When you don’t get what you want, you get what you need.
I went viral, got 37,000 followers and felt like it was all for the wrong reasons.
Sometimes I feel like a marriage counseling going through his 3rd divorce.
I teach messaging and branding, but my branding feels all over the place.
I am a storytelling, content and branding coach.
But is that what I want to be?
I’m not so sure.
Really, I just tell stories via Instagram.
In fact, most of my followers came, not from teaching storytelling, but just telling stories about my own inner monologue around personal growth.
So… who am I really?
What do I really want to create?
Yesterday morning I asked myself, ”If my content wasn’t responsible for making money, what would I make content about?”
I thought about it.
Then did an inventory of my favorite content and stories I’ve told and none of them are about marketing, branding, or storytelling.
They are about my pursuits in life, going after what I want, the personal growth through that journey, and my relationship with my family and how that relationship has allowed me to unapologetically pursue what I want out of life.
Makes sense.
This is my true deeper purpose → I don’t want to live a life of regrets.
What I have found is that, I hold myself back from pursuing things that I love because I don’t own my truth. One of the ways I practice owning my truth is to make content that expresses my truth. It’s a practice of not letting the opinions of others steal my power. If I can do it in my content, I can do it offline as well.
Unfortunately, I am still stuck in this idea that in order to grow my coaching business I HAVE to teach things online.
I HAVE to make videos that prove to you I understand storytelling.
So I make videos like
- How Content is Like Cake
- Seinfeld Isn’t a Show About Nothing
- Relationships are exactly like brand building
- etc… etc….
but they don’t do well.
I was really curious about this because other people make great marketing, branding, and storytelling content. So why don’t mine, in my voice over style, land?
Is it because the 37,000 followers I just gained don’t care about that?
Or is it something else?
I love the “vanity metrics”
It’s immediate insight into my work and ideas.
If one posts gets 1,000 likes and one gets 200. Why? I want to understand as much as I can.
I’ve done a lot of testing. I’ve seen my own content go viral with and without hashtags. With and without trending audio. Posting in the morning and at night. All those gimmicks and hacks don’t seem to drive any true correlation to any content “doing well.”
Which is why I truly believe your content holds the truth of your energy.
Everything Works
I was recently inspired by Seth Hughes who is ~~not~~ into nature.
Seth makes videos about being out in nature, foraging and living off the earth, connecting to plants, and connecting to people in nature.
He’s got 233,000 followers and really engaged community.
All he does it tell stories about foraging, plants, nature, community, etc.
Then, the other day, he announced his first offer.
Is it about learning how to forage?
No
He’s offering storytelling workshops.
He later shared on his story how shocked he was about how many people reached out. (I am inclined to take him at his word and that he’s not just saying that as a FOMO sales tactic).
Seeing this gave me so much liberation.
It’s true.
I don’t HAVE to make these reels teaching you about storytelling.
Seth never did.
I can just tell incredible stories about my own personal growth the way Seth only talks about nature.
And that can be enough to attract people who want to be in my membership and learn how to be better storytellers.
I tell my clients all the time that there’s not one way to do something.
What I realize is when we try to break the mold and trust ourselves, we have to recognize the conditioning of our past selves that doesn’t make this transition easy (though the work I’ve been practicing in therapy has definitely made trusting myself in transitions happen quicker).
I’ve spent over $50,000 on business coaching, have watched tons and tons of marketing experts on social media, and I’ve also been creating content consistently for 6 years now.
I have been taught, witnessed, learned and created content a certain way for over half a decade and now I have this gut feeling that I don’t need to create content like that anymore.
To simply flip a switch and not fall back into my old ways of being isn’t very realistic. And if I shame myself about not trusting myself, it’s not going to help me become who I want to be, in fact, may only perpetuate the problem.
In this process of trusting myself, which is a constant transition, I can give love to the part of Matt who wants to develop a successful business and holds on tightly to this old way of doing things. I can also love the part of me that struggles to fully trust myself to transition fully into this new style of content.
Even as a write this, I can feel a tightening in my stomach and tingles in my hands.
I feel the urge to tell you that this “might be a bad idea” because my logical business brain says, “people need to know about your offers to buy them,” and I want you to know that I know this. “I AM NOT AN IDIOT GUYS!!!”
So even though I can logically see that everything works, and I truly can do things my way or a combination of ways that I’ve learned, doesn’t mean the switch is easy to flip.
But this trust in ourselves… it’s all we truly have.
Getting Unstuck
The message that I share on social media is to not just speak your truth, but you must be that person.
For example, I have a client who got sober has dealt with suicidal thoughts (I’m not sure if they’ve acted on them). So she helps other people create a life they love by getting sober. One of the paths to creating this life—the things she did for herself— is to start your days with sunshine, do cold plunges, meditation, journaling, and other things like that.
But she was stuck creating content.
She was stuck creating content because she stopped doing those things.
She stopped being a student in her own life.
When you stop doing the things you preach, content is hard to create because
- You’re out of integrity
- You forget what it’s like to struggle with doing those things
If she stops making ‘going outside first thing in the morning to get sunlight’ a habit, then she isn’t reminded of how hard that can be some days when life gets busy. She forgets the problems that sunshine actually helps her with. She has no lived experiences to pull from anymore.
She’s not only disconnected to her truth, but also disconnected to her clients and her content.
Similarly for me, if I am not pushing myself to live a life of no regrets and stop trying to uncover my truth and share it. I’d be out of integrity.
I certainly wouldn’t be able to write this email…. which maybe you are deeply resonating with right now. It’s only resonating because I’m going through it. I’m not making shit up. I’m simply sharing my truth.
It’s not really a content thing though
I don’t want to live a life of regrets. To do that, I need to be better about owning what I want (my truth).
This isn’t just about trusting myself to stop making educational content that doesn’t really resonate with me and feels forced.
Trusting myself is a a much deeper wound.
Like confidently trusting myself to pursue a great tennis career at age 34. There are a lot of ways I sabotage this desire of mine because “it’s silly” and it’s not the most valuable thing I could be spending time on and probably other deeply rooted thoughts I’m not currently aware of.
Or the confidence to put myself out there a new city and build the community I’m looking for. What if I really put myself out there and can’t build a community I love? What a loser I’ll be. Pathetic.
The way I approach my content is not a singular problem. It’s a representation of my wounds as a whole.
And it’s worth considering if you’re stuck creating content, what does that say about your life?
Are you actively pursuing a greater vision than the one you preach on social media?
If not, then the work starts offline.
The work starts by you prioritizing what is important to you and the things that you know will create an even better version of yourself and the life you want.
If you’re doing that….
- You will be living a more joyful life (huge win… isn’t that enough?)
- You will always have ideas to share because you’re struggling through what your client struggles through even if it’s just at a higher level or a different version. They will find themselves in your story and will see you as a confident and bold leader who is not afraid to share their struggles, their strategies and lessons through them.
That’s what makes a great leader.
📚 Next up: If you liked this, you’ll love this post on Embodiment Content!
With Love,
Matt
P.S. If you’ve been looking for help with your content, my membership will be opening doors in a few weeks to my waitlist ONLY. Click here to join the waitlist.
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