In this episode, I sit down with holistic business coach, Michele Parad, to discuss the importance of choosing your content pillars and aligning them with your purpose and unique perspective.
We explore the concept of "founder market fit" and dive into the power of tapping into intuition and thinking differently. Don't miss the insights on conscious marketing, personal branding, and the significance of sharing vulnerable stories in content creation.
Don’t Miss Inside This Episode:
- Discover the importance of the holistic approach to you and your business. What is the Founder Market fit and how does that apply to your business?
- What to focus on instead of the pain points for your ideal customer avatar.
- Learn about the holistic method of creating content pillars in your business. What's the one thing to focus on before you create any content?
- Hear how to make yourself truly uncopyable as one of your pillars. You are unique and no one will have all the same stories, experiences, and opinions as you do--use these unique traits of yourself to truly stand out from the crowd.
- Don't miss the mic drop moment when Michele shares the one key takeaway that she hopes all listeners walk away with.
Links and products mentioned in today's episode:
Michele's What Is Your Brilliance Archetype Quiz and Archetype Embodiment Guide
Michele's
Sell Your Brilliance program
Book recommendation:
Gene Keys by Richard Rudd.
About Michele Parad
As a Holistic Business Coach, Michele helps entrepreneurs launch and grow their mission-driven businesses, live their best possible lives, and increase their impact and prosperity through mastery of their S.E.L.L. Method.
Michele's Website
MicheleParad.com
Connect With Michele on Social
You can find Michele at
@michele.parad on IG.
About Your Host
Melissa Brown, MD - Coach, Author, Speaker, Teacher, and Podcast Host.
After leaving medical practice in 2009, Melissa discovered the online world and never looked back! After coach certification, she began a healthy lifestyle coaching practice online and quickly fell in love with blogging, writing, and content marketing.
Melissa believes that coaches have the power to change the world. Unfortunately, too many coaches get discouraged by the amount of content they need to create for marketing their business and this can lead to overwhelm and giving up on their dreams. There's such a ripple effect when a dream dies, so Melissa is on a mission to help coaches and solopreneurs overcome the overwhelm when it comes to content creation so they keep those dreams alive.
Your content can impact massive amounts of people and positively change the world. You've got content in there inside you; let's get it out into the world.
Check out these social media sites:
She's Got Content Facebook group:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
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FREE Never Run Out of Content Ideas Tool Kit/Workbook
Thanks for listening!
Thanks so much for listening to this podcast. It means the world to me to have you here on this journey! If you got value from this episode, please share it on social media, and recommend it to your business besties.
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Transcript:
Just because you have gone down a specific rabbit hole and spent a lot of time in a specific direction, building a specific persona of what you think you are. It doesn't mean that you can't reinvent yourself. And there's always a day where you can start as a blank slate and create something entirely new and to give yourself the permission to do that and to reflect on that and have some freedom in that as well.
Melissa Brown [00:00:44]:
Hello there, content creators. You're listening to the She's Got Content podcast, It's all about creating content for your coaching business. I'm your host, doctor Melissa Brown, and I'm here every week to help you get your content Out of your head, out of your heart, and out there into the world where that information and your services can impact the most people. Get ready to take notes today, and then take action content creators. Let's dive in with today's episode because you've got content to get out there. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the She's Got Content podcast. Today, my guest on the show is Michele Parad. Early in her career, Michele found she was constantly reinventing herself, searching for her true purpose to best make an impact in this world.
Melissa Brown [00:01:35]:
She discovered her personal gifts, though, lie in unlocking the genius within others and showing them the magic, Mindset, systems, and strategies to make quantum leaps in their business. Today, Michele is a holistic Business coach helping entrepreneurs launch and grow their mission driven businesses to increase their impact and prosperity through mastery of the SEL method. Welcome, Michele.
Michele Parad [00:02:02]:
Thank you so much, Melissa. It's a pleasure to be here.
Melissa Brown [00:02:06]:
This is very exciting. We've got a whole lot of things to talk about here today. You call yourself a holistic business coach. Tell me about that.
Michele Parad [00:02:15]:
Yes. So I really look at people in a 360 degree view. It's important not to look only at your business, but to look at everything that's going on in your environment, in your relationships, in how you're taking care of your body, your mind, your spirit. All of these things are factors that make us successful or not, within our business. And so it's the same as if you're going to a general practitioner doctor of summaries. Let me take a look at you from all standpoints as opposed to very narrowly into one specific aspect of your business. So that's really how I translate it, and I bring in all of my knowledge, and information that I have acquired over the last over 15 years in both realms. Both the business world.
