Do you suffer from Nichephobia?

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to do everything for everyone, and nobody would ask what you specialize in. But we don’t live in an ideal world – and being able to define your niche is a critical factor in being able to attract the clients and the business you want.

There are many, many ways to specialize and define your niche — including being a generalist for one specific type of customer. You can also define your niche by almost any variable that makes sense for you, including your activity, the field in which you operate, your role, title, region or, (one of my favorites), the specific challenge you solve. All that matters is that you define your niche narrowly enough to stand out from everyone else.

Are you afraid of being put in a box? Are you afraid of what's in the box? Are you just afraid of all boxes?

That’s when you can intentionally build an identifiable brand and consciously carve a slice of the market for your yourself and your company.

Remember, it’s easier to build a strong reputation with a narrowly defined niche – and grow your business from there — than it is to cast a wide net and hope to attract a loyal following.

It really comes down to this. The clearer you define your niche for yourself, the clearer it will be for the clients you want to attract. It’s an ‘essential’ element of your Essential Message.

If you understand how specializing supports your personal and professional success, and you still haven’t done the work to discover your differentiation, then you might be suffering from ‘nichephobia’.

There are many causes of nichephobia. You may be afraid of turning away potential customers. You may think that you do several things exceptionally well, and you don’t want to limit yourself. You may think that defining a narrow market will result in a smaller business opportunity.

These are the kinds of intellectual rationalizations that people go through to justify to themselves why putting this work off is OK. But in my work with members of the Essential Message, doing Clarity Package sessions with corporate clients, and training other coaches, consultants and copywriters to become certified facilitators, I’ve uncovered deeper sources of resistance.

In some cases, people are held back by a fear of finding out that what they have to offer and what they have to say about it, may not be all that important. Probing deeper still, I have found the opposite — that if they discover their unique contribution to the world, they would be obliged to play a bigger game.

This reminds me of Marianne Williamson’s famous passage from her book, A Return to Love, (Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3):

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?”

Your Essential Message shines a light on that part of you that is “brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous”. Perhaps that’s why you continue to resist defining your niche… And perhaps that’s why it takes courage to define it narrowly enough.