Latest / The Soap Box Podcast / How to talk about what you do when it's not a simple before and after

Transcript

How to talk about what you do when it's not a simple before and after · The Soap Box Podcast

1:18
SPEAKER_00: If someone's ever asked what you do, and you've heard yourself give an answer that's technically true but doesn't cover half of it, you need to stick with me.
1:28
SPEAKER_00: Because in this episode, I'm walking you through the four questions I used instead of the usual elevator pitch formula and showing you what they did for one client who'd been putting off launching for years.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Soapbox Podcast, and today we have a slightly different episode.
1:45
SPEAKER_00: The podcast will be back properly in October with a slew of fabulous business owners with a social conscience who want to jump on their soapbox and tell you about the things they care about and how they talk about them in their marketing and their messaging.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: But in order for you to be able to do that, you need a clear idea of how to talk about what you do in a way that feels comfortable and aligned with your values and with all of the nuance and joy and brilliance that you actually offer people.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: And that's what we're going to talk about today.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Because last Thursday evening I asked a zooming of 10 business owners a fairly simple question.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: I said, Imagine you're at one of those networking breakfasts to the slightly scary kind with a laminated agenda and a man called Graham who sells insurance.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: And someone turns to you and says, It's your turn.
2:41
SPEAKER_00: Tell me what your business is in 30 seconds.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: What do you say?
2:46
SPEAKER_00: And one by one, they typed something into the chat.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: There was a counsellor, a coach for artists, who's also an artist, and a documentary photographer, someone who does coaching and real estate, someone who cleans and is a content creator.
3:02
SPEAKER_00: And then I asked a follow-up.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: Does the sentence that you just typed cover everything you actually do?
3:07
SPEAKER_00: Or is the nuance of it?
3:09
SPEAKER_00: The chat filled up in about 30 seconds.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: Nope.
3:12
SPEAKER_00: Nope.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Nope.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: Lord no, that totally doesn't do it justice.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: No, I find it really hard.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely not, doesn't cover half of it.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: Nobody suggests.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Not one person.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: Which, to be fair, is partly why they turned up to a workshop called How to Talk About What You Do When It's Not A Symbol Before and After.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: If you're thrilled with your elevator pitch, you probably spend your Thursday evenings doing something else.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: So this episode is that workshop, minus the chat and the six minutes where I sit in silence watching people write.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: But if you've got a notebook near you, grab it, because there are four questions coming up.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: And I'd love it if you paused me chatting away and jotted down your answers so that you could do this process along with me.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: If you are new to the Circlex Podcast, uh I'm Peter.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: I was a youth worker for 15 years, which means I got very good at talking to people who didn't want to be my friend and definitely didn't need another grown-up telling them what to do.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: And now ID messaging and copy for values-led businesses, which is weirdly much more similar to youth work than it sounds.
4:22
SPEAKER_00: I work with people whose work is shared and slow and doesn't have a tidy end to it.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: People who aren't massively comfortable shouting about how great they are, even when they really are so great.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: And people who started their businesses partly to stick two fingers up to the patriarchy and hustle culture they were told they had to follow.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: And so they don't fancy building this new thing with all the same old tools.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: If you've ever downloaded a template about your brand story or gone to a workshop on your elevator pitch, then somebody has handed you a sentence similar to this to fill in.
4:59
SPEAKER_00: I help a men in brackets, the people I help, to in brackets get some outcome so they can enjoy some benefit.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: When I put that on the screen on Thursday, one person types completely unprompted, I hate this, in the chat.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: Another sent me a single emoji of a green face being sick.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: I felt very sane.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Here's mine.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: With that sentence, I help creative business owners talk about what they do so they can make lots of money.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: It makes sense.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: It's even true as far as it goes, but it doesn't say anything about how I do it, or why it's different from the 40 other people who could say the same sentence.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: Or any of the other things that change for the people when they work with me.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: And even for me, where a lot of my clients arrive saying some version of, I don't know how to talk about what I do, which is as about as simple as it brief gets, filling in that sentence feels like being shoved into a really tight box.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: Without kind of having to chop bits off what I do to make it fit the template.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: And the bits that you chop off are always the specific ones.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: The strange, particular, only you details.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: So what's left is the general stuff.
