 Talk about authentic marketing a lot. What is really at the core of authentic marketing? Here's the simple idea. You are doing marketing, not as a means to an end, not just so that you can be relevant to others, but really you are doing marketing as a combination, a Venn diagram, a intersection between exploring yourself and serving others. That's it. That's authentic marketing. It's just like the concept of finding your calling, your purpose in life, your calling, or the thing that you are meant to be doing in life. I always talk about the old quote from Frederick Buchner where your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger, that intersection is your calling. And that's how I see authentic marketing too. It's the intersection of your own exploration of yourself. What makes you really come alive? What experiences have been important for you? What ideas do you find are really important? And how exploring those ideas, exploring those experiences, exploring those passions, self-exploration combined with world service equals authentic marketing. That's it. Now, do you hear in that definition, oh, authentic marketing is being relevant to others and making them do stuff, doing things so that they will take action? That's not authentic marketing. That's conventional marketing, which again, it's fine. People can do that if that's their priorities, if that's their values, that's great. But what I have found is that when we dive into authentic marketing fully, marketing itself no longer becomes a means to an end. Oh, I have to do marketing so that I will get clients, get sales, et cetera. When marketing is a means to an end, it's no longer authentic because you have this ulterior motive of making, if I have an ulterior motive of making you do something, over time I tend to lose your trust because you're like, well, George, you always want to make me do something. You're not quite sure what your intentions really are. Whereas with authentic marketing, hopefully you can tell that I have an intention of trying to figure out what I want to say, but trying to explore what is important to me as you can tell the things I talk about, I have a passion for. I'm exploring things that are of importance to me, which I hope also will help you, to serve you. I have an intention to want to help you, to try to uplift you in some way. Like I enjoy seeing you uplifted. I enjoy seeing you helped. And by diving into that intention, the marketing becomes authentic because then it's, you know, and the more I explore myself and find the intersection where you are also uplifted and served and helped, then what happens is I build trust, right? When you do this, when you are exploring what your passions are publicly, I call, you know, I've said this before, it's public journaling. I want you to do this going forward. Just think of marketing as public journaling. You're just trying to figure out yourself, but you're doing it publicly. And by doing this, even, you know, it's interesting, even if you don't try to help other people, by you exploring what is important to you, it is going to resonate with some people without you trying to be relevant, without you trying to trigger something in people, without you trying to get them to feel a certain way or get them to do a certain thing. It's the getting people to feel or do a certain thing that brings us into the territory of inauthenticity. Cause then it's a step outside of what our real intentions are. Do you see what I mean? Like, I know if I were fully intentioned, like I'm going to try to get you to do something, but even that doesn't feel so good. That might be authentic, but it just doesn't feel good anymore cause no one wants to be manipulated. No one wants to be controlled, right? But people are happy to see you figuring things out along your journey because your ideal clients are just, your ideal clients are like one or two or three or five steps behind you in that journey, you see. And so when you are figuring stuff out on your journey, they're like, wow, that's really cool. Cause I haven't even gotten there and what you're figuring out is really interesting to me. You see what I mean? So it's kind of like, I'm trying out right now, I'm figuring out what I want to say, but because I've thought about this more than you have, the figuring out of it sounds interesting to you, I hope. But that's the journey of authentic marketing, that intersection of self-exploration with the hope that it also helps somebody else. And with the trust actually, with the faith that it will help somebody else out because the internet is such a big place. The internet has so many different varieties of people that if you put the stuff out there, there is going to be somebody and enough people if you do the distribution of your content, as I always talk about, I use Facebook ads, you could hopefully use Facebook ads, if not use some other ways of distributing your content, but if you distribute your content, you are inevitably going to come across people who just love who you are, how you explore, and what you were exploring, you see what I mean. So then you don't have to worry about trying to manipulate a result. Anytime we're trying to manipulate a result, oh, I got to get this number of sales or I got to do this or that, then we become unauthentic. And yes, I get it, and people say, well, George, what if I need to have goals? I need to make 50 sales this