Earlier today I posed this question: 

What do you love to do and what’s going to make you money?

Those are the two questions you want to be asking yourself when you’re trying to figure out your niche, your expertise, and the specific problem that you’re going to solve for your clients and customers. I wanted to start with that to prime you and get you thinking about your business through the lens of what you love, your passion, and what’s profitable, because oftentimes people go down a path to create something that they think is going to be profitable, but they don’t really love it. 

If you are trying to build a business that you don’t actually love, that doesn’t light you on fire, that doesn’t wake you up and throw you out of bed in the morning – I’m not saying it’s not going to work, because who am I to say that? – but what I will say is that eight out of 10 businesses fail. So if you don’t freaking love it, just find something that you DO love. Stack it in your favor.

One of the things I see coming up a lot for coaches in the online space is that they don’t recognize their brilliance. This is a very layered topic, but we’ll start with this. I pulled this up straight from good ‘ole wikipedia to get the dictionary definition for you. The first reason why we don’t recognize our own brilliance is because of something called the false consensus effect or the false consensus bias. 

false consensus effect (bias): an attributional type of cognitive bias whereby people tend to overestimate the extent to which their opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others, i.e. they think that others think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias tends to lead to the perception of a consensus that does not exist or a false consensus, and this meaning that there’s an increase or a decrease of self-esteem, overconfidence effect, or belief that everyone knows what you know.

We oftentimes don’t step into our brilliance, we don’t put ourselves out there, and we don’t create the course that would light us on fire because we say, “Somebody’s already done that already. There’s been books written about it. Speakers have talked about it. There’s a million podcasts on my topic. Everyone already knows what I know.” NOT true. It’s the false consensus effect.

You’ve got to take yourself out of your bubble. If you’re in the coaching bubble, once you become a coach or a network marketer, the whole world seems to suddenly be a coach or network marketer. What’s actually happening there? Two things: the Facebook algorithm is kicking in because it’s sharing content that’s relevant to you based on what you search and post, and on a metaphysical psychological level, what you focus on expands. 

At the base of our brain, we have something called the RAS (reticular activating system) and this is actually filtering our world. Our two point three billion bits per second of information that we’re being given and it filters it down to 126 bits per second. We’re filtering that based on our experiences, our beliefs, and our values. So if you are exploring things about being a coach, then all of a sudden it seems like everybody is a coach. This is your reticular activating system kicking on. This is why we say focus on what you want, not what you don’t want because you’re only going to see what you focus on.

Is this starting to click as to why people don’t step into their brilliance?

I remember when I first started transitioning out of network marketing and into the business coaching world, I had joined a coaching program and had a conversation with some mastermind buddies. We were just chit chatting about different things that we were working on and I shared with them my backend training system for my network marketing team, along with trackers, PDFs, and guides that I just kind of thought everybody had.

They said, “Dude, do you understand that people would pay so much money for this stuff?”

I was like, “What, why? Everyone knows how to do this!”

They told me, “No, this is not everybody’s area. Not everybody is organized and process focused. That’s not the way their brains work.”  

I hope that that clicks for you guys. I had this conversation earlier with one of the woman inside my program Pitch to Your Niche. She is in network marketing right now and she started to recognize that she’s really good at numbers, data, and organization. She said, “Based on the question that you posed to us, maybe I should be a virtual assistant because I really love doing all the behind the scenes stuff.” I was like, “Ok, so why not explore possibilities within that? It doesn’t mean you have to be a virtual assistant.”

Not everybody needs to be a face of the business. Maybe your skill set is as a number two in a business, as the integrator, the project manager, or maybe the CFO. You don’t necessarily have to be the on screen talent to be a part of an incredible business. I said to her, “You could go down that route, start as a virtual assistant, and maybe build up to being an integrator or a business manager. Or you can create templates and trainings and teach other entrepreneurs how to get organized in their businesses.” She was like, “Oh EMM GEE, I gotta sit down and journal!” 

Before I hopped on, I asked my fiance what I should talk about on video today and he said, “Why don’t you talk about what you just help me with?” He is a professional performer and an educator, so he was applying for some positions and working on a resume.

This is how the conversation went:

Michael: Jen, I have not had to create a resume in a long time.

Jen: Listen, I am not the person to ask about a resume. I’ve been my own boss for 100 years. I would not even know where to begin with creating a professional resume to give to someone else.

Michael: Can you take a look at this?

Jen: Why don’t you have any of your theater credits on there?

Michael: Well, I didn’t think that that was relevant for a teaching position.

Jen: Why not? You’re on stage. You’re in front of a classroom, you’re able to communicate, and you’re able to engage and entertain people. You’ve done a ton of children’s theater where you worked hands on with kids and had interactive theater performances with them.

Michael: Oh yeah, why didn’t I think of that?

It’s because we’re sometimes too close to it and we don’t see the relevance. I would say finding the details and identifying those little things is, if I can pat my own back, one of the ways that my brain just works automatically. I share that with you because I want you to own the things that you do really well, unconsciously.

Whatever it is – if you love organizing, messaging, copywriting, the legal side of things, or teaching lighting and set design, you can create a business out of it.

If you have a skill set, you can create a business out of it.

I love to talk to network marketers about this specifically because a lot of them entered the online business entrepreneurship world through a box and that was my experience as well. I started in network marketing and I really thought the only way I’m going to be able to run a business is through this avenue, selling health and wellness products and teaching business on the side as I build my team. The truth was, I didn’t need to choose because I wasn’t really passionate about the health and wellness. I was able to just say this is what I want to do and build a business that lit my soul on fire. Not one that I had to make compromises for.

