Market Your Work by Reaching Out to Serve
Update, June 2020:
1) Revisiting this post from seven years ago, I continue to see how marketing your services or goods can be scary and sometimes met by anger or other hurtful responses. So I’ve added a few more solutions I hope you find useful.
2) If any of the ways I market sound too foo-foo to be practical, I can assure you that using magic and running an ethical business helped my book Be a Goddess! become a longtime bestseller and allowed me to pay my bills by being a professional shaman for decades. Magical spells can be practical. Ethics don’t leave you lagging behind the competition.
This post uses my personal experiences marketing shamanic services as a jumping off point to write about problems and solutions that can be relevant to whatever heart-filled service or product one wants to market. Also, my tales build the ground work to share here a bit of my philosophy that helps me overcome challenges discussed herein.
Many people react negatively when I promote my shamanic classes or services. There is such corruption in modern marketing that they assume my motives and marketing methods are the same as that of the endless unethical sales-pitching creeps they’ve already met.
I don’t blame folks for their suspicion, but it still upsets me. For me, marketing is simply reaching out. Reaching out and letting someone know, “Heya, I might be able to be of service.”
I want to help people.
Francesca De Grandis, 2013
I also get criticized for being passionate about my work. I love that what I do really helps people. I also tremendously enjoy the work itself. Not that it’s always pleasant or easy. The work can be very difficult, for example when I’m guiding a trauma survivor. But even if I’m crying in empathy alongside the survivor, I’m grateful, because that person and I are in the real together. For that moment, we are authentic, honest, powerful, and moving forward. We are in deep connection with each other and cosmos, no matter how painful it might be for us.
But when I reach out to offer help (AKA am marketing), my passion is often misinterpreted. Decades of sales hype makes authentic enthusiasm suspect.
Expressing passion and offering help make one utterly vulnerable. I stand defenseless. Heart-based promotion is putting yourself out there nakedly. So when my sincerity is met by angry accusations, it can wound, discourage, or simply exhaust me.
However, my Gods take care of me, sending me the healing and strength and human camaraderie I need.
My Gods told me the shamanic gifts they’d given me were to be my 9-5. They added that, unless I strenuously reach out to offer my services (italicized words are my definition of vigorous marketing), I am hiding them, not being responsible to community. I can’t serve anyone unless they know the stats about my events. They also need a sense of me, because spiritual work is so personal.
So I reach out. With offers of help and info about who I am.
Selling art is not new. It is as old as art itself.
Marketing your services as a healer is not new. It is as old as healing itself.
Marketing shamanism is not new. It is as old as shamanism itself.
Selling jewelry is not new. It is as old as jewelry itself.
Any goods or services that come from the heart have been marketed for as long as they’ve been in existence. In every case, marketing is simply reaching out, driven by Gods, driven by a gift that seeks a giftee, driven by a passion for being of authentic service.
Here’s more support for you to market the gifts you’ve been given by the Divine:
Spiritual and Magical Ways to Market What You Love to Do
1) Stand emotionally naked before your Divine Caretaker, ask for strength to offer yourself to others, whatever your gift, whether it is spiritual healing, baking cookies, crocheting, or anything else.
The Gods are smart. They give us talents that help others while helping self; we are blessed that, each time we serve, the gift we give wraps itself around us and kisses our own foreheads.
Be naked.
The Old Gods are pure magic. Asking for Their help wraps you in a magic that carries you toward your desired goals.
Sales magic!
2) Check out my Affirmation for Speaking from the Heart and Letting Go of What Other People Think. The post also has related ideas: https://outlawbunny.com/2020/01/03/do-what-you-believe-in-speak-from-your-heart-and-dont-let-judgmental-responses-stop-you/
3) Society’s wrongful division of the material and spiritual fuels the widespread belief that we should not earn our livings doing what we love. As a result:
* That schism might be in your psyche.
* Or you intellectually know better, but the schism remains emotionally, defeating your career success. E.g., you emotionally feel like you’re doing something wrong when you try to promote your work.
* Or people’s insistence it is wrong to earn—or impossible to earn—your way doing what you love has diminished or even crushed your fire to serve others in your ideal profession.
If an item in that list feels relevant, get my book A Sacred Marketplace: Sell without Selling Out or Burning Out. It has shamanic material to heal those problems and other inner blocks to success. Available only from the author here: https://outlawbunny.com/2015/10/15/a-sacred-marketplace/
4) Do you need support to face your inner blocks to marketing? I’m here for you. Make a shamanic counseling appointment.
If you already reach out, I praise you. Do you need support to do it bigger, more easily, or otherwise improve it? Make an appointment. I’m here for you. I have the background and down-to-earth mindset to channel both ritual empowerments and sound marketing ideas for you, should you desire.
5) Be kept abreast of my upcoming marketing and other courses: subscribe to my free newsletter. Even my shamanic courses that don’t focus on business still boost your career; the shamanism I teach helps you keep growing, showing up for life, and being of service, all of which helps with all your life goals, big time, whether professional, romantic, creative, or other. To subscribe, click this box:
