She Grows with Allyson Scammell
Ep #51: The Invisibility Trap and How to Avoid It
Hey there, She Grows Nation. That is the name of this sisterhood of soul guided entrepreneurs. Today we’re exploring what I have coined the in visibility trap, or I don’t know, maybe somebody else has coined it too, but, if they have, I’m not aware of it. That’s the contradiction that occurs when we are both fed up with feeling invisible to our ideal audience, yet at the same time, fear truly being seen and growing to the next level.
So how does this trap really occur? So let’s look at the average soul guided woman entrepreneur. That is what this audience consists of. And I’ve gotten to know this sliver of the world pretty well. And in most cases, the soul guided woman entrepreneur doesn’t start entrepreneurship when she’s 18.
Most of us start off with, in a different career, sometimes a shadow career, like in my case. And at some point in our adulthood, that career feels off and we get the calling. We get the calling to do something that enables us to be in alignment to our soul’s purpose, express our core gifts, and be in service to our ideal people and the planet.
And what I see happening is that calling normally happens maybe in the twenties, but often in the early thirties. And before we actually feel like we can make the shift and we feel financially stable enough to start making the shift to entrepreneurship, to this heart-based entrepreneurship, we’re well into our thirties.
So why does that matter for this conversation? Because I’ve seen it over and over again, soul guided entrepreneurs often don’t give themselves permission to learn how to grow a business. Growing a business is like anything. You have to learn how to do it takes time. Now, if your previous career is something like real estate, where you’re used to that concept of selling yourself and going out and getting clients, then that transitioned onto growing your own business, isn’t so steep.
But when you take someone like me, And I know a lot of you out there listening are like me. I worked for 17 years in government and public service. People came to me and asked me for money. I managed government contracts and grants. I had never really had to sell myself. I never really put myself out there in any sort of raw or vulnerable way.
So when I started my business, I felt like I was starting from scratch. I had been off social media for years. I’d been off it completely for my work. So I had to learn how to do basic social media. I had to learn how to write a blog post. I had to learn how to build a website. I had to learn absolutely everything from, you know, stage zero.
And I think what happened in my case, and I see it so often with my clients is I was so hard on myself that I didn’t get it perfect. The first time that it took so long for me to figure out how to write a good blog post that really spoke to my ideal people that people really reacted to and shared and engaged with.
It took me a long time and I wanted the very first blog post that I wrote to light the world on fire. I wanted it to be a viral success. And I didn’t give myself permission to learn how to do it now, back when I was 18 and I was graduating from high school, I gave myself four years of college to learn how to study political science and journalism.
And I studied Spanish. Then I gave myself two years of volunteer work in the peace Corps. Learning how to manage, NGOs and to do civil society development. Then I gave myself permission to take two years of graduate school, to learn international relations at the graduate level. And then by the time I was 26 years old, I had my first job in government.
So let’s see here. I gave myself eight years of learning. I gave myself permission to take eight years to learn. But then when I was 38 years old and I was doing a mid career pivot to launch my business, I gave myself zero permission to learn. I gave myself zero breaks. I wanted it perfect. The first time.
And it took me a lot of pain and struggle to realize that I was setting myself up for failure with those unrealistic expectations. And the result of me setting myself up for a failure is I felt invisible. I didn’t know how to write content that spoke to my ideal audience. I didn’t know who my ideal audience was, and I didn’t know exactly what I was offering them because I was new.
I was learning. And the result of me being unrealistic with myself was in visibility feelings of being invisible. And I see it so often the exact same phenomenon with my clients. So, let me ask you this, have you truly, no matter where you are on your journey, if you are brand new to business, or you’ve been at this for a while and you’re ready to up level to the next level, have you fully given yourself permission to learn, explore, and grow into where your business is right now?
And if the answer to that is no. I ask of you to start seeing, start looking for where you can give yourself permission to learn, to grow, to take a class, to read a book well done you for listening to this podcast. So that is fantastic. So listening to podcasts, investing in a coach, invest in me, invest in another coach.
I tell you what. When I look back at the growth of my business, the monetary investment that made the biggest bang or caused my business to grow the most by far was investing in other coaches to teach me how to grow my business. Because I didn’t know how to grow a business. It was those coaches and my hard work and perseverance that enabled my business to grow it.
Wasn’t me investing in Facebook ads or investing in pretty websites or pretty branding. It was my investing in coaches to teach me who I really was as a coach who I really wanted to serve and how to get my products and services in front of my ideal people. And investing that time and money and coaches was investing in me learning how to grow a business.
