Niche Without Shrinking: Why You’re Not Bringing All of Yourself to Your Business [E82]

[00:00:00] After I recorded this episode, I realized that this episode talks about niching and gifts and reclaiming the parts of ourselves and so many other things that are gonna be important to some upcoming conversations. I realized that I recently did a podcast where I was a guest on Aligned and Turned On with Nedjma. Nedjma Bouhid. That is on all the players, and that is on YouTube. I'll link all of that below. It is a video conversation, and the title is What If Your Greatest Gift Doesn't Have To Fit In A Box? Now, we talked about a lot of things on that podcast episode, but that was the title she used, so how could I not have this episode and that and let you guys know about it? Additionally, I'd mentioned a guest spot I did in the last episode. On that guest spot, I'd mentioned that one of my gifts was that I could see people's gifts better than they could see them themselves, and today [00:01:00] I ran into a past client who said just that. She's like, "What a great skill you have, this ability to just see what people are good at." Because I'd worked with her, and then she saw herself in a whole new way. The fact that niching shouldn't mean that you shrink yourself.

 hopefully you enjoyed the last episode about trusting yourself, a much more theoretical question than the AEO question or even what I talked about the episode in between, which was building from design versus building from tactics. I understand and I explained in that episode that people think of the tools that I use under the hood as spiritual tools, energy tools healing journey tools, but I don't use them that way.

I use them as literal frameworks. The accuracy, the bullseye, the precision, the speed, the efficiency is unsurpassed [00:02:00] That is what I keep them in my toolbox for. Generic shit and regular advice and not doing prep work and not analyzing and not having those two gifts, because astrology and Human Design are fundamentally different systems, is a lot easier.

Also, since I alluded to in the episode before last about my system that I'm building, I use three separate branches of astrology. Those are three separate schools to learn. There's overlap. They're not three systems, but they're three schools. That is what I mean by a simple solution based on a complex architecture.

I had a smoothie this morning, and that smoothie had collagen protein powder, it had soy milk, it had a frozen banana, it had peanut butter, it had pearl powder, it had rose powder, it had bee pollen, and it had royal [00:03:00] jelly. That's a lot of stuff. But if you had just handed that to me, I would've gotten all the goodness without having to think about it, and that's what I do in my solutions, and that's the point. People who do Human Design do not know the Kabbalah. 99.9% of people do not know the Kabbalah, and I guess you don't really need to It's good to know where it comes from. It's good to know about the I Ching, and the Kabbalah, and the chakra system, and the astrology system.

Although I will say the correlation to the chakra system and the astrology school is very light. As someone who studied astrology for over a decade, and as someone who's Indian, very light. But it's all good because I had a lot of soy milk, but I only had a splash of pearl powder, so not everything is gonna be blended in the same way. When I think of Human Design, it's a lot of Kabbalah, 'cause it's a lot of energy. It's frequency. That's what makes Human Design, in my [00:04:00] opinion additive the last episode, I talked about this notion of intuition and body wisdom, one extreme, and then the episode prior to that, I talked about a AEO, and there's nothing flow about AEO. It is linear. It is logic. That is similar, and they this episode is about none of that. This the episode that I alluded to that I did with Daniel Polgar, I mentioned that on the episode before last I quickly reviewed it because I'm gonna be putting that on YouTube sooner than later. It's on Substack on her platform. It's gonna go up on YouTube and other places I'm present. One of the things I do with flow is I'll just grab a book, bibliomancy it's called, or a tarot deck, you pull a card or whatever. So I opened up randomly an hour-long episode, and I got to that one section of the episode, which I'll link the full thing below. [00:05:00] She used the word reclamation And she's a counselor, and she's trauma-informed. So what she does is she helps people reclaim parts of themselves. That's what inner child work is. I'm not an expert in this, but that's a lot of what therapy is. People had trauma in their childhood that caused them to fracture parts of themselves, and they lost something And that's part of what she does in her work. And she uses astrology as a tool for that, as an MRI, as a map in the way that I use it for business I wasn't quite sure what the word reclamation means. I know what it means, but I wanted to look it up. She's a writer. She's very good with language. And I was like, "Let me understand what this means," because I had described what I do, and she called it reclamation, and I was like, "That's not quite what I do, but maybe there's something for me to learn that I can [00:06:00] talk about here." Reclamation is essentially recapturing the parts of yourself that are lost. It's reclaiming something like land, if the land was stolen or something was stolen. It's bringing something back.

