The real reason you hate showing up online
And no it’s not because you don’t know your target audience
Things that brought a bit of ✨sparkle✨ to my week
My sweet Bindi celebrated her 4th birthday! 🐶🎂
15 beautiful people subscribe to this newsletter 🎉
I had my first Notion coaching sesh 🥳
If you’re like me, when you were getting started with your business you researched things top to bottom and inside-out to make sure you were doing everything as you should. You created a logo, picked out a colour palette, chose a snazzy Canva template. Then it was time to figure out your marketing.
Most newbies choose Instagram or Twitter. You changed your name and bio over and over until one fit (for the time being), you started to post about your services and why people need them and should pay you. You scoured the explore page to find people in similar industries, then scoured their pages to find inspiration for your own content.
With every new piece of content you found (and maybe bookmarked), you started to feel less and less sure about yourself.
“Do I know enough to talk about this?”
“Does this post look right?”
“What am I trying to say here?”
“Is this too weird?”
“This doesn’t look as good as [insert name]’s own”
“How does [insert name] have all those ideas? I have zero”
“Who even cares what I have to say?”
You researched things top to bottom and inside-out to make sure you were doing everything as you should.
Soon you’re throwing out all kinds of content to see what sticks, most of it stuff you hated creating in the first place. Or maybe you ghosted social media for a while thinking you needed to learn more to get better at content creation.
All the advice people told you says you have to show up on social media to get views and engagement and sales, so why do you hate it so much? The simple answer is not so much that you hate showing up online. It’s that you hate sharing who you are.
I’m so sorry to snatch your wig bestie 🤭🫣
The simple answer is not so much that you hate showing up online. It’s that you hate sharing who you are.
Every single client I’ve had that hated showing up on social media was insecure about themselves in some way:
They were insecure that they didn’t know enough to be posting like an authority
They were insecure that the ideas they had for content weren’t good enough
They were insecure in the way that they looked or sounded
They were insecure about their tone of voice in their content
Instead of working through that insecurity, they shoved it under the rug and showed up in ways that were misaligned to who they were, their goals and values. Some didn’t show up online at all! Then began a negative feedback loop:
Engagement dips → obsessively look for content to copy/emulate → post misaligned content → feel shitty → stop posting → engagement dips
Every single client I’ve had that hated showing up on social media was insecure about themselves in some way; They were insecure that the ideas they had for content weren’t good enough
Awareness is a big part of running a business, especially if you’re in the first 3-5 years of business. You need people to know that you exist for them to know that you can solve their problem. But it can be a real struggle dealing with your insecurities out in the open where people can scrutinize you, especially as a freelancer where you are your business.