You're Afraid to Be Visible and It's Hurting Your Marketing

“If you’re struggling with the current step, go back to the previous one.”

I was going to write about why it’s hard to price art (and lots of services like coaching, lessons, classes and other services that can’t be looked up on an ‘official’ price guide somewhere).

Even though pricing is hard, there are some objective ways to do it. You can figure out what you need to earn by the hour, track how many hours it took you to make something, multiply those two numbers together, and voila! Your price.

It’s slightly more complex than how I just described it (and I’ll go into more detail next week), but this pricing method only requires second grade math.

Still, people balk at pricing this way. Sometimes there are good reasons for balking, but mostly, something else is at work.

What’s the step that comes before pricing? Being visible.

For me to write this newsletter weekly, AND be willing to send it to anyone, took me years of working with my fear of being visible. It started in 2007, when I went to this woman, to have my colors done and to go shopping with her so she could select clothes for me to buy.

We took photographs of all the outfits she put together. I had a simple system to follow:

• Pick out the outfit I wanted to wear that day from the photographs.
• Put it on.

But when I followed the system and left the house to go about my day, I got scared.

It wasn’t that her color and wardrobing skills didn’t work. They did.

That was the problem.

I could see people noticing me, in ways they hadn’t before when I was wearing baggy t-shirts and jeans. I did not like that. I didn’t completely revert to jeans and t-shirts. I just sabotaged the outfits she put together by wearing a gym sweatshirt over them. Or I’d wear a shirt she selected but keep the baggy jeans. I avoided the body-conscious clothing altogether.

It took years of practice, working with her more times over the years, and having multiple Soul Portraits made by Siddiqi Ray, before I was willing to be seen. It still amazes me that I was willing to take the (many) suggestions to change my website to my name: www.christystrauch.com. This doesn’t bother me now, but it did when the site first went up last year.

Bottom line, my work isn’t about me. No one cares if I use my name as my URL, or dress in my right colors so I can be seen, or write a weekly newsletter.

What they care about is how I can help them.

Your people don’t care how you feel about being visible either. They just want to be able to find you so they can buy your work. They need to feel the emotions, the impact, the significance of what you’re putting into the world.

I felt like saying, “Get over yourself!” to my own self over those years. In fact, I did a few times, but it didn’t help. What did help was the work I did with Jennifer and Siddiqi, and understanding what my fear of visibility was protecting me from: possible ridicule, criticism, and the crippling shame that comes with them.

Are you afraid to be visible? If you want to chat about what you can do about that, click here to make a short appointment.