J. Sands Loch

2020 Day 24: Identifying your desired target market

Brainstorm item #2 in 2020 Day 21: Surfing Universes – Life Coach – 60 Needs that Healers Have is identifying your desired target market, which is the set of people or businesses to which you plan to offer your products and/or services. By example, my desired target market for this blog post includes human healers, worldwide, who can read and understand English (or perhaps translations of English). I’m not targeting corporations. I’m not targeting entrepreneurs in non-healing professions. It doesn’t matter that corporations and non-healing entrepreneurs might also benefit from reading this blog post. I have chosen to exclude them from my desired target market. This focus is important, from both a practical marketing point of view, and a universe surfing point of view.

When identifying your desired target market, think about the present moment first. Then consider further out in time, e.g. one month, one year, one decade. Notice how you feel as you consider any changes in your desired target market over time. Also consider narrowing and expanding your market and notice how you feel. Guide yourself through meditations in which you consider serving different markets. Notice your feelings during these meditations. If your meditations go well, you will gain some insight into your desired target market. This may present itself as an “ah-ha” moment, or perhaps as an energetic happy glow within your chest (fourth chakra if you count such things) when you are meditating on a specific target market.

By going through this process, you will use both your mind and your body to select your desired target market. One final step is needed and that is to consider your spirit. This is where you connect your market to your own personal higher purpose, as much as you understand that through your own spiritual development to date. Look inside yourself and identify personal stories from your past that are important to serving your market. Be able to explain to anyone who asks why this particular target market is important to you.

As another example, I’m going to continue with the business for which I posted a business plan for yesterday in 2020 Day 23: My longest run 5.47 in 53:33 and Life Coach business plan. After meditating on it just now, thinking it through, and giving it the spirit test, I see my desired target market to be English speaking healers of any age, residing anywhere, who are providing products and/or services that I would want to provide myself if I had their talents, energy, and inspiration. During the meditation, I felt myself drawn to focus on women. I see an initial market that is focused on members of the same community who are in a limited number of female-dominated healing professions.

2020 Day 23: My longest run 5.47 in 53:33 and Life Coach business plan

Being now in Santa Cruz I thought I’d check to the status of my old and new habits in this new location. My old habit of checking stocks is still not present. I did talk stocks with friends. My new habit of running is still present. I just ran 3.33 miles at a 10-minute mile pace, 5 miles in 49:19, and 5.47 miles in 53:33. My experience with universe surfing is to increase your chance of moving to a desired universe, it is helpful to change as many things as your have control over. It is also especially helpful to give energy to each cell of your body. I find that running causes a lot of cells in my body to replenish themselves. I can imagine old cells being recycled into new cells. From a universe surfing perspective, I am moving to a universe where I’m more fit, strong, and healthy. And by moving universes, it is likely by random chance that other things will be changed, especially things which are correlated with the primary things changed (in this case, the running habit and removal of stock checking habit).

In 2020 Day 21: Surfing Universes – Life Coach – 60 Needs that Healers Have, the first need I mentioned was the need for a business plan. Your first business plan should be realistic and serve as a guide for you to get clarity on the goals, risks, and priorities of your business. Before you invest much time and money into your passion project or business idea, you should convince yourself that your business is worth this investment. Your business plan only needs to be a few pages long. Here is an example one:

Life Coaching Business Plan Example 2016-12-01

2020 Day 22: Habits in the Multiverse

Last night I participated in a meditation group. We listed to a meditation by Joe Dispenza. I do resonate with a lot of what he preaches. I also understand why there are people like Morten Tolboll who have their doubts. One of the reasons I keep my universe surfing philosophy close to my chest is that I have my own doubts about it. In the six years now that I have been practicing universe surfing, I have come to understand both the limits and power of it. The main value I see in it now is as a model of reality that helps me to understand common psychological phenomena, such as why habits are so hard to break and make. In the meditation group I learned that 21 days is one of the milestones for forming a new habit or removing an old habit. It was a bit synchronistic to me that I learned this on the 21st day of me posting on this blog. Also synchronistic to me was that my 21st blog post on 60 needs of healers somehow received a much larger number of views.

