Assignment 1: Ditch your drab & declare your dazzle!

Estimated time commitment: 45 (consecutive or not!) minutes.

Today’s assignment is all about lightening your load, and taking the first steps to refresh your voice. Here are your three steps! Click your heels together as you complete each one:

1.

Close your eyes and call to mind someone (human or not) who knows you, knows your brilliance, sees the importance of what you bring to the world. Someone you feel comfortable being YOU with. Now take about 5 minutes, and imagine telling that person what you do, what you are most excited about, why it matters to the world, and the impact you are making with it. Use this 5 minutes to be COMPLETELY on your own side, celebrating the power of your work in the world with a good friend. Don’t worry about web copy or marketing or grammar: just speak from your heart!

Here’s the important part: whether you are alone or with someone as you speak these truths, RECORD YOURSELF SPEAKING OUT LOUD. Use your phone’s voice memo, or leave yourself a voice message - whatever gets the job done.

Now go to your web site, and using the same recording device, record yourself reading 5 minutes of copy from your web site, in the tone of voice that the copy inspires in you. (See where we’re going with this?)

Now listen to both, and see how they are different! What do you notice about your tone of voice in each situation? Does your web copy feel as authentic as your speaking voice when you are in a situation in which you feel SEEN, HEARD, LOVED?

You don’t have to do anything with this information right now, just NOTICE. (But of course, if you are inspired, you can always go change a bunch of your copy!)

2.

The second part of today’s assignment requires you to find your dirty gloves and heavy duty trash bags. Do what you need to do to get a bit detached from your past decisions and your past hard work on your web site. Its time to TAKE STOCK and DELETE anything that does not serve you so that you can move forward.

Go through your web site’s main page, and look for any offerings, programs, statements, ideas, and images that no longer reflect who you are and/or what you do, and hit that DELETE key. Seriously. Get rid of it, archive it, get it out of your site. That stock photo you never liked that much but you kept because you didn’t know what to replace it with? SEE YA! That link to the blog that you don’t actually want people reading any more? BUH BYE! That font that doesn't work, but you don’t know what else to use? Replace it with something incredibly BASIC so you aren’t distracted by it’s nuances.

Strip that site down the the essentials, friend! CLEAR SPACE so you can move on. DECLUTTER so you can invite the NEW. So you can THINK. So you can GROW.

For some of you, there won't be much do to here, and for others this part might seem really fraught and huge. Come into the Tactical Imagination Club for support, come to the livestreams and ask for help. Remember, if your web site has been stagnating, ANY action is a victory. We’ve got you!

3.

Come to the Tactical Imagination Club and tell us what you learned in Step 1!

Our livestream Q&A’s today are at 10am (with Jenny) & 4pm (with Amy).

These times are Eastern Standard Time.