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In this episode, I look closely at what it means to have confidence in your offer and offer some tips on dealing with a lack of confidence.
Show Notes
Belief is everything as a business owner. And that manifests itself in your sales. If you don’t believe in yourself and what you’re offering as a product or service, you’ll have trouble attracting customers.
In this episode, I look closely at what it means to believe in your offer and I share tips on cultivating belief in your offer so you can confidently invite your people to work with you.
Other resources
- The RELEASE Method - 7 steps to releasing your biggest sales blocks + attracting your next client
- The Black Girl Business Bar Facebook community
- Book a sales call with Khalida
More on Khalida
Khalida DuBose is a business coach specializing in sales strategy. As a previous crowdfunding coach, she supported more than a thousand crowdfunding campaigns and project creators in their quest to bring their dreams, passions, and ideas to the world. Now, she focuses on helping women of color who are early-stage online business owners as they navigate the entrepreneurial journey. For more information on Khalida, visit khalidadubose.com. Follow Khalida on Instagram @khalida.dubose. You can email her at khalida@blackgirlbusinessbar.com.
The Black Girl Business Bar is produced by Zuri Berry (@ZMCPodcasts). Music by Vincent Tone and Die Hard Productions.
Creators & Guests
What is The Black Girl Business Bar?
The Black Girl Business Bar Podcast is for Black entrepreneurial women who crave practical information to implement in their businesses and careers. They want tips and tactics that work and they want on-the-go mentorship that will make a difference in their businesses, projects, and lives.
Hosted by business coach and crowdfunding expert Khalida DuBose, the Black Girl Business Bar is all about letting Black women know what's possible for them in their entrepreneurial journey.
If you don't believe in your offer, if you don't believe in whatever it is you're selling, then nobody else will either. Henry Ford said whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.
Welcome to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. I'm your host Khalida DuBose. And this podcast is my love letter to all of you, especially you Black women and women of color. I'm on a mission to help you thrive in your business and your life by bringing you practical advice, tips, and mentorship that will empower you to make bold moves.
I want to see you increase your sales, overcome your mindset blocks, and step into your best self as the leader of your business and your life.
All right friends. So today I have a similar message for you as Mr. Henry Ford had. And my message to you is that you really, really have to believe in yourself as a provider. And you have to believe in your business. You have to believe in your offer before anybody else is going to believe it. And we're going to talk about all the things that happened when you're putting that belief on other people before you internalize it yourself.
So what really brought this up for me was so many conversations I spent. I'm so happy I gave myself permission to have a lot of conversations during the month of February with women in my audience, just talk to them and really hear them really hold space for them, and hear what they had to say. And a lot of what I heard coming up with a lot of self-worth issues that then bleeds over onto our offers, our business, how we feel about ourselves, how we perceive ourselves in relation to our business and our offers.
So, I recently found myself, you know, kind of pondering over whether I really believed in my offer and a question was posed by my coach to all of her people inside of her coaching program. She asked us did we really believe in our offer? Do we have like a deep belief in our offer?
And my knee-jerk reaction was yes, of course, I believe in my offer. Right. I'm coaching other women to believe in their offers. So of course I believe in my offer. But then something made me think about it. You know, my brain kind of like my, my ego answered. Yes. Then my brain was like, well, do you, do you really?
And so I started thinking about it. And I worked through some of the prompts that my coach gave us as well. And I came to this conclusion that yes, I really believe in it, but just doing those prompts actually helped really anchor in that belief a lot. So, you know, I highly recommend that and I'll try to give some of those thoughts in this podcast as well.
We're starting some of those tips in this podcast as well.
And you know, I thought, yeah, I do. I have a healthy belief in what I'm doing and I love it so much. And so I feel like my belief is intact, but it was kind of a reminder for me to make sure I keep it on maintenance. Make sure I, you know, I add this to my mindset practices where I'm always checking in with my belief, not from the standpoint of do other people believe? Do other people believe in me? Or do they believe in my offer? But more, you know, how I'm feeling and my thoughts and feelings from my offer.
So I'm going to talk a little bit more about myself and my story around that on Instagram this week. So if you're listening to this in real time, mid March 2022, then head over there and check it out. And if you're not following me over there and make sure you follow me, you can find my tag in the show notes.
So let's jump right into this and look at, what does it look like to believe in your offer? So what does that really look like in the world? Okay. What does it look like in the real world? Not to believe in your offer? What sort of things start to pop up when you don't believe in your offer? And then let's talk about, I'm going to give you some tips to start cultivating a solid belief in your offer.
