You’re supposed to do one thing a day that scares you. Yesterday for example, I watched an octopus mug a biologist (true story, more on that in a bit). And today, I participated in a “TwitterChat” with the hashtag #gowiththepro.
Yesterday I went to the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth. I hadn’t been in ages and I LOVE marine life. It’s so fucking mental down in the ocean, it might as well be another world. Seriously, it’s bananas.
But at the same time there’s something so calming and cosy about the ocean. I can imagine being a little cow fish, or a box fish, or a blue tang snuggling up in some coral.
Then we met Neptune. She is a young giant octopuss and I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was. I was absolutely captivated by her skin colour and shape. You can literally see her working things out in her head.
Liv and I hung around for a short talk on octopuses and it turns out that that beautiful, cleaver and charming cephalopod is a horror show in a tank.
There are documented cases of octopuses escaping their tanks, crawling over to other aquariums, eating all the fish and returning to their tank without anyone knowing until it’s too late.
When female octopuses have babies, if other fish or starfish get too close, she’ll just rip them apart. And when they do have babies (or the eggs), they’ll wait for them to hatch and not eat. Starving themselves before their babies eat them alive for nourishment. What. The. Fuck?
When giving the talk, the biologist put her hand in the tank and started tickling and playing with Neptune. Octopuses are smart and need engagement and enrichment. They like playing with toys and the biologists have to think of new puzzles for them otherwise they get bored.
Also, you have to work in teams of two when you work with the octopuss because each sucker can hold 1kg in weight and easily drag you into the tank. Just because they want to. You could hear the suckers “popping” as they peeled off of the biologists arm.
Fear, is what prevents all of us from doing anything. We dress it up as excuses and reasons. Fooling ourselves that we’re being sensible or logical. But it’s fear that stops progress.
Everything you want, is just on the other side of fear.
George Addair
To that end, I did something which absolutely and totally terrified me. I did a live TwitterChat with Nicole Osborne of @Lollipop_Social using the hashtag #gowiththepro.
I had categorically no idea what a TwitterChat was. It turns out it’s a mad barrage of questions on Twitter that you reply to. In today’s #gowiththepro I talked about discovery calls, selling services and dealing with pricing.
You can see the questions that I was asked below and my answers in each tweet.
- What are your top tips for finding clients when we first start out?
- How can we get over our fear of selling?
- What are your tips for running a discovery call with confidence?
- Once we send a proposal, how can we move things along in the sales process to help us close the deal?
- How can we handle budget objections during calls, which we often get for social media and marketing projects?
- What are your favourite hacks for converting leads from networking events?
- What learnings can you share from running and growing your own business?
I had a LOT of fun. Was I scared? Yep. I was terrified. And I thank Nicole for coaching me through the scary bit?
However, was it as scary as seeing a massive octopuss rip open a rubber duck to eat some shrimp inside it? No. Nothing will be as scary as that.
