We have another Q&A episode of the podcast today, and I’ve got a brilliant question from Mel about facing up to the mindset blocks and gremlins that might rear their head when you are creating and promoting a webinar.
This will be strongly focused on your webinar mindset and is going to be a really helpful one.
Let’s dive right in…
Before we jump into Mel’s brilliant question today, a quick reminder that if you’d like me to answer your question on the Heart-Centred Business Podcast, and give you a lovely little shout out as well, you can submit your question HERE.
Today’s question comes from the amazing Mel Gorry who you can find on Instagram at @mel.gorry.
Melissa asked a great question about running a webinar, and I love this because I love Mel so much. If you don’t follow her, please make sure you go and check her out. She is a business and marketing specialist who specifically works with women who have chronic conditions or other reasons why they have limited energy and therefore need to build their marketing and business strategies in a way that works with that limited energy.
Mel is absolutely brilliant at what she does, and I absolutely adore her so I’m super happy to be answering her question today.
Mel’s question is:
“When launching and releasing my first webinar, sooo many mindset gremlins reared their head. I was so unprepared and didn’t know how to combat it!
Why does this happen?
What are the best strategies to combat and build resilience to those mindset blocks?
And Tash, what came up for you in your first webinar?”
Great questions and I’m really excited to talk about this one today!
When it comes to creating and launching a webinar, it’s such a great strategy for your business.
It’s a great way to get in front of a lot of people at once, to talk about your services, and to help people move from where they are to where they want to be. It also does great things for growing your list, building your audience, and creating momentum on social media.
There are so many reasons to love webinars, and if you haven’t watched my podcast episode previously that is about why I love webinars so much, then go check that out because I am a big webinars fan.
Think about the fact that when you start a business, it is one of the most powerful personal development journeys you can go on.
When you think about why it’s such a strong personal development journey, it’s because it brings up all your stuff.
YOU are the boss now, YOU have to do the work, YOU need to be self-motivated.
If there’s a self-sabotage or procrastination bone in your body, you’re going to find it when you start a business.
You need to ask for money, you need to be seen and visible, talk yourself up, and talk about your services.
Knowing that starting and growing a business is the ultimate personal development journey and brings up all that mindset stuff for us to be able to pay attention to it and clear it, then when we think about a webinar, it’s the one part of running a business and marketing strategy, where every single one of those things come into play.
This happens because:
- You’re saying that you want to teach someone something, meaning that you are positioning yourself as an expert, which brings up all the imposter syndrome things.
- You need to get out there, promote it, do all the marketing, set yourself up and put your slides together. It allows you to leave things to the last minute so if that’s one of your particular mindset blocks, that will come up. You can also be self-sabotaging or procrastinating. All of the pressure and stuff about having made a commitment and needing to get it done can come up as well.
- You’re going to be more visible. You are standing in front of a bunch of people (virtually), and first of all, saying that they should come to your webinar. Then when they’re at the webinar you’re saying that you’ve got something to say. You’re at maximum visibility when you’re launching and delivering a webinar.
- At the end of it, you’re usually asking for the sale for something… so you’re asking about money, and it brings up all your money blocks.
It’s no surprise that a webinar is something that can bring up a lot of those mindset blocks for us.
But at the same time, that’s what we want.
We want to be paying attention to those things so that we can clear them and move through them. This allows us to expand, receive more, work more effectively in our business, get more done and whatever else it is that we need to do.
Whilst it may be annoying that it brings up all of your mindset blocks, you really need to celebrate that it brings them up because that’s exactly what we want to do.
We want to take action.
Notice what those thoughts are, notice what those gremlins are, and then use the tools and strategies that we have in our toolkit to uncover, clear and release them.
It’s actually a really beautiful opportunity to grow your mindset and undertake a leap in that personal development journey that comes with starting and growing a business.
The second part of your question that I’m going to answer is what came up for me when I ran my first webinar.
I ran my first webinar in 2013 when I was a couple of months into my business journey. The webinar was called 12 Steps to Creative Success and it was a webinar on how to grow a creative business, whether you are an artist or a crafter or any kind of maker.
That was my niche when I first started my business (well, my second niche).
I only had 13 people sign up for that webinar, despite the fact that I thought I had spewed up content about it onto the internet for two weeks solid.
I felt like everyone in my entire world must have known I was running this webinar and must have been sick of hearing me talk about it.
When I finished the webinar, due to the fact that I had only had 13 people sign up, I did a little review of my marketing and how I’d shared it.
Here’s what I had done:
- I’d emailed my eight-person mailing list once
- Posted about it on my own Facebook page zero times
- Posted about it in two Facebook groups that I was in once in each group
I had shared the information about my webinar three times, and I thought I had told everyone about it and I was all over the internet.
It was really interesting that I thought I had done all the right things but in essence, I had been very quiet about this webinar and expected people to sign up for it the first time they ever saw it.
The only way that I was talking about it was just by copying and pasting the promo copy that I was going to be using. I sent the same promo to my list, as well as putting it in those two Facebook groups.
Really it’s a miracle that those 13 people signed up, to be honest with you.
Only one of those 13 people showed up live because I didn’t send out any reminder emails. It was only when they first signed up for the webinar that I shared the link of how they could join and watch it. There were no reminders sent to anyone, so only one person showed up.
I talked to that one person like she was 100 people and it was hilarious.
It brought up a lot of the “Who am I” stuff because I hadn’t had a successful artistic or creative business at that point in time. I had a lot of imposter syndrome stuff coming up, feeling like I knew how to do the business part but I wasn’t someone who’d already done this before. I felt like I was still growing my business but I knew what worked on social media and what sorts of things I could encourage people to do.
