How To Find Your Unique Message (And Use It To Make An Impact)

If you want to be an effective coach, there’s one thing you should first consider: how to find your message. You see in an age where anyone can take an online course and attach a coaching certification to their name it’s hard to stick out, but a chosen few seem to have found the secrets to influence and making an impact. But how do you tap into this secret?

How To Find Your Message And Influence People

When it comes to learning how to find your message, remember this: Even if you have a hard time seeing it, you have a life story to tell, life lessons to teach, and a message to share with the world that can change lives. Your life story is unique, your life lessons are unique, and your message is unique.

Your message is so powerful you can build a celebrity brand around it, attract high-quality clients, and earn multiple streams of income doing exactly what you love. So if you’re a coach, speaker, expert, artist, author, service-based business owner, or entrepreneur, your story is your message to millions.

So how do you go about creating your message from your life story and learning how to coach with confidence, clarity and drive?

How To Find Your Message By Crafting Your Story

There are three components on how to craft your story with confidence and clarity. But before I go into those, I want to tell you about the two “magic ingredients” of great storytelling. Your story needs both of these elements for it to be truly compelling and impactful.

a. Vulnerability

Vulnerability is power. When you’re prepared to get vulnerable, it creates a human connection with your audience. Without expressing your vulnerability in your story, you can’t ever really get into the transformation you experienced in your life or the truth of how you learned the lessons you can teach others. Without vulnerability, your message loses power.

b. Credibility

If vulnerability helps your audience get connected to you, credibility also helps convince them you’re the one they want to go on a journey of transformation with. Credibility comes when you share your own transformational results or the results of your clients. It’s about the outcomes you experienced as a result of your own journey.

Now you know you need to incorporate those two elements into your story and learn how to find your message. So now, let’s get into the structure.

Structure On How to Find Your Message

The purpose of great storytelling is to take your audience on a journey from the Call (which is the beginning of the story when you’re called into a situation where you realize you need to create change), to the Pit (your lowest point) to the Search through to the Results. As you tell your story, you’ll lead people through the steps of what you actually have to teach them.

a. Call

Begin with the Call into the story for your character (you). For example: “I started off with a promising career in the military, always top of my class I had dreams of qualifying for special forces training and was well on my way. Until one night heading home for the weekend I was victim of a terrible car crash.”

b. Pit

Next, you go into the Pit of your story. What was a dark moment for you? For example: “When I awoke on the hospital I was told I may never regain full mobility in my back or shoulder, my dream of qualifying for special forces, or even walking again without pain had all but completely fallen apart.  And because that was my sole purpose up to that point, my only real driving force it tore me apart when my CO walked into my room and told me the best they could for me was a medical discharge and cover my flight back home once I was out of the hospital.”

Tip: Notice how I tell my story in the present tense? That’s the great thing about storytelling: it brings the audience with you. Talking in the present tense means your audience will stay engaged because you’re bringing them on the journey with you.

As they’re listening to you, they’re becoming the character in the story and experiencing what you experienced. They’re becoming emotionally connected to you.

c. Search And Breakthrough

After you take them into the Pit with you, take them out again to experience your Search and Breakthrough:

“A couple months later and I was back home in Montreal, Quebec feeling completely lost and depressed. I had spent every last penny from my release bonus getting drunk, high or both. I didn’t know what would happen next and for the most part I didn’t really care. But I had this massive shift with this transformational process that allowed me to shed the unworthiness. All of a sudden, it was like the unworthiness and a million pounds of weight just fell off my shoulders, and I stood up and was like, “I can do this thing!” And so together with my brother, who had spent the last 6 years in the coaching business, I started Bonaventure Marketing Solutions to help coaches get their message to millions and in the last 6 months alone we’ve been able to help over 52 coaches create the businesses they’ve always dreamt of.”

Connecting With Your Vulnerability

Through listening to your story, your Pit, and your Breakthrough, your audience understands how your journey of transformation ultimately lead to you finding your truth, finding your meaning, and creating a business that serves humanity around your truth.

As your audience listens, they get the experience of vulnerability from you and the experience of your search. They experience the breakthrough results from your story, which inspires them to know they, too, could experience their own breakthrough results.

You create rapport and trust through sharing your story and your vulnerability. So that’s what inspires people to take action and create transformation in their own lives.

Create A Brand Story

People want to become something more than they want to have something. To learn how to find your message and make an impact, start by asking: Who do my clients want to become?

This is where Brand Story becomes helpful. It paints a vision of that person ready to do the difference and make an impact. He or she becomes a person with a voice and who is playing a win-win game. He is making money and possesses power. With their power, they have an ability to make a difference and provide for their family and realize their dreams and have the lifestyle they want.

How To Begin Your Brand Story

The Brand Story is a movement in the world – an empowering story of what’s possible. And each person who hears it defines what that means for them. They claim what resonates with them. As you think your Brand Story, create a new persona.

Then you think what’s going on in the world right now. What’s the problem with that? Where’s the opportunity? Make it possible for people to think about the new opportunities that are in front of them.

Show them what might be possible. Inspire their imagination and allow them to expand their own vision for their lives.

The key is just START. Start playing around with your brand story. Speak it into existence. Tell someone about it over lunch. “Hey, I was thinking about this with my brand. I feel like I am creating a new group of leaders who are doing this in the world. I sense there is a desire for this in people, but they’re not talking about it.”

Ultimately, there are no rules for creating and learning how to find your message and even how to gain confidence in life to speak with persuasion. Rather, consider the process as an opportunity for you to explore your story. Your message really comes alive when you are connected to your story. When you go deep into your story, you transform, and that transformation helps your messaging becomes more powerful.