In this episode, I'll remind you of the value of surrounding yourself with others when you're self-employed. You'll gain inspiration, continually learn, build alliances, and more!
PRO TIPS:
Find a group at your level or or better – if your goal is to learn, grow, get accountability
Find a group at your level, or still developing – if your goal is to practice coaching, provide support
Paid – you will pay attention
Group vs. 1:1
Some paid offer a facilitator
Some free include a facilitator – which can be used for content (YouTube, lead gen, etc.)
Let me know if you found this helpful. Email me at brenda@mellermarketing.com
****************************************** You’re invited to my FREE, Live webinar:
Getting Leads for Your Coaching, Consulting, or Solopreneur Business Using LinkedIn
Choose from one of these two upcoming LIVE webinars:
************************************** My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.
In this episode, I'll remind you of the value of surrounding yourself with others when you're self-employed. You'll gain inspiration, continually learn, build alliances, and more!
PRO TIPS:
Find a group at your level or or better – if your goal is to learn, grow, get accountability
Find a group at your level, or still developing – if your goal is to practice coaching, provide support
Paid – you will pay attention
Group vs. 1:1
Some paid offer a facilitator
Some free include a facilitator – which can be used for content (YouTube, lead gen, etc.)
Let me know if you found this helpful. Email me at brenda@mellermarketing.com
****************************************** You’re invited to my FREE, Live webinar:
Getting Leads for Your Coaching, Consulting, or Solopreneur Business Using LinkedIn
Choose from one of these two upcoming LIVE webinars:
************************************** My name is Brenda Meller. I'm a LinkedIn coach, consultant, speaker, and author. My company is Meller Marketing and I help business professionals get a bigger slice of the LinkedIn pie.
Let's connect on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/brendameller (click MORE to invite me to connect and mention you listened to my podcast)
Speaker 1:
Now, if you're self-employed, you know that it is great, right, because you are enthusiastically self-employed. But one of the challenges that I've experienced, and I'm sure you have as well, is, if you are self-employed, you probably work from home and it can be a bit isolating. Right In today's episode, I want to talk to you about why you might want to look into participating in group coaching, masterminds, accountability groups, etc. Surrounding yourselves with others, and I was thinking about this on my walk with my dog, pepper, recently. How you know, there's not a lot of things that I miss for my corporate life, and I'm glad that I had the corporate career that I had. But I do really enjoy walking my dog different times throughout the day and taking breaks when I need to, working late if I need to, taking the night off when I need to, but really having the flexibility and freedom to make my own course. But I do miss the opportunity of surrounding myself with my peers and learning from my team and learning from others as well. So today I'd like to offer this suggestion from my point of view, and maybe you'll consider looking into groups for your own scenario as well. So here's my tips for you If you're looking around for groups and you're trying to decide what type of group to join.
Speaker 1:
What I found in my experience is there are a variety of different individuals that are out there, and let's use the category of marketing consultants as an example. So if my goal is to learn, to grow as well as to get accountability, what I want to do is I want to find a group of individuals who are at the same level that I am at in my career, or better. Now let me break that down. What I mean by that? At or better. So they are at the same stage in my business perhaps, maybe at a similar revenue level, maybe offering some similar services, or maybe they're better, meaning they've been in business for many more years than me. Maybe they're at the next tier up in terms of revenue. Maybe they're no longer just self-employed but they have a team. They have a few individuals and employees that are working with them. Maybe they're growing into an agency type of a scenario. So if my goal is to really learn and grow and accelerate my business, I want to surround myself with people who are in a similar scenario as I am, but also the group should contain people that are maybe a few steps ahead of us, if that makes sense. So that's one type of a group that you can look at. You can also find other groups that can be at the same level that you're at or maybe a few steps behind, still in the developing phase Now, can also find other groups that can be at the same level that you're at or maybe a few steps behind, still in the developing phase Now.
Speaker 1:
I think these groups can also be really helpful for you, especially if you are a coach and you're looking at developing your coaching skills or you're looking to gain confidence for your area of expertise. Maybe your business is just getting started and you can find a group of individuals that maybe don't have a marketing expert as a part of your group yet if you're doing marketing consulting right and they may actually benefit from learning from you, and I think this can be really great to give you a scenario in which to practice coaching, providing guidance to other individuals, and the group can also provide you with support. It's not to say you won't learn and grow with them, but what I've found in my experience is, if you find a group that's at the same level as you or maybe still developing a few steps behind you, it provides more of an opportunity for coaching. So you're giving back to the group more so than you're gaining from the group, if that makes sense. Now, with either type of these groups that you can find, whether they are a mastermind, an accountability group sometimes people call them pods, although I like to stay away from that word because pod means something a little different on LinkedIn and it's negative.
Speaker 1:
But with either of these types of groups the ones that are at your level or better, or at your level are still developing you will find community, which I think touches on the earlier point I made about being self-employed can be isolating, so it does give you a community that you can start to be a part of. And my recommendation is find a group that you can meet with on a fairly regular basis. I tried for a while doing a monthly group and I found it was just too far in between. I really find that there's more benefit to meeting on more of a weekly basis, so that would be my tip for you. And that leads to the other point which both groups can offer, which is accountability, because if people know that you're supposed to be on the group, call at Tuesday at one o'clock and you're not there, they're going to reach out and say, hey, what's going on? Especially if they know that you're in the middle of a program launch or in the middle of a busy season of your business or there's some other things that are going on on a personal level, they will reach out to you and there's some accountability, which you often don't have when you're self-employed right Now.
Speaker 1:
Above and beyond that, I want to offer you some additional pro tips. These are based on my experience of participating in masterminds and accountability in small groups as well. If you pay, you will pay attention. So what do I mean by that? There are a lot of free groups that are out there and they may attract many, many people that are coming into the group and I don't know about you, but if I'm not paying, I might have the group open and be multitasking in the background right Now. If I'm paying for my time and participation, my access to this group, I will definitely pay more attention, especially if you think about a sliding scale. If it's a group that I'm paying $97 a month versus $1,000 a month I might be paying even more close attention, because I want to make sure I'm getting the ROI, the return on my investment in that group. Okay.
Speaker 1:
Another thing to consider is I've been talking a lot about group masterminds and accountability groups and whatnot, but you also might look at one-on-one working with a coach, just working with somebody who can provide that support back to you on a one-on-one basis so you can get more of your questions answered and you can learn from them in a faster time frame than potentially working with a group of people. So that's something to consider in a faster timeframe than potentially working with a group of people. So that's something to consider. On that note, I have found some groups out there that include a facilitator versus other groups are more of a standalone, like find your own accountability group and you decide when and where to meet, whereas some of these programs, especially the paid programs, will host the call for your group. So think about that and the benefit there is that the facilitator, their job, is simply to facilitate.