And when I invested that time and when I gave myself permission to learn, I gave myself permission to invest that money. Things started to turn around. I started to get clear on who I was called to serve how I could serve them. I started creating content that spoke to directly to their pains and their desires.
And I started to get seen. I started to feel seen people reacted to my stuff. They download it, they signed up, they liked it. They shared it. They commented all those things that happen in business that contribute to your feelings of being seen. I am seeing I’m visible. Ooh, it feels good. So that is a primary reason why we feel invisible because we didn’t give ourselves permission to learn.
And we set up unrealistic expectations on how fast we should be growing and expanding. Okay, let’s say then you’ve been at this for a while and you feel like you have been learning and you have been putting in the time and investing in coaches and investing in other things in your business and you still feel in visible.
What do you do then? there’s a lot of things that could be going on. One of them is something in your business needs to be tweaked either. You’re not identifying the right ideal client either. You’re not offering the right product or service for them, or you’re not really positioning yourself in front of your ideal clients in a way that’s going to call them in.
So. I recommend that you check in on your ideal client. Does that feel aligned? Check in on your product? Does that feel aligned? Check in how you’re marketing your product to your client? Does it feel aligned? Allow your intuition to guide you? And if you just take a moment to pause and ask these questions where am I in alignment in my business, your intuition is going to guide you towards it.
Maybe there’s a block or a fear that’s preventing you from getting in front of your people and getting people, buying your stuff. And maybe there’s a lot of blocks or fears that could be there, but maybe one of your blocks or fears is the flip side of the invisibility trap. And that is fearing being visible.
Do you fear growing to the next level? If you are offering a product or a service that is a little bit cutting edge or makes you feel a little bit raw or edgy, you will likely fear getting that edginess, that part of your truth out there to more and more people. So, let me give you an example of what I mean by that.
I’ll take my own story here. So I started out coaching. Gosh, where did I even start? I think, it’s funny. I don’t remember now, like who is my first ideal client avatar? I was always very, it took me a while to get clear on who she was, but I think I started out with, I was always interested in helping people, uncover their core gifts or those unique abilities they were born to share.
So that was always there from the get go. That was just something I knew had to be there in some form. But I think I started people. I know now I was helping people who, didn’t like their jobs and they just wanted a mid-career shift. So, I’m still doing a variation of that now, for sure.
I’m just more focused in, on a spiritual entrepreneurs. So I guess I was always going in the right direction with regards to my ideal client avatar, but. What I started to realize that my genius, what makes my coaching so special is the spiritual side of it. So my ability to communicate to non-physical consciousness, my ability to help you connect into your higher self, my ability to bring in the fifth dimensional tools into your business to spurn.
And generate third dimensional growth in terms of money and expanded and larger audiences. That is my superpower. My genius. it feels much easier to talk about it now because I’ve overcome so many fears. But when I first came to this realization, That these spiritual tools that I’m so gifted at, they’re the things that really can help spiritual entrepreneurs grow their business.
So I need to start talking about it. I need to share that I’m a psychic medium. I need to talk about and help people connect to their own spiritual support team. And when I first came to this realization and I first started talking about it, I was afraid. I was scared of what people would think of me. I was afraid.
They would think I’m weird and strange and fringe, it’s a basic human need we have. And that is to feel like you belong to feel like you’re part of a community. And if you feel like your community, your group, your people, your Passy is rejecting you because you’re too edgy. You’re too out there. You’re too cutting edge.
You’re to fill in the blank that is going to trigger a fear in you. That’s going to trigger a basic survival fear. And ultimately that is triggering a fear of being visible. I wanted to talk about my abilities to speak to angels and nonphysical consciousness, but I feared how you would perceive me. So I feared being visible with that content in front of you. So on the one hand I wanted you to see me.
I wanted to be visible, but I feared you seeing me and I feared how you would react to me. This is the essence of the invisibility trap. So where in your business are you fearing being seen and where in your business is this fear causing you to hold back to cork up, keep it in, create content that’s acceptable to everyone.
And when you do that, when you create content that is acceptable to everyone, it speaks to no one. And when you’re speaking to no one you’re staying invisible, people will scroll on. They won’t see it, they won’t see it. So the trap perpetuates, and that brings me very nicely to how do we remove this fear of being visible?
So we know that we have to give ourselves permission to learn and permission to grow. And we need to check in with our business to see where we’re out of alignment and that’s going to help us be seen. So how do we remove the fear of being seen? it starts with your truth, really because our fears are padding our truth.