Michele Parad [00:03:18]:
I worked in marketing and business development for most of my career and combine that with the healing modalities that I have. I've certified in over 6 different spiritual modalities and went down a interesting rabbit hole and journey of trying to understand what was the beautiful best approaches for myself. And, as a result, work with people in different ways in ways that suit them the best. And I pick and choose depending on what they're working with.
Melissa Brown [00:03:54]:
To me, it's very fascinating, the journey that so many people have had where You start in 1 career. I'm gonna put myself in this same category. You start in 1 career. You think this is it. This is what I'm meant to do. And For some reason or another, that just doesn't sit right. And some people just stick with it, and they're miserable their whole life. And others start this journey of trying to find, really, what is their purpose.
Melissa Brown [00:04:22]:
Tell us a little more about your journey. You said you Started out in marketing, and then you've had this segue into more of health and wellness, But still business related, spiritual
Michele Parad [00:04:35]:
journey? Yeah. Absolutely. I'd say my journey really began earlier than even the start of my career. My very first job was in finance, which you wouldn't really put me there knowing me now. It definitely allowed me to understand where I was not placed. It got me also to think about Where can I be part of an organization that has more purpose to it? Not that financial institutions don't have their own purpose and there are lots of varieties of what that is. At first, it got me thinking about, can I work for an organization that has cultural purpose embedded into it? I started exploring down the avenue of working first maybe as a public servant. I did public policy actually as my academic background.
Michele Parad [00:05:30]:
And then I realized, nope. That's not really the place where I think I would make the most difference. It was intellectually very interesting, but I didn't see myself climbing the ranks within the system that we have. I decided, okay. I'm gonna go to the private sector and try to tackle public issues through innovation. So I started out working in cleantech, and I was in a marketing type of role within that. I managed to stay at that 1 organization for over 4 or 5 years. It's just the most I've been at one place.
Michele Parad [00:06:10]:
And I had a different role every year, which was very interesting. And that's actually what kept me there in a way because I oftentimes, once I learned a specific role, I got a little bit bored. And I was like, I don't think I can do this for my entire career within that organization. I did customer success. I did business development. I did event organization. In. I did research and investment.
Michele Parad [00:06:39]:
And so I really got to explore and understand the different aspects of sales and marketing within an organization. And every time was an evolution and a climb to get to understand what that role really entailed. And I do think that was a lot of the skill set that made me today understand what it's like to work with entrepreneurs in specifically. But, yeah, the golden thread I would say throughout my life is, like, how can I be of service? How can I have purpose and meaning in what I'm doing? And I kept switching environments to try to find that. It was an instant journey of where do I belong? Where is the place for me? What's the role for me? And I Often couldn't really find them within the organizations that I worked in. I learned a tremendous amount, but I always felt very boxed in. It's like when you're good at something, they wanna keep you doing
Melissa Brown [00:07:52]:
that. Yes.
Michele Parad [00:07:55]:
And that's really where I finally took myself or rather the universe pushed me in the direction of working for myself and being entrepreneurial because that's really where you do get the freedom to say, I have this role today. And then tomorrow, maybe I'm going to expand into something else or I'm gonna develop a new offer for people. I'm gonna go in this other direction. And to me, that was super exciting to be able to self-direct and have the freedom around that. That's a little bit of the backstory. But during this whole journey, it really got me thinking about how can I design something that is really aligned with my gifts and what my mission is? And I enrolled in a lot of different programs, And I just couldn't really quite find any coach or program that really took into consideration people's talents and really honed in on what that is. It was mostly like, if you have a business program, it's mostly okay. You already have an idea of what you wanna do and here's a blueprint for how to get to success.
Michele Parad [00:09:10]:
And then I found that 1 person's blueprint is not another person's blueprint.
Melissa Brown [00:09:15]:
One size does not fit all.
Michele Parad [00:09:17]:
Exactly. And, while you can certainly learn about all the facets of what's possible and out there, it's important to come back to ourselves and say, okay. Is this actually the strategy for me? And those are very intricate, and it also really depends on and I call it a founder market fit. What is it that the market needs from you? And then also matching that with who you are and what you're good at too. The market might need one thing, but it's not in your area of expertise, then that's not what you're gonna necessarily offer. I think that people go on this truly long journey of many years of discovering, wow, I went down this rabbit hole that was totally not aligned with me. Finally, later, they're like, wait. Maybe I should just switch my business model to this and suddenly they have a lot of success with that.
