It was a fuller room this week, wintry on almost every side of the call, with a brand-new face joining and the usual honest check-ins on who did (and didn't) do the thing they’d committed to last time.

That ‘end-of-year stretch’ feeling definitely hung in the air, with each of us admitting to trying to get “everything” done before December. With this as our backdrop, what surfaced this week were the stories we tell ourselves about what's possible, who'll actually pay for it, and how big we're allowed to play.

We pitch to people, not to the logo on the door.

Liz was weighing her first real corporate pitch and worrying she didn't have the corporate experience to belong there.

On one of my own pitches I built a whole speculative case for the returns a client could see, and a sharp mentor told me to strip it all out. What replaced it was far stronger:

Being less corporate is often an advantage, not a liability. Showing up real and capable will outshine a polished corporate logo with nothing else behind it. The work isn’t about getting more experience, it’s about re-packaging the experience already in hand.

Reframe the offer before reconsidering the price.

Speaking on filling spots in paid workshops when ticket sales are going slightly slower than you’d like, the instinct can be to assume that nobody has money, right? There was some very insightful push back on that from two directions:

● First, the audience: Individuals may pay out of a tight personal budget. Companies, however, have a line item for team building, C.S.I and wellness projects. Same workshop, very different ability to pay.

● Second, the money story: Liz made the point that "people don't have money" is a limiting belief, not a fact. People are more discerning about how they spend their money, but they still do spend on hobbies and on unmet needs when the narrative earns it.

The box around my business was one I built myself.

I shared what happened to me with the group, because it completely reset my week, so I’ll share it here too. In a masterclass I attended I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, arguing that my clients are all overseas and difficult to reach from here. The speaker asked one simple question: have I ever heard of a flight?

Then he did something I still can't quite believe. He put real money behind me on the spot and attached a dare to it: go and host an event where your market is. Suddenly every constraint I'd been treating as a wall turned out to be one I'd created myself.

The deeper lesson was about where I'd been hiding. Writing a newsletter is comfortable, but the people I most need to reach aren't reading it. The host of the masterclass put it quite plainly: if we had the one thing someone desperately needed, we wouldn't start a social media account and hope those people found us. We'd go to them directly.

●Passive channels feel productive and safe.

●Direct outreach feels exposed and hard, but it's usually the thing that moves us forward.

What we're each doing in the next week or two

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