6:12
SPEAKER_00: And the general stuff is the same to everybody.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: Everyone in your corner of the world ends up saying that they offer a safe space.
6:18
SPEAKER_00: So they're non-judgmental, but they work with anxious people.
6:21
SPEAKER_00: And then somehow everyone sounds exactly the same.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: This is nothing about how well you write.
6:29
SPEAKER_00: You have been given a sentence with one slot in it.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: And most of the people I work with do four things that are connected in a way that only they can see.
6:41
SPEAKER_00: A lot of them also don't offer something that gives you that clear before-after transformation.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: Because let's face it, life is a lot more complicated than that.
6:52
SPEAKER_00: That sentence comes from a particular story.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: Frameworks like Storybrand are built on the hero's journey.
6:59
SPEAKER_00: And if you've read the Storybrand book or done anything around it, then the shake will be very familiar to you.
7:05
SPEAKER_00: There is a hero.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: The hero has a problem.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: The hero finds a guide who helps them solve the problem.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: They go off on a quest and defeat said problem, which is normally dragon-shaped, and then they ride off into the sunset and everything's fine.
7:19
SPEAKER_00: Except they're on their own.
7:21
SPEAKER_00: Because in that story, other people and community are basically roadblocks between the hero and wherever they're trying to get to.
7:29
SPEAKER_00: And this can work really well if you sell picture frames or cars or insurance.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: Hello again, Graham.
7:34
SPEAKER_00: But if your business has anything to do with community, or is in any way nuanced, or is anywhere near as far from the massive before and after transformation as most of the work I see, it just doesn't fit.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: You are using a map to somewhere that you don't want to go.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: That is a terrible idea.
7:52
SPEAKER_00: So I built something called the Regenerative Story Framework, which is based on the heroine's journey instead of the heroes.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: I am not going to jump deep into the heroine's journey here.
8:03
SPEAKER_00: There is a blog post on my website.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: It is linked in the show notes if you want the comparison with the hero's journey.
8:10
SPEAKER_00: But the short version is that the heroine's journey is built for a journey that happens in community, that leaps rather than marching a straight line, and that doesn't pretend there's a single moment where everything's fixed.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: Everything I do with clients runs on the regenerative story framework.
8:27
SPEAKER_00: And there's a free tool called the Regenerative Story Map that takes you through it with questions at every stage.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: You can find it again in the show notes.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: The four questions I'm about to give you that I gave the BE people in the workshop come from the map.
8:42
SPEAKER_00: They are the ones that I use in place of this one slot sentence.
8:48
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: Pens out, if you've got one.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: And none of this has to be polished or make sense to anyone but you.
8:55
SPEAKER_00: You can use bullet points, four sentences, drawings, a voice note to yourself.
8:59
SPEAKER_00: Whatever works.
9:01
SPEAKER_00: And want it before we start.
9:04
SPEAKER_00: But don't write about your audience as one homogenous group.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: Think of one real person.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: Maybe the last person who came to you, or the last sales conversation you had, even if it ended with not right now.
9:16
SPEAKER_00: Hold that person, that individual, in your head.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: Question one.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: What are your people trying to leave behind?
9:27
SPEAKER_00: Normally at this point, someone would ask you about your audience's pain points.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: What are they trying to fix?
9:32
SPEAKER_00: What's hurting?
9:33
SPEAKER_00: And that line of thinking tends to end up in our sales pages as us poking at those pain points, making people feel really, really bad so that they'll come and work with us to make it stopped.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: This question comes at it from a different direction.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: What is the story or the system or the way of working that they've had enough of?
9:52
SPEAKER_00: The 70.
9:53
SPEAKER_00: What are they totally done with?
9:56
SPEAKER_00: What had they already tried they don't want to try again?
10:00
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you were doing this long with me, hit pause, go away, write some stuff, and hit play again.
10:07
SPEAKER_00: I will be here.
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Question two What actually helps them when they're in the middle of it?
10:14
SPEAKER_00: This is the one that never gets enough limelight when we talk about our businesses, because the middle of anything is pretty hard to photograph and get excited about.
10:23
SPEAKER_00: What do you actually provide when someone is working with you while they're in the thick of whatever they came to leave behind?