month. I've talked about that in another post, and we'd be ambitious and still authentic. It's really about setting goals based on past results and doing more of what's working rather than, and I'm not going to talk about that right now because that's another blog post and another video, and I went into that. But what I want to say right now if you dive fully into authentic marketing, what's going to happen is that you become more creative, number one, number two, you draw forth an audience of kindred spirits who just love the way you think the way you are. And when you have that kind of audience, you can then work with them to create or to source a product that they actually love. So the whole thing about marketing becomes enjoyable because marketing is, marketing, so many of you, like, oh, I have to do marketing to get clients to do the work that I actually love, right? What if marketing can be part of the work that you love? That's what I wish for you. And when you can see marketing as inner exploration and outer service, you can, that feels fulfilling to you. That feels enjoyable to you, I believe. I think so, right? See if you agree with me. So another way of thinking about authentic marketing, the core of it is to bless and then let go. To bless with, to bless your audience with just your heartfelt explorations knowing that it's helpful for some, it's helpful for the right people that you're trying to reach, just your own explorations, your own public journaling, otherwise you'd be journaling privately, but you're journaling publicly as a service to your ideal clients, to your kindred spirits, right? To bless them with your courage of public journaling and then to let go of having to change them, having to force them into a particular action. Bless and to let go. And then if you keep doing that, you become, you become service oriented, really. It's like your whole entire business and your whole entire marketing becomes an act of service. It's like I'm here because I know that this is helpful for some of you. I'm not gonna force any particular person to change or transform in any way, but I'm here because I know that by my sharing of what's important to me and the exploration of how to say all that, it somehow helps some of you. And I'm just going to let go of exactly who it's gonna help. I'm gonna let go of exactly how many people it's going to help. I'm gonna let go of that attachment to that result. And I'm just gonna keep blessing. I'm just gonna keep exploring, I'm gonna keep blessing. I'm gonna let go of that result. And the marketing becomes authentic. The marketing becomes fulfilling as an act of itself. And if the act in and of itself is fulfilling for you and enjoyable for you, you find joy in that, then guess what? It's much more easy to make it consistent because it's a consistent experience of fulfillment and of joy. And if it's consistent, you will certainly get enough practice to become talented. You see, because ultimately you do have to become talented to get more and more people interested in what you're doing. But the talent, if you are forcing the talent by saying, okay, I've gotta move my eyebrows in this way or that way, because it makes people feel this, I'm making a, you know, but if you're trying to be talented by emulating somebody's hand gestures and way of speaking, and, oh, you know, someone said I should, you know, talk in this way so that it triggers your actions in this way or whatever. If you're trying to become talented by trying to be like somebody else, you lose your soul. You lose your authenticity. But if you become talented as a natural byproduct of practicing your explorations of yourself, your any explorations, then you become a talented, authentic person, right? Just like I've become like, I couldn't, if you took me, you know, when did I start doing videos? I started doing videos really in 2014. And then now, you know, five, six years later, I hope more talented in doing videos, but I'm more natural out of two. So I'm more naturally talented at doing videos. I'm not afraid anymore. I don't have to, I'm not anxious. I know some of you are anxious and afraid and you come on video and you freeze up and you don't know what to say. I was that way too. Trust me, I was that way. But now I can just show up and, you know, more or less talk and not freeze up and have it be somewhat entertaining, not because I'm trying to make it entertaining, but because I have so much practice exploring myself. And therefore the authentic marketing is now also hopefully good marketing, it's better marketing. But that's the path that I recommend. It's not emulating me. It's not some kind of tactic. It's your own finding of yourself. It's your own practice of yourself. And you practice yourself, you become more talented as yourself. And that becomes more interesting to other people. So I hope this helps. And I'm gonna go ahead and look at the comments to see if there's any comments. And while you're waiting for me to see if there's any comments, I hope that you'll comment below and let me know what was interesting to you about this. And if you have any questions about this. And I'm gonna go ahead and I wanna thank Captain and Dorota and Alex for joining me for this video. And let's see here, and Sharon as well. And I see comments from, let me see here. I see a question from Captain. And Captain asks, do you think this works for all industries? So for