You don’t need to make compromises when it comes to your big vision. Change it. Have the business come to you. Have the business adapt to the way that you want to show up, to the way that you want to serve, and to the way that you want to build your own legacy. Hear what I’m saying?

The number two reason people can’t figure out their niche is because of imposter syndrome. Likely, you have heard of this at some point. This essentially is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has an internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. I think we all deal with it to some degree, especially when you’re going through a part in your business where you’re up leveling, where you are expanding, when you’re about to enter into a live event and meet people who you really admire, this is where imposter syndrome can kick in.

I’m really grateful that I have an incredible mastermind run by James Wedmore that I’m part of. The people in that room are multiple six, seven figure business owners. I think just about every single person that I’ve interacted with has shared, even though they are at a very high level of of what they’re doing in their area of expertise, we all go through it. We all have those moments, either in the past and getting to that point or now moving forward. When we’re newer entrepreneurs, it’s really easy to hide. It’s really easy to sit behind the computer and think you’re the only person in the world who’s ever experienced these things. If you don’t have a community, you need one.

They say with kids, it takes a village, well, with a business, it takes a village.

It takes a team. I brought one on just in the last year year and a half and it’s been an amazing transition. I’m going to admit, it was a scary transition because I went from being solo entrepreneur and now imposter syndrome again.

Who am I to grow this massive legacy?

Who am I to grow this massive vision?

Who am I to take up this space?

Who am I to step forward and claim this unapologetically?

But who are you NOT to?

Why not you?

With imposter syndrome, the way that I’ve been able to embrace it is when I start to feel it, I recognize in myself that it’s my ego and my fear coming up because I’m about to grow. I’m about to step into something that scares the bejeezus out of me! That’s when the little mind gremlins starts to get a little stronger. Instead of getting scared and going down that dark hole, I get excited and I reframe it for myself because I’m able to recognize a pattern that only shows up when I’m about to have expansion and grow.

Instead of avoiding and diluting it by bingeing Netflix and not sitting in the discomfort, I encourage you to stay with it, sit with it, and embrace it. Really listen to what you’re saying to yourself because fear can be tricky.  

If we take it from our subconscious and bring it forward into a place where we can hold it in our hand, it loses its power. Write that belief down on a piece of paper.

“I’m not good enough.”

“I don’t belong in this room.”

“No one’s going to buy my course.”

Write it on a piece of paper and look at it. Is that really true? Hell no. According to whom?! Some nonsense. It’s your ego and your fear trying to protect you.

A lot of people try to chase their plan B. I see this a lot, where people will stay in network marketing when they really don’t want to, but they think that they should. They say, “I’m afraid to quit because I don’t want to be labeled a quitter.” If you fail at something that was not your real passion, there is a sense of safety in that because then you don’t have to own it. You’ll be able to say, “Well, it wasn’t really what I wanted to do.”

For those of you who are feeling a sense of heaviness and a burden around this, I encourage you to work with a coach, specifically somebody who is an expert in NLP, because they’re going to have the tools and the resources to allow you to actually shift the way that you perceive the world and be in control of your thoughts in a way that you never thought possible. That’s why I became a master NLP practitioner because it is freakin life-changing stuff. Maybe you’re in a place where the imposter syndrome is more than imposter syndrome, where it’s a little bit debilitating and you’re like, “I can’t just fake it till I make it. I’ve got to deal with this stuff,” go to a professional, go to a therapist, go to an NLP  practitioner and and do the work. I went to therapy, I am NLP master practitioner, and I’ve had people do that work on me because I believe in it and I’ve seen the transformation in my clients and myself. That was the missing piece for myself and so many people. So if impostor syndrome is not just imposter syndrome but a debilitating anxiety, then take that next step to get additional support.

We talked about the false consensus effect where we think everybody knows what we know. We talked about imposter syndrome and feeling like a fraud even though you’re not. This piggybacks perfectly with the Dunning Kruger effect. This is the dictionary definition and then I’m going to break down for you:

Dunning Kruger effect: The illusory superiority that people believe ‘suffer from’ and this happens because of misjudging their cognitive abilities as greater than it actually is and it is the inability to understand your incompetence leading to inflated self-esteem.

Let’s think about it like a chart. On the Y-axis, we’ve got confidence. On the X axis, we have competence. It’s how confident you are in what you do and how competent you are in what you do. When someone first starts something new, I call it ignorance on fire. When I first started my coaching business, I had all the confidence in the world. I had no idea that I was falling on my face and making mistakes. I was throwing spaghetti, linguini, and the alphabet macaroni at the wall. I had no idea I was offending people because… ignorance on fire.  I was just going for it. I had a lot of confidence.

As I started to learn more about online marketing, sales, and content creation, my confidence dipped because I thought, “Oh my gosh. What have I been doing? There’s so much more that I need to learn!!” This is the Dunning Kruger effect. That, my friend, is where most people STOP taking action.

You’re starting to build your competence and your level of mastery in your area of expertise, but your confidence is down. What it requires in order to get back up in confidence is to keep going, because every single time you show up, you build your competence and you start building your confidence. You start putting things in place, you start helping more people, and your confidence build back up. That’s how you get to that level of stepping forward as an expert and authority in your industry in your niche.