10:30
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's company, maybe it's permission or a place to think, or someone who isn't surprised by them.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: What I am not looking for here is I helped them make six figures in six minutes.
10:40
SPEAKER_00: Nothing the each screenshot and paste all over your stories.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: If you find yourself writing something like that, have a think about what is going on underneath it.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: What was going on for that person that let the result happen?
10:52
SPEAKER_00: And write that down instead.
10:55
SPEAKER_00: Press pause again.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And I'm back.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: Question three.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: What is different because they're not doing it alone?
11:03
SPEAKER_00: Now.
11:04
SPEAKER_00: If you run a group or a community, this can be about the other people in it.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: But if you work one-to-one, it can simply be that they're doing it with you.
11:13
SPEAKER_00: What changes about how that feels?
11:15
SPEAKER_00: What becomes possible because someone else is there?
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And if there's no grand transformation at the end, that is completely fine.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: And you know, rather the point of this conversation.
11:28
unknown: Okay.
11:29
SPEAKER_00: While you're off writing a small confursday, this was the question that most people found the hardest, including someone who runs actual community spaces for a living.
11:40
SPEAKER_00: So if you've just drawn a blank, you are in excellent company and it is worth coming back to.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: It's also, not coincidentally, the question that explains why anyone would do this with other people rather than on their own at the kitchen table.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
11:55
SPEAKER_00: Question four.
11:56
SPEAKER_00: What do they start to see changing in their own lives?
11:59
SPEAKER_00: This is the nearest we get to a transformation.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: You're looking for the early signs here, a long way before any finished version of them.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: The thing they notice themselves doing differently.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: The thing that stopped being quite as hard as it was.
12:13
SPEAKER_00: Doesn't mean anything is completely fixed.
12:16
SPEAKER_00: That's okay.
12:20
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: So we're done with pens and paper for now, unless you are dropping.
12:26
SPEAKER_00: When everyone came back off me in this workshop on Thursday, I asked them how it had felt.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: I'd expected a bit of the struggle, but what came back from six different people inside about a minute was relief.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: I thought it would be hard, but it wasn't.
12:41
SPEAKER_00: It felt easier than I expected.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: I was surprised how easy it was and how many things I could write.
12:46
SPEAKER_00: Um so much easier to write than the normal questions.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Someone wrote it makes space for nuance, and someone else said that it felt great not to be achievement or results focused.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: And one person said it float out really quickly, and then she found herself wondering whether it needs to be more.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: As if something that came easily is inadequate in some way, which is um something maybe you all need to take to a therapist's If that's you right now.
13:13
SPEAKER_00: It isn't inadequate.
13:15
SPEAKER_00: When I do this one-to-one, the thing people say most often is that it feels like more is a land.
13:21
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to cram an answer into a box, so the answer can just be true.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: Easy is what it feels like, and the question finally fits your work.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Let me show you where this can end up.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: Anna is a client of mine, and she's lovely.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: She downloaded the regenerative story map, worked through it, and came out with a sentence that summed up what she does.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: She wasn't quite happy with it, so she booked a call with me to turn it into something she could use in her brand story and at the aforementioned networking events.
13:54
SPEAKER_00: This is what she bought.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: I support creative women to get away from self-criticism and other negative systems by testing alternative methods for experiments and personal explorations in a protective and nourishing environment.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: We support and encourage each other to find stronger self-acceptance so we can establish our own best way to use our gifts.
14:17
SPEAKER_00: This is miles away from the IHEPX to do wine.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: It's warm, it's values led, and Anna said so herself.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: But when she tried to use it out loud or in her writing, it was a little bit overly complicated.
14:30
SPEAKER_00: So we talked.
14:31
SPEAKER_00: And the way she talked was full of gardens.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: She described her clients' lives as allotments.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: There's this rock in one corner that they've been trying to hide, she said, and nothing will grow on it.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: So instead you scrape the soil off the rock and you let it show, and it soaks up the heat and all the plants that love warmth in the spring grow up around it.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: She told me she'd first thought of her clients as the seedlings and herself as the one nourishing them, and then she changed her mind.
14:55
SPEAKER_00: They're the gardeners, she said.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: They've each got their own garden.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: She is the assistant garden.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: And the thing that mattered amid all of this was that Anna had been trying to launch her Greek programs for years.