From a universe surfing model point of view, habits are things we do that we also do in most of the parallel universe that are dimensionally surrounding the universe we are in. Living life on autopilot is like randomly moving through nearby parallel universes. By “nearby” or “surrounding”, it is easiest to understand by considering only a single characteristic at a time – say universes where I write a daily blog post and universes where I don’t. Before writing the first blog post of 2020, I was in and surrounded by a vast majority of universes where I did not write daily blog posts. However, there was apparently one where I did and I found it! Once finding myself in that universe of daily blog posts, I “did some universe surfing magic” to bring closer to me other universes where I also wrote daily blog posts. I continued to do this for 21 days until today where I am not surrounded by a vast majority of universes where I DO write daily blog posts. This is an example of how I use universe surfing concepts to understand psychological behavior, in this case habit forming.

Regarding “did some universe surfing magic”, I’m not entirely sure how to explain this and it is definitely a topic for a future post. I’ve heard from other teachers that if you want more Love in your life, then resonate with the energy of Love. The idea of resonating with the energy of something does work as a mental model for bringing desired universes closer to you. The goal is to get every cell in your body resonating with the same energy. If you have a yoga, meditation, Qi Gong, or other practice that has taught you how to focus energy in your body, then you are ready for universe surfing. If you have such a practice, and it’s a habit, then you are surrounded by other universes where you also have such a practice. If you also then understand how to resonate each cell in your body with a certain energy of Love, or Compassion, or even Daily Blog Writing (or the feeling that this habit gives you), then this will likely also be true in the universes that surround you – if not immediately then over time.

So habits tell us about our surrounding universes. If we want to break a bad habit, we need to surf to a nearby universe in which we don’t have that bad habit (by either using universe surfing magic or luck). We then need to focus ourselves – every cell in our body – to bring near us other universes where we have also broken that habit. For long-time habits, this focusing will be extremely difficult. And for all habits, regardless of how hard you focus, you will find yourself in one of the ‘bad habit’ universes from time to time. Often these bad habit universes are surrounded by other bad habit universes, so it’s a good time to put some extra focusing power into bringing in universes without the bad habit.

I’m going to now try this technique on a couple of bad habits that I’m trying to remove from my life. One is daily checking the stock market. The other is picking my fingernails.

2020 Day 21: Surfing Universes – Life Coach – 60 Needs that Healers Have

I’m on the bus traveling Hwy 17 to Santa Cruz. It’s been a day of physical traveling and I have found that when physically traveling, it’s also easier for me to travel dimensionally to different universes. Over the last few days I have noticed a nearby universe in which I’m a life coach. One event that I noticed was I reached out randomly to someone who had sent me a marketing email and asked him if he wanted to do a trade. During the exchange, he asked me to send him a link to my offerings and I realized that I didn’t have such a link. That was my first feeling of the universe where I’m a life coach. I then made a decision to start creating such a website and tried to feel into what my offerings were. I signed up with bluehost.com to host my new WordPress website. As I tried to imagine what was on this website, I got a call from a friend who wanted help listening to their phone marketing pitch. For an hour and a half, I acted as a life coach for my friend. During the call, I even had the chance to work on my phone pitch as I gave her an example of how I would have done the call.

Earlier when I was on the plane flying from Austin, I found myself journalling about these events and I began planning my life coaching business. My target market for life coaching is anyone in a healing profession. I brainstormed a list of common needs that these people have:

