Dare to Disappoint With Authentic Marketing Without Pleasing Everyone
Written by Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a former corporate advertising executive turned life and business coach who helps female entrepreneurs build strategic, soul-led businesses. She works with the innate intelligence of their ideas, alongside her signature past life regression experience and heart-forward coaching techniques.
There’s a peculiar price to pay for trying to be everyone's cup of tea. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the desire to be liked has probably killed more brilliant ideas than a lack of talent ever has. It’s astonishing what ideas we let fall away in order to belong. In truth, I could write this entire article about belonging because it’s a complicated, deeply human need.
Those who have felt like the black sheep of their family can carry the sense of being an outsider into every room they enter. When belonging has felt uncertain, we can become remarkably skilled at editing ourselves to secure it. Those same instincts don't magically disappear when we become entrepreneurs. They simply find new places to hide.
How fear of judgment holds entrepreneurs back
An idea arrives full of electricity, and you feel excited about your upcoming offering because of it. But before it's had a chance to grow legs, you've invited an entire imaginary committee to weigh in on whether it's appropriate, sensible, or likely to make your community question what on earth you're doing.
But you haven't actually asked these people for their opinions. Instead, you've graciously appointed yourself spokesperson for every possible objection they might have and spent precious time imagining the responses. Cue the editing process.
You remove the part that feels a bit too unconventional and soften your language so nobody feels excluded. You reconsider sharing an opinion because someone might disagree, and wouldn't it be dreadful to need to defend yourself in the comments section on Instagram? By the time you're ready to introduce your creation to the world, it's been through so many rounds of imaginary public consultation that even you aren't particularly excited about it anymore.
Authentic marketing begins where pleasing everyone ends
Your marketing is doing more than communicating what you offer. It's giving people an opportunity to recognize something of themselves in you and your work.
The way you see the world, the things you find fascinating, the questions you're willing to ask, the experiences that have shaped you, and the particular flavour of your imagination all contribute to what makes your work recognizable. Yet these are often the very things we edit out in the name of being professional.
I spent more than a decade in the advertising world, where enormous amounts of money were spent trying to make brands memorable. We'd study audiences, develop positioning strategies, and search for the distinctive qualities that would make one business stand out from another.
Now I watch brilliant entrepreneurs unconsciously work too hard to make themselves sound like everyone else. But consider this: the qualities you've spent years trying to make more acceptable are the very ones that make your work extraordinary.
Perhaps you were the child who asked uncomfortable questions at the dinner table, the one who felt everything too deeply, challenged the rules, or had an imagination that made the adults a little nervous. You may have spent years learning to dial those qualities down so you could belong. Now you're building a business that could actually benefit from every last one of them.
How being yourself attracts your ideal clients
The people who are genuinely drawn to your work are searching for precisely the perspective you've been carefully editing. Of course, speaking more openly won't make everyone fall in love with what you do. Some people will disagree. Some will leave. Some may decide you're not their cup of tea.
Wonderful. There are plenty of cups of tea in the world, and each brings its own particular comfort to the person who loves it.
But imagine the people who have yet to discover your work, the ones who would be thrilled to encounter your particular way of seeing the world, who have been searching for someone willing to say the things you've been editing out, and who might finally feel a sense of belonging because you had the courage to be unmistakably yourself. What a shame if they never find you because you've been so busy trying to keep everyone else comfortable.
Sometimes we use other people's potential disappointment as permission to abandon our own desires. When you're building something that matters to you, that's an awfully high price to pay for being liked. Dare to disappoint the people who don't understand your vision rather than abandon the people who are waiting for it.
Read more from Donna Wilding
Donna Wilding, Life & Business Coach
Donna Wilding is a life and business coach and former corporate advertising executive who walked away from conventional success to build a more honest way of working and living. She supports women in creating businesses that are both profitable and deeply aligned, combining strategic clarity with past life regression and energetic work. At the core of her approach is the belief that every idea has its own guiding intelligence, and that business becomes easier when you learn to work with it. With over a decade of experience in transformational practices, Donna’s work bridges the worlds of strategy and soul.