15:07
SPEAKER_00: She'd never felt comfortable with how she talked about them, so she'd always put it off, or decided it wasn't quite the right time.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: Here's where we landed at the end of Anna's session.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: I support a creative woman who suddenly feels that life has grown up around her like a wild's garden.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: My programs give her a safe and nourishing greenhouse she can visit for resources, tools, and advice as she begins to explore what she wants her garden to look like now.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: We focus on self-acceptance, tiny experiments, and making the best use of what we already have within us to create the life we want.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: You can hear, if you listen closely, all four questions in there.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: The life that's grown up around her like the wild garden is what she's eating behind.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: She woke up one morning and it wasn't the life that she pictured.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: The greenhouse is what helps in the middle.
15:59
SPEAKER_00: The we is the not doing it alone.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: And the making the best use of what we have already is the early changes.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: It's no longer the sentence she came in with, and it's also a lot easier to follow because you can see the image.
16:14
SPEAKER_00: When we finished, I asked her how it felt, and she said, I feel hope.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: Which made me very happy and a little bit weepy because it was probably that time of the month.
16:22
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, Anna uses that in her brand story and at networking events now.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't list every brilliant thing she does.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't need to, because you are allowed to carry on talking after you've said your online.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: If you've only got 30 seconds at whatever overly scheduled event you're at, you are also allowed to say the sentence and then say, but actually it's a bit more complicated than that.
16:48
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to have a chat afterwards, let's.
16:51
SPEAKER_00: All of that is allowed.
16:52
SPEAKER_00: Nobody at the networking breakfast is going to carry on timing you after tea and coffee.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Except possibly Gran.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: Once you've got something you're happy with, you can hang everything else off of it.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: Your bio, your about page, what you say when someone introduces you on a podcast, maybe this podcast, the welcome emails for the freebie that you keep meaning to make.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: It's the root system and the rest all grows out to.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Now, if you are listening before midnight in UK time on Friday, the 25th of September, there is one more thing I want you to know about.
17:26
SPEAKER_00: Everything in this episode has been about one sentence.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: But the same problem runs right through your sales funnel.
17:32
SPEAKER_00: The templates, the sales pages, welcomes emails, and launch sequences are all built on the same one sort of story.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: So you have to chop bits off your work until it fits in the box, or find your reader's pain point and press on it until she buys.
17:46
SPEAKER_00: Most of the people that I work with won't do the second, and they are worn out and disillusioned from doing the first.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: The messaging underneath it, the content that brings the right people in, the freebie, the page it sits on, the emails that follow, and the sales page all points to.
18:12
SPEAKER_00: It's all built on the regenerative story framework.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: So there's room in it for everything you actually do.
18:18
SPEAKER_00: And really importantly, it's designed to sell without making anyone feel worse first.
18:24
SPEAKER_00: We tackle um manipulation, persuasive tactics, and we put them all up against your own ethics so you always feel comfortable and aligned with how you are selling to your audience.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: You won't be doing it on your own either.
18:38
SPEAKER_00: There are fortnightly teaching sessions, fortnightly co-working sessions where you can put something half finished in front of me, and you can email me your drafts in between.
18:46
SPEAKER_00: We start on Monday, the 28th September, and it is£250 a month to four months.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: So£1,000 in total.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: The Nick is in the show notes.
18:56
SPEAKER_00: And if you'd like to talk it through first, then you could send me an email, which is also in the show notes.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: I am happy to have a chat, and there is absolutely no pressure at all because I do not do the hard sell because it makes me feel icky.
19:10
SPEAKER_00: If you're listening after the 25th of September 2026, then the best place to start, if you're interested in talking about how you do differently, is the regenerative story map.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: It is free.
19:25
SPEAKER_00: And it walks you through these four questions and the rest of the framework and finishes with a sentence you can actually use.
19:31
SPEAKER_00: The link to that is in the show notes too.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: And if you'd like to know when the next round of sale without selling your soul opens, you will hear it first if you're on my email list.
19:41
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for hanging out with me when I got on my, I guess, little soapbox about the reductive ways that we are being told to share what we do.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: Have a fabulous week, and I will see you again soon.