While that's not the work that I do, when you think about owning your gifts and you think about building from your brilliance, I will be honest that most people I work with don't know their gifts. Doing positioning work is very difficult because they're like, "I know what I do. I know my niche.

What I need is a marketing tactic. What I need is a social media strategy. What I need is a better sales framework. What I need is an XYZ." Think of positioning as this back of the envelope, throwaway exercise that is five minutes. Positioning is not used in traditional solopreneur work, which is why I gave you those examples about software and Haagen-Dazs and [00:07:00] category creation. That's in the episode before last Niche is not positioning. Unique value proposition is not niche. So positioning is so foundational and so fundamental, and it is an aspect of what I do.

You hitch your wagon to something And I hitch my wagon to business consultant, business advisor life is about experimentation. Marketing is about experimentation. Positioning at some level is about experimentation when you're a solopreneur. When you're a medical device company and you're a software company and you work on some of the campaigns I did, you're not launching a million-dollar medical device on an experimental campaign. You gotta nail that first. That's a lot of what I used to do. I was thinking about that because it's not necessarily that people are reclaiming the parts of themselves. A lot [00:08:00] of them don't even know they might have an inclination of what their gifts are. They probably don't have that sweet spot of what I do, which is I bring in, what you do that nobody else can do. Where should you double down your brilliance in your business architecture? How do you make it commercially viable? How does that align with your client attraction frequency, which is different And then the fourth piece is the prosperity path. That is the how are you designed to make money in this lifetime with ease? Not easy, with ease, meaning less friction, and how can you marry that to your gifts? That's what X marks the spot is, and at some level, that's what I do in different ways in my work

That pilot is still running. There is a link in the show notes. That will triple in price when the pilot is done that's for you [00:09:00] if you feel like you know you're not bringing all of yourself to the table, but you don't know why. You're feeling like your stuff is all over the place. You're feeling scattered. You know you're driving the boat, you're taking efforts, but you're looking at everybody else's map. You're kind of confused, and some part of you has an inkling of maybe you're not bringing all of you to the table, and that's what made me think about when I heard the term reclamation. It's not reclaiming parts of yourself because I don't know if you even know that you've lost parts of yourself. I don't even know if you know that those parts existed in the first place.

Sometimes with gems, they're under the ground. We don't see them. That's what bringing the brilliance out is and then weaving it into the business design. That's a big part of what I do. But I do think that there's an element, if I look at all of my clients so far, and of course clients evolve, where there are parts of themselves that were talked out of them by business coaches, by well-meaning people, by strategists, [00:10:00] by niching.

They've kind of lost parts of themselves that they thought they had to diminish in order to be clear. And in that sense, by helping them understand that that's not the case, that it's just about how you create that box It's a more macrame box versus a cardboard box, which is what I said almost two years ago, probably to the day two years ago, actually.

That's what I do. And in that sense, you are reclaiming parts of yourself because you feel more alive, you feel more, for lack of a better word, aligned. But it's not aligned, it's like a Rubik's cube, it's like a click, it's like a yes. And you're bringing all of you to the table. So in that sense, it is reclamation. in a back of the [00:11:00] envelope way. Not in the way that a therapist would describe it, not in the way that I would even wanna be associated with it, but I saw that, I thought of it. And I do think that that is something that is in the water right now that no one's really discussing in that way, is this feeling like I'm not bringing all of me to the table in the way that I could. The tactics are great and they serve a purpose, but when you layer the different pieces on that cause erosion, you erode the building and then what are you building? And that's something to be thinking about. Next episode is actually gonna be a conversation that I had with Danielle on this platform. It's not the interview I'm alluding to. That's linked in the show notes. That's on Substack. That'll be coming up in time. But we had a fabulous conversation [00:12:00] about a month ago about what she does and a bunch of other stuff, and I don't remember what we talked about, but I know it's fabulous, and I know it's next. X marks the spot in the show notes. Couple of slots left. Take advantage if it speaks to you. I'll see you on the next one.