Shownotes
In this powerful solo episode of Say YES to Your Soul, Tessa Lynne Alburn explores the concept of a Signature System and its importance for anyone in the business of personal transformation. A Signature System is a structured approach or framework that defines how a coach or healer guides clients through their journey of change.
Tessa shares her own experience of getting distracted by other people’s coaching strategies and rediscovering the value of her Signature System. She emphasizes how having a well-defined Signature System can enhance the effectiveness of coaching or healing practices, lead to better client outcomes, increase revenues, and build a sustainable and recognizable brand.
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- Tessa answers the question of ‘What is a Signature System?’ and its importance for businesses offering transformation in various areas like physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual well-being
- How it is essential for professionals who aim to provide ongoing, transformative experiences rather than one-off sessions
- Tessa discusses the benefits of having a Signature System: clarity for clients, structured process, client satisfaction, brand differentiation, focus and efficiency, and sellability!
- Using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a framework and simplifying the journey into 4 to 7 stages of client transformation
- The importance of balancing the depth of each stage to ensure clients achieve meaningful progress without feeling overwhelmed.
- For additional insights, a follow-up episode will explore specific examples of Signature Systems
* About the Host *
Tessa Lynne Alburn is a soul connection business coach, author, podcast host and explorer. Tessa believes that every woman has the ability to learn to express their true voice, be heard, and fulfill their dreams.
Her mission is to help women entrepreneurs bring their ideas and authentic feminine voices into the world, so they make a real difference and receive compensation that reflects their brilliance!
Tessa’s Free Gift: Get access to Tessa's Roadmap to a Soul-Connected Business and Say YES to Your Soul! http://www.tessafreegift.com/
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Transcripts
Hello there. Today I'd like to share with you some insights and details on what I consider to be one of the foundational pieces to any type of healing or coaching business where you are helping people to change from the inside out. So this could include, let's say if you were a naturopath who also coaches or a chiropractor who also does like the resetting of beliefs, or a weight trainer that works with mindset and principles to keep people motivated for doing the work, then you too might benefit from a signature system. On the other hand, if your business, uh, is something where you're providing a known tangible item that's obvious what it is, such as a, something a retailer would sell like blouses, for example, you probably don't need a signature SY system. You just need good blouses and you need differentiators so people understand, you know, what kind of blouses you have, and maybe you have a company mission that aligns with something, uh, eco fabrics and eco dyes, that, that sort of thing.
(:There's a, there are a number of things that you would need to know that are similar to coaches and healers, but for anyone who's in the business of selling transformation, a process, whether it's physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, financial, career based, or relation relational or relationship transformation, a signature system can be very beneficial. And if I've forgotten a particular kind of expertise, please forgive me for that.
(:A couple of years ago I'd been doing some coaching with some coaches who have different strategies than I do. And, and, you know, I wanted some fresh perspectives and this, that, and the other, and I wanted to be challenged a little bit. And I, but what happened was I started to go in a little too far into their system and into the way that they do things in terms of their systems. And in doing that, I lost sight of my own signature system.
(:Now, it wasn't terrible because I have many tools and experiences and things that I could rely on to help my clients achieve their goals, but what I found was that I was spending a lot of time working on the messaging and redoing it and, and actually the messaging is really the step after knowing what your signature system is. So I wound up wasting a lot of time, energy, and resources when I was attempting to adopt these strategies that weren't including my signature system. They weren't taking that into account. And so I have returned to the signature system and it really gives a beautiful foundation for everything that I do. And this is true also for my clients.
(:And even though I have many frameworks for content and for processes, even the frameworks and the models and the processes work better when they're connected to the signature system, they, they seem to make more sense to people. So today I'd like to share with you what the Signature system is and the benefits of it. So you may have heard about Signature Systems here and there, and you're kind of like, yeah, maybe I know what that is. Maybe I don't. Or maybe you've done a little bit of a dive into Signature Systems. So either way, whether it's your first time hearing about it or the eighth time, it's okay. because I'm going to give you some unique perspectives here today.
(:One of the things that can really detract from a coaching or healing or transformational business is without a system, if we don't have it, we run the risk of being perceived just as any old coach. Oh, there's just a life coach, right? There's like not a big differentiator there and with nothing. So there's nothing much distinguishing us. And at the worst, we're seen as a one-off session type of self-care professional, you know, like massage for example. But you can't equate getting your nails done or your neck rubbed as the same kind of exchange that you are doing as a coach or a healer. And for a coach or healer, one-off sessions just don't create a sustainable business because both professions require interchange and not just something on the surface. An interchange takes time, dedication, and persistence. Now, if you're someone who, maybe you're a psychic channeler or something like that, and so you're kind of in this funny little zone, you could have a signature system that will totally make your business rock even more. But you could also just go along and, and have people doing one-off sessions and a lot of psychics that I know enjoy that. But if you want to change things up and you want to have repeat clients who are excited about what you're doing, or maybe you, you wind up certifying them at some point in what it is that you do, a signature system is the way to get that going.