At this point, I had already been working with two clients in creative businesses, but I still felt lots of stuff coming up of, ‘Who am I to say I can help people with this? Who am I? There’s no way that I am the right person to be teaching people this’, and I got really freaked out before I ran that webinar.
BUT my desire to share the 12 step process I had developed and been working on with my VIP clients, outweighed my fear. I’m really grateful that it did because it meant that even though I was really worried about it, had the imposter syndrome and I only had 13 people sign up, I knew that even if just one person heard this 12 step process and it made their business growth journey easier, then my job was done and I would have been of service.
That was a really interesting thing to reflect back on so I did a lot of journaling and self-reflection on:
- That webinar
- The promo process
- The delivery process
- How I could improve it
- The follow-up process
It was such an amazing growth time for me in my business.
I really do encourage you to tune into that desire to serve and that desire to tell people what to do and help them.
Tap into your desire to really show up and make a difference in even just one person’s life because that will help with a lot of the webinar mindset wobbles that can come up when you are creating and launching a webinar.
All of that being said, here are my top four tips on what to do about the mindset stuff when you are creating and launching a webinar.
1. Tap into the service mindset
Whenever you are freaking out about something that you are going to do, you are focusing on yourself instead of focusing on your audience.
Whenever you notice that, shift it.
Think to yourself: Okay, clearly I’m talking about myself and worrying about myself right now. But what about the people who are waiting for this information? What about the people who are sitting there thinking that no one understands them and that no one is going to be able to help them?
I want you to think about them.
Specifically for you, Mel, think about all those beautiful women who think they can’t be successful in business because they’re not well. The women who think that they can’t be successful and do all the things that they need to do because of a physical limitation with their energy. That makes me really teary thinking about it and about all those women we are depriving of the amazing Mel Gorry because you’re a bit worried about your mindset wobbles. You’ve got your imposter syndrome happening or whatever is happening for you.
When you focus on them instead, it really does make a huge difference in how you feel and the energy that you bring to that webinar.
I talk about this a lot, but when I first started my business, I had a post-it note on my desk that said, “Do it for her“. Those four words really drove a lot of what I did in the first six months of my business because it wasn’t about me.
It’s very easy to make it all about yourself when starting a business, but at the end of the day, it’s about who you’re here to serve.
“Do it for her” was what it took to get me into that service mindset whenever I was feeling wobbly.
2. Take the pressure down
This is a practise.
When I first ran my webinar, it was just the one person.
Your audience will never be as small as it is today.
The number of people who sign up for your webinars will never be as low as it is today.
Take the pressure down. You don’t need to be perfect. Just see this as practise.
Even if you completely mess it up and the 25 people who signed up to webinar think that you don’t know what you’re talking about, that’s only 25 people out of billions who are out there in the world that you can serve.
Nine times out of ten when you do mess it up, people don’t think that you’re terrible and that they’ll never work with you again, it actually makes people realise that you’re human, and it can be more engaging than if you get it perfect.
Take the pressure off yourself to get it perfect.
Embrace that feeling of it being a practise, and allow yourself to experiment and learn to get better at it.
3. Trust that it gets easier
I remember in my first YouTube videos, I was so breathy and weird on camera.
Whenever we get a big influx of Take Off students, I reshare one of my very early YouTube videos with them because I know how much it makes them feel better about what they’re doing. I was terrible. I was sitting on my balcony and the wind kept blowing my hair up, you can hardly hear me, there’s a truck that goes behind me, and I thought I was doing this amazing, super casual type thing on my video, and it was terrible.
So just know that it gets easier, and you get better at speaking to your audience.
With practise you’ll get better at facilitating that webinar, moving people through the process, dealing with the chatbox, the screen, the slides and all of the things that are going on at once.
You will forget to record your webinar at some point along the way as well (it’s usually a bit of a rite of passage), but it will get easier.
I think that’s such a beautiful thing to remember.
It takes practise. It’ll get easier. The way that it gets easier is by doing it more consistently. That’s how you’ll get better at it.
4. Use your mindset tools
See this as an opportunity to uncover what those gremlins are, and then use the mindset tools in your toolkit to work through them.
If there’s something showing up when you’re in webinar mode, even if it’s not showing up in other spaces in your business, it will be impacting your decision making in your business.
It will be impacting your mindset in your business.
Bringing it to the surface is actually a good thing.
It will allow you to use those tools in your toolkit to work through that mindset block or whatever it is that’s coming up for you.
Woman writing in journal to support webinar mindset in business start-up
Some mindset tools could be:
- Tapping
- Visualisation
- Working with a practitioner
- Journaling
- Kinesiology
If you found a mindset practise that really helps you – especially one where you’re paying attention to those blocks, what’s coming up and having strategies to clear them – that’s going to be really helpful.
You can use this webinar as an opportunity to go even deeper with your mindset practise.
A big thank you to the amazing Mel for her brilliant question about webinars, especially in relation to mindset blocks and the gremlins that come up.
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If you’ve had a lightbulb moment, have any follow up questions from this podcast episode, or if you’ve got a tip on how to address the mindset stuff that comes up when you are running webinars please share it. I want you to come over to the Heart-Centred Soul Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group, use #podcastaha, let us know that you’ve been listening to episode number 223, and share your comments, lightbulb moments, questions and your tips on how to overcome those mindset wobbles that can come up when we are running webinars.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
If you want to ask a question and have me answer it here on the podcast, simply submit your question with all your details HERE.
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