All right. So to get us started, let's look at three things that you do not need in order to believe in your offer. I want to just put this out there right away. Get this. Like just lay it on the table. So you're not thinking this the whole time. So some of the things that you don't need to believe, number one, you don't need to believe.
Sorry. Number one, you don't need anybody else to validate your offer or you as a provider by paying for what you're doing, writing you a glowing review. Or just getting such an amazing result from you. Okay. And I'll explain. So I know these things help us to feel comfortable. They let us know what's working over time and yes, they can be a confidence boost.
Once you are working with clients that you're seeing was help half, excuse me, once you're working with clients and you're seeing what's helping them, what's maybe not so helpful, et cetera. Right. So they can definitely influence your practice of what you're doing. The core belief that, Hey, I can do this should not be coming from other people.
It should come from you. The core belief of, I believe in this should come from you. It does not come from it. The starting point is not validation of other people. Secondly, um, you don't need to be able to take your clients from a to Z before you believe in yourself. It's probably probably more appropriate for you to be taking your clients from a to.
Or a to see during the time that you're working with them so that you don't overwhelm them, et cetera. So many of us are walking around with this feeling that I must solve all of my client's problems. Right. It's just not realistic. I'm sorry to tell you, this is just not realistic. It puts a lot of pressure on you, which then sometimes pushes you away from trying to get clients.
If you can't handle that pressure. And also your clients are not looking for somebody who's just coming to solve all their problems. Okay. Um, and finally, People think I need a ton of receipts. I need a ton of testimonials, and I completely understand why you would think that you need testimonials before you believe in yourself.
But here's the thing. Sometimes those testimonials backfires. Sometimes you have people saying all these wonderful things about you, but if you don't believe those things, then it's not going to, um, then it's not going to really work in your favor. Right? You're going to start to feel that imposter syndrome popping in like.
Hm, you know, what have these testimonials, but I still don't believe this. Right. So it's important for you to cultivate that belief before, um, the testimonials come as well. Right? So I'm, especially, I'm especially directing this to my community. That's just starting out or had very few clients so far. If you don't have all the receipts, don't worry about that.
That is not what you need in order to believe in yourself. I really like to think of receipts. Um, as being good for those times down the road in your business, when you're codifying your methods, your launching programs, and you're raising prices. That's when receipts are really good, like, Hey, I have a method, um, that you can go through and you can use.
And then all of a sudden, right, it's nice to be able to show a receipt that somebody else has got this, but when you're first starting off and you're, you're working not necessary. All right. So. Let's now talk about what it really looks like in the real life when you're believing in your offer. And then we'll touch on what happens when you don't believe in your offer after that.
So when your believing in your offer, you're owning the transformation that you can provide, right? You're not going crazy with like making all these, these promises that you can't follow through on, but instead you're saying, you know what, this is what I've done. This is what I know I can help clients with. Right.
You're being mature and realistic about it. And then you're offering it to clients knowing full well that your offer is going to mature over time. You're going to learn more. You're going to have more experiences with clients and it's going to mature. And then you're going to be able to offer more to people. You're gonna be able to say more of that in your marketing.
It also looks like finding evidence that you are competent. I believe in evidence, you guys know this. Find evidence for yourself. If your brain is. Wired like mine, where it wants to find all the reasons why you're not good and that's that's most of us, then it is your job is your part-time job and your business to make sure your brain has sufficient evidence to believe in itself.
Okay. Really your brain is trying to protect you. And so it was your job to go out and get that evidence. So, finding evidence that talks about like your bet shows that you're competent in what is the value that you have to offer here? So a person in the real world who believes in their offer is doing this. They're looking for evidence, they're reminding theirselves, they're cultivating that belief in theirselves.
There will be moments of self doubt. I just want to put that out there. They're inevitable. So find the evidence for yourself.
Really believing in your offer looks like being brave and courageous enough to work with what you have right now. To start at this starting point that you're at right now with the full belief that you are going to continue to learn as you go, and your offer will evolve over time.
It also looks like not comparing yourself or your offer to anyone else. And I know this can be really hard. We all get caught in it. So it doesn't mean if it happens to you every once in a while that you don't believe in what you're offering. What I'm saying is, is that to cultivate true belief in your offer, to get to this point where you really believe in your offer, like many people out there who are selling hundreds of thousands, even into the millions, is you really have to learn how to put blinders on and don't compare yourself to other people.
Don't compare your offer to theirs. It also looks like not creating a ton of offers to help you compensate for your feelings of inadequacy.
So again, I see this a lot. I coach on this a lot. I talk to women in my audience about this a lot. I'm just going to have all these offers so that right, so that I can feel like I'm offering people more so that I can believe in myself more.
