I sit down, I do a little bit of like breathwork or body movement to kind of get into my body. And then I light a candle, and then I pull a card from my Oracle deck, and then I journal on the card, and then I do a meditation, and then I blow out my candle on that ends my practice. 

So if you share what you're actually doing, that's your methodology. And you can use that in your marketing, certainly, but also by using it in your program itself in your curriculum itself, people are going to just really relate to you as their facilitator, as their teacher, as their educator.

So you can think of all kinds of different ideas, right? I'm modeling launching, and I'm modeling and showing exactly how I do audience building, and things like that. This mindfulness is an example, but how and where can you share what you're actually doing and what you're actually working on? Again, that's the relatability factor.

Right. So again, this is your 100% permission to bring yourself. We don't have to hide in the online space. We don't have to keep things secret in the online space. We don't have to... when somebody asks how our day was or how, how our meetings were, we can share. We can say, oh my gosh, my student, Dante, had the hugest win today. She had the validation interview that knocked her socks off, and it was amazing. And you could just see her being. I can share that just like you can share it. And it's just a totally different feeling being in the space that allows for personal experience. 

So I'm a big fan, and I do think it makes a difference with the results that your students or clients receive, the way that they trust you, the way they perceive you, and the way that they advocate for you and your brand. So this is why I am a big fan of bringing your personal experience to not only your marketing but to your program.

If you want to learn more about curriculum types and methodology and how to do an offer that's impactful and will sell, this is the stuff we do inside of Space Holder. So you can head over to marissalawton.com/space-holder grab the course. It's on-demand, so all of the modules will be there for you and you can go through them in your own time, and then we meet monthly for coaching calls. 

So it's a great way for you to start working with me now even though Side Hustle doesn't open until the New Year. We enroll in the fall and then we start in the New Year. I know it's a long time to wait, so Space Holder is set up for us to start working through the concept of your offer now.

And of course, what's really cool is you get to apply your purchase of Space Holder to Side Hustle. So if you do decide to come into the big kahuna program, you get to apply your purchase directly off the top. 

So I would love to see you inside of Space Holder, start working with you now, getting your ideas solid, and then we can build a business out of it inside of Side Hustle. Alright guys, I will be back next week and until then, keep on rising. 

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