Right doors open easily

My question for you is: what door are you trying to open that’s just not budging? Is there another door that’s available to you that you may not have even realized was available?

We ALL have a door we’re trying to open that’s not budging.

My stubborn door is a workshop. I’ve probably invested 1 to 2 days per week for the past two months developing and promoting the one-day offering Realize the Result that my husband Ken and I are doing in KC, NYC, and SF. Please keep reading … this is NOT a promotional piece about that class. It’s a story of how we as leaders and communicators can choose where to invest our energy and precious time.

Before these past few months, I have not really marketed myself and my services. Before I chose to pursue self-employment as a full-time effort, I simply accepted the work that naturally flowed to me and attracted my interest. With over 12,000 of you in my LinkedIn network, I naively thought “How hard can it be to get 20 to 25 people in these three cities to sign up for a one-day course?”

In short: it’s hard!

I now respect the work of marketers even more. It takes discipline and focus to develop campaigns, build registration systems, and make it easy for people to enroll. It almost felt like the harder I pushed, the fewer results I saw. Having rented facilities in each of the cities and engaged at least a few registrants to each location, I chose to not cancel but began to see this also as a market research experiment rather than just a product offering.

Then, one Thursday afternoon while on a call with fellow alumni of the Modern Elder Academy, I heard—almost in passing—that MEA had a week available in Baja after a corporate client canceled. I inquired to find out if they’d consider offering an entirely new class, and my friend Chip Conley told me he’d look at a proposal but needed it Friday. After chatting with Ken, I burned a little midnight oil and had my proposal in Chip’s hands before bedtime. He scheduled a call with us and his MEA team, and by the end of day Monday we had reached an agreement to expand our work into Mastery Week: The Roadmap to Your Soul’s Expression.   

It was a vivid example of advice my husband often gives:
“right doors open easily.”

Yes, there’s work yet to be done to expand our workshop into a longer offering with a focus beyond just how to communicate. We also will partner with the team at Modern Elder to promote the new offering, but they have the expertise and structure to do that. It’s not that my work on RtR was a failure, not at all … it was an education on how to find better ways to provide my gifts to the world in ways the world will receive.

As always, let me know what you learn. I love hearing from my readers.

JD’s Recommendations: what I’m reading, hearing, and seeing:

• Reading: The consistency and impact of my friend Fabrice’s A weekly newsletter on LGBTQ+ Equality inspires me. Check it out, weekly at noon sharp EST every Wednesday.

• Hearing: I swear by my use of the Full Focus Planner and try to start each week listing to Focus on This. This episode is on making new habits stick.

• Seeing: This weekend my little ones and I watched Ninja Kidz, one of our favorite YouTube shows. Their transparency around adopting their youngest son, Kayson, moved me to tears.

Thanks for enjoying my newsletter. I welcome your feedback.

As always, jds

P.S. Okay, so that you know, as a reader of Communication Matters, yes you can still register with a subscriber discount for Realize the Result. Simply enter 200off (clever, huh) when you sign up. Don’t get greedy now, simply putting a large number like 500off will not yield a larger discount! Have a great day.