If I can show them the quantity of what I can give, then maybe people will buy in. And then maybe I believe in myself and. You see, When you actually believe in your offer, you keep things simple and you create offers based on a need and a demand in your business. Not from feelings of
So let's look at what happens when you don't believe in your offer. And I think I got into that a little bit, right? I have a hard time not putting them together. So what happens when you don't believe in your offer? You won't put it out there consistently. This is the big one.
This is number one. And that's why I put it first. You will not talk about it consistently. You won't put it out there consistently. You won't believe in yourself. And even if you are putting it out there, you'll be putting it out there with this timid energy that people can feel. People want to work with you when you're confident. And I'm not saying you have to be the most confident person in the world, but they want to believe they want to work with you if you believe in what you're doing. You're you, you're the one who has the knowledge. So they can't believe it before you do. So you won't put it out there consistently, if you don't believe in it.
Another thing that happens is you will probably tweak it and change it a lot. I see this a lot. There are so many people I follow and sometimes I'm really gearing myself up to work with somebody. And I watched them change things three times and it kind of turns me off. I'm like, What are they doing? I think I thought I needed what they had before, but now I'm not sure, you know, so keep that in mind. You don't need to constantly change and tweak, get clear on your offer and how it provides value and stick with it.
What also happens is there's a lot of feelings of inadequacy. As I mentioned before that they're not solving all of the problems that. Client has, and this is really going back to your own self worth feeling like you're only worthy if you're solving all the problems in the world.
I tend to see people create a lot of different offerings to solve all these problems and then they feel burned out and they feel like, how can I possibly sustain more than even three clients. Another thing in this area is that your offers will end up competing with one another. So I see this a lot and then it confuses your clients. If they are even hopping on a sales call with you, then you're offering all these different things and they, they just want simplicity. They're probably there because they're confused too.
So you don't want your offers competing. You don't want to be creating from a place of like, I feel inadequate.
I see people do this, coaching in the DMs, trying to validate what they're doing. Or when I say coaching in the DMS, I don't just always mean the DMS. What I really mean here is like, sometimes you will coach on a sales call, right? You'll start coaching heavily on a sales call. I put this one in, because this is something that I did, but I also put it in because I've talked to other women who've done this. So I know it's happening. It's happening probably a little bit more than we think.
And so you start coaching and you start sharing all these things and you start to overwhelm the person with the vision that you see for them, because you want them to buy into what you're doing.
What also happens when you don't believe in your offer is you will talk people out of buying it from you. So I've seen many times where it was like, okay a client's coming, right. And or this is a potential client and I'll, and I'll have actually have a client. And she'd be like, well, they have to have all these things, right. She starts throwing all the objections right. They're all these things need to happen before I work with them.
So this is talking people out of buying from you. When you have an offer and you know what that container is, and you know what your boundaries are, you don't need to do that. You just listened to what they need. Sometimes that is a perfect client for you. And they just think they need something else.
So talking people out of buying from you happens a lot. I've done it myself. I've actually done it inside of a sales call before. Like, nope. I don't think I'm the provider for you and not from a place of, like, no, I'm really not the provider for this person, but from a place of like, I'm really scared to work with this person. What if I can't deliver, you know, all the things, right. I did that in my previous coaching career.
And then finally, needing these grandiose responses from clients in order to feel like your offer is valid for grandiose responses from people when you're putting out content. You're like, no, this is going to like really wow them and then you don't get the response you need. And so it makes you feel like, oh, maybe I'm not, maybe I don't have this offer. You know, maybe my offer is not good. Or I've been working with this client for six months, how come like my testimonial doesn't say the things that I was hoping that it would say.
This is what happens when you don't have a deep belief in yourself and what you're offering and what your process looks like and what you're doing, even with the belief that these things are going to evolve over time.
All right, coach. So how can we start to cultivate the belief? Is that the question you're asking? If that's the question you're asking, I got some tips for you. So don't worry.
First and foremost. be realistic about your offer and make sure it's within your wheelhouse. meaning, yes, offers are going to evolve over time. Yes. You're going to be able to help more and more people. But right now, today, you don't have to promise results that you've never done yourself. So to give you an example of that, if you're a copywriter, if you're, if you're a business coach, right?
You're a business coach. You don't have to promise people that you can get them fully booked. If you've never gotten people fully booked. If you're a copywriter, you don't have to promise people, six figure email launches if you've never done a six-figure email launch. You can promise them what you have done, what you have done consistently.
So spend some time asking yourself powerful questions about your offer would be my second, my second piece of advice. It's really interesting to me. A lot of times when we have problems, we don't know how to solve them because we don't know. We don't start asking ourselves. And I think a lot of times we shy away from questions because we think that it's going to exacerbate the problem that we're perceiving this going on.