Creating a plan for a successful business that is measurable and achievable, given their resources;
Identifying their desired target market to which they wish to offer products and services;
Identifying the products and services that they wish to offer;
Determining the value to their market of their products and services;
Determining the price to charge for their products and services;
Determining how to let their target market know of their offerings;
Building their customer list as efficiently as possible;
Having a work/life balance;
Determining if/when to hire/outsource employees/contractors/vendors;
Determining if/when to partner with outside investors;
Finding affordable health care insurance for themselves and their employees;
Saving money for retirement;
Taking time off without disrupting their business/practice;
Keeping track of income and expenses for tax and business purposes;
Continuing to learn best practices in their field;
Knowing when conferences, events, festivals, workshops, and speakers of interest are happening around the world;
Being part of a professional community that can support one another;
Managing computers, phones, internet, mail, and website;
Having a social media presence;
Finding a place to work – private office, shared space, home office;
Investing their profits and earnings into their business, life, and future;
Developing communication skills;
Developing negotiating skills;
Understanding borrowing money options and risks;
Understanding how self-employment can have an affect on relationships;
Knowing when to engage in bartering and trading with other service providers;
Staying focused and productive;
Working remotely;
Storing and backing up content and digital business records;
Search Engine Optimization;
Attracting the first, first 10, first 100, and first 1000 super customers;
Understanding options for online store fronts;
Growing into higher self through personal development;
Knowing when to quit or pivot or stay the course;
Understanding the challenges and benefits of bringing on equal partners;
Understanding how to minimize taxes through legitimate expenses;
Passing on the knowledge they’ve learned to others;
Being as successful in life as in work;
Avoiding legal and liability problems – contracts and ethics;
Successfully mixing friends and business;
Serving clients with authenticity;
Being productive, organized, and efficient;
Knowing how to deal with clients when you are sick or injured;
Quitting your “day job” to focus on building your passion business (including the importance of saving up before you quit);
Picking a beachhead for your initial target market;
Determining the features of your minimal viable product/service;
Understanding the costs, benefits, and process of hosting free webinars and online classes;
How to determine pricing and whether to offer sliding scales or discounts;
Dealing with unsatisfied customers, refunds, and customer service in general;
Building online and local communities around your products and/or services;
Writing and publishing a book;
Live streaming and podcasting;
Understanding free advertising options;
Understanding paid advertising options;
Protecting your intellectual property through copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents;
Developing your brand;
Creating your logo, business name, and business cards;
Managing email and phone lists and outreach;
Offering retreats; and
Having fun!

2020 Day 20: Twenty predictions for 2020

20. The U.S. Congress will continue to vote primarily along party lines (Duh). This will increase the chance of a third-party movement gaining momentum.

19. The Wuhan coronavirus will spread in a similar way as other SARS-like coronaviruses. All cities with direct flights to Wuhan will be infected.

18. I will run 5 miles at a 9-min mile pace, 4 miles at an 8.5-min mile pace, 3 miles at an 8-min mile pace, 2 miles at a 7.5-min mile pace, and 1 mile in 6.5 min.

17. I will update this blog from at least two other countries.

16. Apple will have an exciting “one more thing”.

15. AMD will continue to take away server market share from Intel.

14. A 3rd-party candidate will shake up the U.S. presidential election.

13. Alan Greenspan’s coined phrase irrational exuberance will become a trending hash tag.

12. Religions across the world will reclaim their role as protectors of the long-term survival of humanity by joining together with a common voice against climate change.

11. Gasoline prices, Gold, and Bitcoin will spike higher with Gold hitting $2000/oz and Bitcoin topping $20,000.

10. April will be a tough month for the stock market, which will end 2020 roughly even after a rollercoaster of a year.

9. Ruth Bader Ginsburg will remain a Supreme Court justice longer than Trump will remain President.

8. Combined global land and ocean surface temperature for August 2020 will be almost a full degree Celsius above the 20th century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F).

7. Over half of U.S. states will legalize marijuana for at least medicinal purposes, and over half of those will also legalize marijuana for recreational use. Vaping will continue to be increasingly banned.

6. CERN’s plans to build a 100 kilometer particle accelerator will move forward while China’s plans to build a similarly sized particle accelerator will remain uncertain.

5. Tom Steyer will continue to gain unexpected support for President at the expense of Biden.

4. Bernie will gain the Democratic nomination in a brokered convention and will select a woman as his running mate.

3. Despite all of the saber rattling, 2020 will be a peaceful year.

2. Trump will not be removed from office.

1. The Battlestar Galactica Series coming in 2020 on NBC will have a unique storyline that will be well received by most Battlestar Galactica fans.