example, if someone is doing a spiritual work, does this apply? Well, certainly I think spiritual work, this certainly applies because spirituality is very much about an inner exploration and teaching one's passion. But let's say Captain says, well, what if someone is selling stuff in an online store? Does this kind of self exploratory approach work for them as marketing? Okay, well, let's talk about this. This is interesting. Well, so I wanna be clear. The kind of businesses I help people build, I call it authentic business. And authentic business, it's more than just what it sounds like. Well, authentic business, you're just being authentic in your business, no. Authentic business, my definition is you're selling something that comes out of your explorations of yourself. Really, it comes out of your experiences, it comes out of your passion. And so when you're selling something, that's, and it could be an online store, I don't know. It could be a product, it could be a book, an online course, it could be a t-shirt. I mean, anything that comes out of your passion. And when you're doing your marketing, now marketing and sales, I'm gonna separate the two right now, okay? This is important, actually. There's a difference between marketing and sales, okay? Marketing, have you heard that? That's my cat trying to get in the room. Marketing is brand building. And sales is transactional. Okay, let's, this should be another blog post, but I'll just talk about this briefly. Marketing is brand building or tribe building or audience building and sales is transactional. So marketing, the way I do marketing, authentic marketing is I do it through exploration and service, so I do it through content. And my content is about exploring my thoughts, my passions, what I think is important and in hopes that it helps somebody, right? Public journaling. And as I do this, I build an audience, well, people like yourselves, you know, and Shweta, thank you for joining me and who else is joining me here? Yeah, so marketing, by doing this, you build an audience and Diane, hello. You build an audience who care about you, essentially, who, because they are with you in the journey, you are a couple of steps ahead of them and like I said, so even your own explorations are interesting for them because they haven't thought it through as much as you have or they haven't lived that experiences or they haven't helped as many people as you have. So just your own explorations is already several steps ahead of them and that's interesting for them. So you do marketing all the time or as often as you can and that builds an audience who care about you, who are interested and then occasionally you do the sales and the sales therefore don't have to be, oh, you better buy this or you'll feel bad or you'll better buy this, otherwise, you know, you won't have the best life possible or whatever, you know, scarcity and they are missing out but the sales is like, hey, I've got this thing, I'm excited, I'm genuinely excited about it. I put it together based on our explorations together based on my understanding of you, based on our conversations. If you wanna buy it, you wanna buy it? Okay, I think it's interesting and here's what I think is great about it and here's what I think you might like about it. So when you say selling in an online store, okay, what makes me concerned about that, it's you don't have an audience there. So it's all transactional. It's like, it's cold selling, right? And cold selling is cold, it's not warm, it's not fun. Cold selling is, hey, I don't know who you are but I got a t-shirt to sell you, you know? I don't know who you are but I got this widget that you better buy this otherwise because I only have three seconds of your time so I better do something like this to get your attention for three seconds so that you'll pay attention from me for another 10 seconds and in those 10 seconds, I better tell you that this thing is the best thing in the world and you better buy this. You see what I mean? So cold selling has to be loud because it has to get someone's attention for three seconds and then the next 10 seconds and then the next 30 seconds and it's so, it's so much, it sells, it sells. And I wrote a whole book called Authentic Selling which is the opposite of traditional selling, not opposite but it's building an audience that who loves you first and then selling can become a whisper. It doesn't have to be loud anymore. You see what I mean? So I hope this helps and provides some perspective. I'm gonna go and take a look again to see if there's any other comments. Let's see, oh, Dorota says very helpful nuance. I often worry about not coming across as patronizing and how to avoid that when sharing insights and tips. Yeah, patronizing is basically like, I know better than you and Dorota, I know better than you. This is gonna help you and you don't know what you're talking about and whereas exploration is like, I think this is true and in my experiences this has been important for my clients and this is something that I think is really important. I don't know if you agree, let me know if you agree. So that's blessing and letting go, right? So anyway, enough in inner exploration. I hope this is of service to you and I hope this helps you better understand what authentic marketing is and how you can do it on your own. So until the next video, I wish you well and take care, see you next time.