In fact, it's like almost opening a pressure valve that relieves a lot of pressure when we start to ask questions, because once again, our brains are like, oh, okay, well there's, there's possibility in questions, right? So why am I serving these people? You know, what do I, what do I have to offer? What, what do I love to offer? What have I done in this area? That's helped me. That's helped others. That would be a benefit to people. How is my offer life-changing? This one goes out to my, my business coach. She asked us this question, how is your, your offering life changing? So you can sit and you can list five ways in which your offer is life-changing.
And I really love this exercise when I did it because it was so helpful for me. And it really, for me, it just did a lot of reinforcing of what I already knew, what I was already doing, what I already loved.
So a hint about life-changing offers before your brain spins out about that. Life-changing can be something as small as you're a health coach and you help somebody think about food differently. Maybe somebody comes to you and they've been struggling with food for five years, 10 years, 20 years. And it like plagues their brain. What are they going to eat? You know, how can they stay on track today? And that's been their life for 20 years. And after working with you, that's not the case anymore, right? After working with you, they think differently about their food or maybe somebody is going through a divorce and they work with you. And they've just not been able to sleep since the divorce proceedings started. And now they're getting, you know, restful night's sleep. Now they know how to calm their nervous system, et cetera. And that's life changing for people. That changed something in their life. So I want you to think about it like that.
Another tip here is gather evidence. We talked about, I talked about this a lot, but I'm telling you I can't stress this enough. You have to sit down, you have to write down the things that you've done. You have to celebrate yourself. You have to listen to what people are saying and take it in. And you have to say nice things about yourself, because when you do start to gather evidence, it'd be really hard for you to write down like a small win.
If you're like, oh, that didn't really count. Learn how to celebrate yourself, learn how to, um, learn how to. First again, I guess this is believing yourself, right. But when you gather evidence, make sure you write down all the small things, make sure you're remembering all of the things that you've done and that people have said. And instead of rejecting what people say, accept it as truth, even when it doesn't feel true.
And then I would also say along the lines of this gather evidence about other experience that you have in life that might not necessarily directly be related to what you're going to do in coaching. So for instance, maybe in a prior job, you know, you're always in sales.
You learn something in sales, you probably learned how to speak to people. You probably learned how to hear what they're not saying. You've probably learned how to handle objections and those things are gonna really come in handy. When you're talking to clients who might be going through something really tough, and they're throwing objections to you as a coach. So. You know, think about the experience that you've had that might not be directly related to your clients, but that's going to end up benefiting your clients, right.
And this will help you have a lot cultivate a lot more self-belief, which then helps you to believe more in what you're offering.
So I would say next would be, get help. Surround yourself with positive community, people who have different zones of genius than you, who have shared experience, but maybe they're not exactly like you. That can be very helpful. Maybe they're all entrepreneurs, they're going through a similar journey, but that journey looks a little bit different, right? Surround yourself with helpful community.
Also hire coaches, hire therapists, you know, whoever it is that you need to help you navigate some of the mindset blocks, facilitate some of the strategy, facilitate how you think about your offer, how you're structuring your offer, whatever it is, get the support that you need, in order to help you to cultivate the belief.
And then finally, I would say remember that what you practice in your life will also translate to your business and vice versa. So if you find yourself in life having very negative thoughts about other people, or what other people do, or what they're offering, your brain hears you, and it's going to bring that back to you.
So this is like people talk about karma and they kind of understand this. I think. The way I think about karma. It's like, it's not some future event that's going to happen. It's when you say negative things, your brain is taking it in and it's taking it as, like you're saying it to yourself. Even if you don't feel the effects of that immediately, it's happening immediately.
So try to think about what others are doing more positively, if that helps. And think about what thoughts you're having and just all parts of your life throughout the day, and ask yourself, are those thoughts helpful? Are they not helpful? If they're not helpful, you know, switch to a thought that's more helpful and it just helps your brain to think more positively when it's time to think about your offer.
So now, you know what it looks like to really believe in your offer, what happens when you don't believe in your offer a lot of times. And I gave you a couple of tips here to start to cultivate that belief in your offer.
All right, friends. Thank you so much for hanging out and listening to the Black Girl Business Bar podcast. If you haven't already hit that follow or subscribe button so you never miss an episode. If you found today's episode helpful or had an aha moment, please take a screenshot of this episode and share it on your socials. Be sure to tag me so that I see you. And as always friends, we're dropping episodes on the podcast every Tuesday, and we can't wait to see you back then.