And our fears come from our brain. That’s trying to keep us safe, right. And keep us accepted and keep us part of the group. So the fear goes in and it, it just, it creates a nice little lining of padding around your truth. The problem with that, it’s your truth that wants to get out. It’s your truth that your ideal people need.
And want and are craving for and are looking for. So lean into your truth. Try to get as specific as you can regarding what is the part of my truth that my ideal clients really need and they want to receive from me. Okay. So in my case, it was teaching people how to connect to their intuition and spirit guides.
That was a part of my truth that was being held back by my fear. So then you go into your fear and you give yourself permission to feel the fear, get into that fear, immerse yourself in that fear of how other walls, taking that again. Immerse yourself into that fear of how others will perceive you.
That fear of being rejected, that fear of being misunderstood. Just sit in the fear, bring it to the surface of your skin. Feel it for 60 to 90 seconds. When you feel the wave starting to go down deep breaths, long, deep belly breaths, exhale. As you exhale, say out loud, or to yourself, the word release, I’m releasing this fear.
And once you feel like, ah, the fear is being released, pivot down to your heart space, pivot down your heart space and ask your heart what part of my truth does my ideal client need today? What part of my truth does my ideal client need today and allow me to share that truth with her, allow me to share that truth because it’s that truth.
She is going to see, she’s going to see it. She’s going to react to it. She’s going to like it. Comment, sign up, pay for it. That my friends is how you are seen and you don’t give a shit about being seen by everyone. It doesn’t matter. You don’t need 50,000 likes. You need 12 likes by 12 ideal clients, 12 ideal clients can easily get you a six figure year in your business.
You don’t need masses of numbers. All right, because that’s the other thing about being seen. It’s a perception feeling seen, you perceive that you’re seen and you feel seen, you perceive that enough people are seeing your stuff and you will feel seen for some people you need thousands of people to feel seen for others.
You need a few ideal people to feel seen. I invite you to shift into the ladder. Shift into quality over quantity. Meaning notice when your stuff is being seen by one or two or three idle people and allow that to feel as if it’s been seen by a million allow those people who mean the most to you.
They mean so much your idle people mean so much to you. The masses don’t. At the end of the day, when you’re getting into your truth, wanting to be seen by the masses is an ego, want wanting to serve the masses and that’s different. But normally when you have this desire to get your content seen by the masses, you’re probably in an ego desire.
That’s fine. No worries. It’s okay to have ego desires. Just notice it shift back into your heart. Ask your higher self, what its desires are and its desires are to serve your ideal people and allow those people, that sliver of your audience to see you and feel seen by them feel seen by the one, the two, the 12.
And ah, it feels good to be seen. It feels good to be visible by the people you feel called to serve. The final point I want to explore with you today is how to position yourself to be seen in front of your ideal clients. First, as I mentioned, you want to answer the following question? What part of my truth does my ideal client truly need and more specifically, what part of my unique genius does she need?
And when an answer arrives, or even if you’re not sure, take your best guess, then develop your signature offerings around that and make sure your signature offering speaks directly to three things your ideal client avatars wants. Her pains and her needs, but when it comes to your marketing content, so that content you create that helps you to be seen by her so she can self-select and say, yes, she’s the person I want to engage with.
She’s the person I want to hire. She’s the person I want to buy from. You want to lead with talking about her? Why thoughts and her pains, but not her needs. Because very often, she doesn’t have clarity on what her needs really are. She knows her pains and she knows what she wants, but you’re the one is going to help identify her needs so she can transform them and get one step closer to those desires.
So for example, part of my truth and unique genius is that. I am a soul guide and I help Lightworkers or anyone who feels ready to do this work, to assemble the mosaic pieces of their soul, to create a clear and beautiful picture that shifts them into alignment to their soul’s purpose. This is what my ideal client, not all of my clients, just my ideal clients need help with, but what they want.
Is to be fully booked in their business and their pain points are feelings of invisibility and just general blocks and resistance that affects their business growth. So I don’t lead my content. I don’t start out with the mosaic of your soul and all that deep stuff I start out with. Are you feeling invisible?
Do you desire to be fully booked? That’s something that’s easy to understand. My ideal clients self-select immediately. They identify with that. They’re like, yes, I want to be fully booked. Yes. I feel invisible. Yes. I want to get to know Allyson better. I want to go to the next level deeper is this woman. I, is this someone I want in my life?