Michele Parad [00:10:20]:
I do think that a lot of people that I've encountered, They spend years even in their entrepreneurial life deciding I'm gonna be a coach or whatever. I'm gonna provide this one service, and they go down that road without really truly knowing themselves most intimately. And whether or not they actually really enjoy having that whether it's that one to one service or deeply working in a particular area of what they're providing. If you're a marketing service provider, that entails working really deeply behind the scenes and building something. And so if that is not actually what you innately enjoy doing. It'd be difficult to build something successful because you're, ultimately, you're grinding. You're going to be burnt out sooner or later. I've designed this archetype quiz, but I also have all these other tools as well to help people align themselves with the role that they're meant to take.
Michele Parad [00:11:24]:
And this quiz is just one factor you can consider and then start thinking about okay. So I have 12 archetypes. Let's say that you're an educator. Right? But built your business more along the lines of a a builder. Like, you've created a software product, But, really, your core of what you should be doing is thought leadership and educating people on maybe the software or maybe something else. And so you got it backwards. Right. Ideally, we can understand those things before we go into starting a new business.
Michele Parad [00:12:04]:
That would be the ideal scenario. But I do often help people when they're trying to pivot. And they've gotten to a place where they understand that there's something not quite right with the way that they're operating. So these are beautiful tools that we go into to get them to understand what their mission is and on a higher level as well. Because that's the other problem I see is people are selling themselves short from the perspective of only solving a small problem when they could actually be doing something on a much bigger scale. And it's because it hasn't even occurred to them in their brain, they could step into that type of role. I also work with people intuitively. I can be cautious sometimes of telling them like, wow.
Michele Parad [00:13:05]:
I actually see you let's just say, like, you're gonna be a TEDx speaker or you're gonna be like this public figure. And sometimes that scares people because they haven't yet their subconscious mind hasn't seen themselves that way yet. But I can see themselves in the highest version of who they are. So it's also training yourself to think bigger than the box you put yourself in. We can blame organizations for putting us in a box, But then the funny thing is that we continue to do that into our entrepreneurial life. I'm just gonna stay in this, like, safe zone of what I know to provide to people. But what if it was something in a much grander scale than that? It it shouldn't stop you that you don't know how to do it quite yet. But starting down the exploration process can really help you to start Googling things and be like, oh, how would you set up whatever it is, and then starting to get the right mentors and the resources to drive you in that direction.
Michele Parad [00:14:16]:
You don't even have the understanding or the confidence or the foresight to see yourself in this much, much bigger role, then you're gonna keep yourself in this small hamster wheel that you're in. So That's part of the work that I do with people is really expanding their expectation of where they're going, because we are all able to be these powerful creators, and we really can create anything we desire. So why not go big
Melissa Brown [00:14:56]:
with Why not? Yeah. I see how with that explanation and that whole big picture, I see how You call yourself a holistic business coach. You really are looking at all aspects, including putting that intuitive piece into Your vision and holding space for your clients. Here on the show, we talk a lot about content, about creating content. You and I had talked before the show about talking about content pillars to focus on to attract your clients, and I'm really interested in Your take on how you help your clients come up with these content pillars. Before we dive into your Take on it. Let's just be sure we're all on the same page. When you talk about content pillars, what's your definition for that?
Michele Parad [00:15:47]:
Yeah. That's a good point. I wanna take this back to my own personal story and experience because when I first started out in the business realm. I actually started out as a healer, and I had absolutely no niche. And so when I was developing content, I think Instagram just became my creative outlet as opposed to a real effort towards actually being a business. And I created these beautiful meditations and videos and inspirational content and information. It was almost like my journal. As I was discovering things, I would be putting that out on social media.
Michele Parad [00:16:31]:
And there's nothing wrong with that. I think especially if you're maybe going into more of an influencer route, that could be one way to go about it. It really didn't give me any traction because I was really all over the place. Where am I going to for what? And so I think the the beginning part before you even start on creating content is Who are you talking to and and being more specific about that? What is, obviously, what is your niche? And we don't have to go super narrow at the beginning because in the beginning, it's still an exploration phase, and you don't wanna necessarily take a whole group of people out of who you wanna talk to. But let's start with an idea or a sense of who it is. I picked entrepreneurs and business owners, and that's can be a pretty broad spectrum of people. I focus on with those that are a little bit spiritually curious as well. And then see what feedback you get from the universe.
Michele Parad [00:17:42]:
So get to understand who am I actually attracting now as my avatar. And then do I like working with this type of person? It's important. That's interesting feedback as well. And then you can continue to narrow down your niche because you've gotten that information and feedback. Okay. I like certain...