(:So I want you to start thinking about a signature system. And if you already have one, this might inspire you to dive in a little deeper or to re give it another zjoozh you know, refresh it a little bit.
(:So the way that I think about them is that they are the shero's journey. They're the journey that your clients go on when they work with you. And so it's not the tools, it's not the practices, it's not that you have certain qualifications, it's the specific journey that you take them on to help them meet their goals and dreams.
(:Now, if they're just working with you, say for a handful of sessions, it's you're, you can still use a little bit of the signature system and kind of give them a taste of it. But when you really start to get into it, you're going to want to do say like six-month programs or year long programs when it comes to private coaching. You could do a group program based around your signature system. Maybe you do a, um, however many stages you have for your system. You do that many months in your group program. I think doing it week by week is a little too fast for any process. So I would pick maybe a, a couple steps or just one step or stage to then flesh that out.
(:Now in a year long program, you can do an entire signature system within six months. You might get to all parts of it or seven months, right? So depending on the progress of the person you're working with, that will dictate exactly when you complete the signature system. However. So one of the things I do, I have a seven step signature system and I can run that in a year long private program. And that gives a lot of buffer zone to the
So when it comes to the sheroes journey, I want you to define your specific cycle of transformation. I think the, a good number of steps or stages is four to seven. If you've got 10, it becomes, we really wieldy and hard to track on things and hard to separate them. I know I've tried that if it's fewer than four, it doesn't feel like a journey. So there's, there's something probably missing. So, you want to look at somewhere in the zone of four to seven stages or steps.
(:You can also think of your signature system, like the cycle of transformation. You know, I think the Hoffman Institute Foundation calls their cycle, theirs the cycle of transformation. Uh, I, I want to share a little bit of a really wonderful cycle of transformation, which is the one that Joseph Campbell uncovered basically did a lot of research and he was an amazing writer. Uh, and he, he dove into mythology and like the psychology behind it and Jungian principles and all these other things. And one of his, um, most famous books was called The Hero With a Thousand Faces. And I remember reading it and just having my mind just like opened a lot because of the depth of what happens on the journey.
(:He
(:Called it The Hero's Journey. And he identified an extensive 17 steps and he was really interested in like the deeper psychology of things, like I said. So we don't need to go that far, thankfully, but we do want to understand what the journey is. And if we were just to look at his 17 steps, there are some key stages to it. So he's got, he's got steps and stages. The beginning of the journey is the Departure, and there are four other, there are five steps in the departure. The first one is The Call to Adventure. That sounds pretty cool, right? The call to adventure love that. I find this really inspiring. I, and I'm going to just share quickly. I'm not going to share all the steps with you, but the second one I really like because it's the Refusal of the Call, right? So somebody, somebody gets that big call, you know, in their heart or in their soul, and they're like, yeah, you know, I could go do that thing.
(:And they're like, no, this is way too hard. Forget about it. And we see this all the time. Like that just makes me laugh. I see it all the time in the coaching industry with serious self-sabotage and avoidance patterns like crazy. Anyway, the hero is resisting the call, right? And so, then you got to keep going, you got to do the other steps. And so you get to step six through 11 in his example, and this is called the Initiation stage, where there's all kinds of trials and tests and um, and things that need to be healed, almost like taking inventories and atonement with the father is one of them. And this is where the person basically does a lot of growing up. The last stage that Joseph Campbell has is the Return. And he has steps 12 through 17. There. You can look this up, uh, I'm sure it's online at a million places.
(:There are things like the magic flight and rescue, uh, from, with Rescue from Without. And the Master of Two Worlds. Like this is really cool stuff, right? The freedom to live the, these are just wonderful. And we know if we look at something like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, it's got this all throughout it. There's just so much juicy stuff. And basically, any movie worth, its, um, ticket price is going to have at least a big piece of the hero's journey in there. So there's a lot of juicy stuff within each of the stages of the journey. Now, like I said, for you, for your business, you don't need, you don't want 17 steps. You want four to seven, and that's enough. And what happens is, within each of the steps, however many you have, you just go deeper into it. So you can really teach some mad skills. You can really bust some, uh, false ideas, you know, the myths that people are living by the false beliefs and really help them establish new habits without sending them to New Zealand to go through a gauntlet of angry, you know, mountain people
The first thing is that a signature system creates clarity for the client. This is something that can show up in the way that you message, the way that you build your landing pages, the way that you have initial intake conversations with potential clients, and it, it helps them to feel more secure. There's like, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they tend to have greater confidence in what it is that you do. So if you can briefly describe the journey, it prepares them also a little bit better psychologically. So they know they're not just like coming for crisis, you know, counseling or Crisis Fix me or Crisis Coach Me or Crisis Heal me. Instead, they get the point that, okay, this is, this is going to take, take some time. There's going to be some ups and downs, some hills and valleys, and they just sort of subconsciously start to get in line with that idea.