Could she help me? Might I want to invest in a product or service someday. I don’t know. I don’t know, but I’m going to take that next step. That’s what you want your marketing content to be focused on. How do you get that ideal potential client going that next step with you? Okay. And you get to the next step leading as clearly and quantifiably as you can regarding their pains and their wants.
Try to make it so clear. It jumps out of the page. For example. Get fully booked, sleep for eight hours uninterrupted, get six pack abs, feel like newlyweds with your spouse. Again, wherever possible, use numbers, if you can, or try to get something that is clearly visible for them to see. So for example, you promise to help people lose their final 10 pounds.
So they have an ideal weight goal in mind and you help them get the final 10 pounds. So let’s say they want away 150 pounds, but they weigh 160 pounds. They hire you at 160 pounds, they go on a journey with you. And very often that journey, isn’t just about weight loss. It’s about loving your body, eating nutritional food, doing things as self care, you know, in that journey, you give this person their needs.
Of course, which often has nothing to do with weight loss in this example. And then when they’re done with the journey with you, they look down at this scale and they see one 50 instead of one 60. So I know a lot of my clients say, yeah, but I deal in happiness. I deal in inner transformation. It’s hard to quantify that I don’t have a six pack abs I can promise.
So that’s when I say explore deep, try to find your six pack, abs, try to find your eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. That is, what’s going to call that want, that quantifiable want is going to help you be seen by your ideal clients. And the other thing it’s going to do, it’s going to say it’s safe to invest in you.
I know that if I invest my time in my money in you, I know I’m going to walk away with eight hours of uninterrupted sleep. As I’m someone who suffers from insomnia, for example, So when you can identify your ideal clients, quantifiable, easy to see, easy to measure what, and talk about it a lot and talk about those pain points.
That’s preventing her that standing in the way from what gets taking that again and spend a lot of time talking about her pain points empathizing with her pain. About that’s preventing her from getting her wants from achieving or experiencing her wants. And you’re the guide, your, the person that’s going to help her get there.
And when it’s appropriate, you can talk about her needs and you can talk about how you’re going to address her needs. But very often you don’t want to lead with that. You lead with. What she’s going to understand. What’s going to jump off the page for her, how she’s going to self-select that this content is for me, this person is for me, this offering is for me.
And when you do that, when you really start speaking to her, wants. And her pains in a way that’s clear and easy for her to understand and digest you will, and your content will jump off the page. She will find it, she will see it, and she will share it with the other people in her network that are struggling with the same things and, or have the same wants.
And it’s important to add here that getting to know. Inside and out your ideal client, avatars pains wants and needs, takes time. It takes connecting in with her, talking to her, talking to people that are in her general demographic, working with her getting feedback. It takes a lot of trial and error. It doesn’t come overnight.
So again, you’re giving yourself permission to learn. To get to know who she is to get her know her, taking that again, and to get her no, taking that again. Okay. And to get to know her pains wants needs, and how you position yourself as the guide and create a signature offering that addresses those things transforms her life really does speak to her needs and transform her needs.
And takes her closer to the person she most wants to be. So to recap, The Invisibility Trap is that feeling of wanting to be seen and fearing being seen at the same time, that sends out a mixed message to the universe and your ideal people and has the result of keeping your stuff invisible. We often get into the invisibility trap because we don’t give ourselves permission to learn our ideal client and learn how to reach her and learn how to create content that speaks to her. We get into the trap because we fear sharing our truth. We fear opening up that piece of ourselves that feels raw and vulnerable. We transcend the Invisibility Trap by getting clear on what our truth is and what part of our truth our ideal client really needs, and feeling into the fear of sharing that truth so you can release that fear and go back to being in highest service to the people you feel called to serve and showing up as your greatest, most authentic self.
And my challenge for you this week is to ask this question, what part of my deepest truth does my ideal client most need? What part of my deepest truth does my ideal client most need? And when an answer comes back or you perceive an answer to be there, and when you understand that need what she needs from you, then identify as it relates to that need her greatest wants, and her greatest pain point standing in the way of that want.
And create marketing content, create one piece, several pieces, however many pieces you feel called of marketing content that speak directly to her pains. And her wants being as clear and quantifiable as you can and share that content with your audience and in those places where you believe your ideal audience is hanging out.
And when you do that, she will see you. She will see your content and she will want to go one step closer to you and to creating a long-term relation ship to you and your offerings. And that’s all I have for today, my friends.