(:I think why it helps so much is because when people first come to us and they want support, and I'm talking about people who haven't done a lot of healing or a lot of coaching, yet, they only know what they know, right? Well, even, and even for advanced people, like we only know what we know until we know something else. And the journey helps bring other things to the surface that they will also need to know. It alerts them, oh, there's this whole thing I didn't even know about that, that I'm going to need to put some time and energy behind. And your system is the solution to it. Isn't that amazing? So your system shows the problem and the solution. So you're going to imbue greater confidence in potential clients.
(:Plus when you're, when you're working with them over time, they like right away they start to have a sense of looking forward to something and they have an understanding of what it is that they're dealing with right now. They, they get that they're not in the wrong place, they're in the process because the process is clear. There is a process and they're learning and they're accomplishing with a greater context. So, homework assignments, for example, make more sense and skills building makes more sense because it's all unfolding in an order. And all these things come together and fit together nicely. So it feels and is an integrated process. The Signature system gives both them and you a roadmap and they're going to get where they're going. It's like, you know, if you took somebody and you said, we're just, we're going to go on a trip, and you had them in a car for 20 hours, they'd be like, where are we going? Where are we going? What is going on? Right? They need to know, people need to know where they're going. And that's what one of the things that Signature Systems help with the system also helps with streamlining, which in another way is really about focusing, right? So it helps focus their efforts. So it maximizes time and energy and resources.
(:So when you create your system, you choose based on what it is you take them through. Some of it's going to be a little bit about what you do, but most of it is what is happening in their inner world, right? You're, so when you describe your signature system, it's not about telling them what you're going to do to them, it's going, you want to tell them and paint the picture of what they will be learning, what they will be overcoming, what they will be solving with your system, or your system helps them solve it. So it helps you also focus on what's really important so the client can reach their goals. I think, I think it's really helpful for tracking client progress. It keeps you from going down rabbit holes and it also keeps you from spending hours and hours and weeks on creating content that doesn't go anywhere.
(:The signature system can also help your clients have more satisfaction because they're getting consistent outcomes. And then when they've completed something, they know it. It's like, oh, I did that now, now I'm moving on to the next thing. And it feels really good. If you're moving too quickly in a signature system as a little side note, then people can get a sense of, I'm not good enough. So, you want to make sure they're getting some element of each step or stage that feels good to them so they feel they have accomplished something, even if there's more to learn because there usually is, there's going to, there's always more levels, but we want to create success for the client and keep them moving so they can have the results they're feeling. Usually, like when this is happening, they're like motivated, there's an energy, they're pretty happy, they're looking forward to their sessions. They have, they're having ideas like stuff is really getting exciting and interesting and they know that they're, they're moving towards something. It's cool because it's all about your unique approach. You've decided what the system is and what will happen is that you start to have brand recognition for it, right? And with brand recognition comes loyalty, you know, happy clients, people come back, they're like, oh, you know, you want to go over there to Tessa for Signature systems, for example, right? So, whatever you want to be known for, you want that in there.
(:And another thing that happens with the Signature system is that psychologically people perceive that what you do has greater value because there's a system. So it adds to your bottom line just by having the signature system, you'll be able to probably move up your, the amount of your offers when you have a signature system because it, it creates so much certainty and confidence that people are like, oh, this feels good. You know, this is, this is like everything that I need in this, right? And I'm not saying you want to be a one-stop shop, but your system is going to be comprehensive unto itself for its purpose. I
Because it is trainable. Other people can learn your system, which is really cool. Okay, so here's what I'm going to do. And you know, I, I do these solo episodes every four or five, uh, episodes, and what I can do is I'm going to give you some examples of Signature Systems the next time we meet, and we're going to talk about some other things around signature systems to kind, um, fuel the flames. I, and in the meantime, I want you to start to really look at what it is you are doing. Not, not the things you do to people, but the things you take people through. What is the journey that your clients need? What do they need help with? What helps them get started? What's that middle world like? What are some of the beliefs? Like what is the process for helping them shift beliefs? What are the processes to help them learn new skills? So start thinking about what your journey is and see if you can start to identify some of those steps. P.S. when you do, when you figure out what some of your steps are, you start to have more confidence yourself in what it is you provide.
(:So, the last thing I want to leave you with is that the signature system
(:Kind of take, it takes on this life of its own. And I found over the years, you know, I've been doing this for more than 20 years. It helps me to stay the course when things are changing, when the world is wacky and questions come up and people are changing in ways that I'm like, how does my system now serve them and how do I want to modify it in their new consciousness? And it helps me to continue to stay connected to my purpose and my contribution and play the long game. This is for me, the like the biggest part of the game of life, which is about bringing consciousness where there isn't any or where consciousness is limited. And I'm dedicated to that. I love learning and growth and I love seeing the light go on in other people in their eyes. And so having my signature system keeps me energized because I know I'm on track and I don't get lost in all the chaos out there. And I can always come back to this and know that I've got a core body of work that will make a difference. It's proven to have made a difference and that has helped me to stay in coaching and in healing for more than 20 years.
(:And that has helped me help people break old paradigms of poverty, lack, worthlessness, and not good enoughness. And I really believe that it is time for women to succeed. And this is one of the ways that I can contribute to that. And I know that you have a contribution to make as well. So start thinking about it. You know, what might be your genius journey?
