authentic content? document don't create. presence not perfection.

Let's talk about authentic content creation. What does it really mean? So, as you know, I love using social media to build a business, to grow a message. But some of you don't like to use social media like Facebook to grow your message, to grow your audience, to grow your business. And I would be really interested to know why that is. If you are willing to comment and let me know, let us know what your concern is with using social media to grow your business. Or if you're not sure you want to go public with that, you can privately message me to kind of give me your thoughts on it. I'd love to know. One of the common concerns I hear from people. Some of the clients that I've worked with is George. I don't want to use social media to grow my business because I. I don't want to feel like I have to keep putting up an image of myself and to try to maintain that image. Right. Another reason is, well, I can't imagine having to keep posting content forever. Like, I don't have that much to say. I mean, you know, so I'll address each of these concerns one by one. And let's start. Let's start with the one about image. Are you concerned that once you start, you'll have this image? You have to upkeep? Right. First of all, it's kind of like you get into a relationship and the person that you're dating likes you as a certain way. Maybe you tried to impress them originally, so you put up a pretense about who you really are. You know, you had to act to become more charming or whatever, to be liked by the person. And so now you're like, oh, my God, I gotta be in this relationship, and I have to keep up like that, otherwise the person won't like me. So that's like social media, right? What if now we're talking about authentic content, authentic social media? What is authentic social media? What is that? It's like an authentic relationship or an authentic friendship? Let's just talk friendship. Let's not even talk relationship. Just talk friendship. Do you have to pretend to be somebody that you're not in order to continue a friendship? If so, is that an authentic friendship? Not the most authentic one. The most authentic friendship is where the person that you're friends with likes loves you just as you are. You can show up however you are that day, and as long as you're not too mean to them, as long as you're not consistently mean and offensive to them, they're gonna be. They're gonna keep being your friend. And the truth is, you are not gonna show up on social media and be consistently mean or offensive. There's no point. Why would you do that? I mean, you know, none of you are gonna do that. You're just showing up to social media. And if you're just being your authentic self, let me tell you what that means for me. It means showing up as I am. You know, as you see, I wear the same thing every day pretty much. You know, I don't try to pretend to be somebody I'm not. Yes, other people might enjoy changing out their shirt every day. Like, screw that. I don't have. I don't have energy for that. I don't care if you don't like. See there. There are authentic friendships and authentic social media, right? It's like, I don't care if there are certain things you don't like about me. I don't care if you don't like me because I wear the same shirt all the time. Leave. It's okay. There are plenty of. I am only one of tens of thousands of marketing experts that you could listen and watch and listen to and watch. And many of the million marketing experts out there, out of the million, maybe there are a thousand who are very authentic or like, has the kind of value set that I do. Go and watch them, you know, don't watch me. I had the same background all the time. You don't like it, no worries. There are plenty of other things you could do with your time. You know, don't watch me, okay? And some people, in fact, don't like to watch me, and they just like to read my articles. Great. No problem. I try to show up authentically on my articles too. And if some people don't like watching me nor reading my articles, no problem. There's tons of things you can do with your time to learn marketing and to learn business and all that stuff, right? So I don't have the energy to do certain things, but I do have the energy to do other things. I have the energy to show up with as much passion and heart as I can. I have the energy for that. Or I can build up the energy for that. I can build up the energy to study in my field and get as excellent at marketing certain things. Again, marketing is so many things, including switching up your background all the time, changing shirts, you know, making video editing really cool, making everything really fast and interesting. That's marketing too. I don't have the energy for that. Right? But marketing is so many things I'M going to just focus on a few things I have energy for and show up and whoever connects with me. There's enough. Going to be enough people. That's the thing about online marketing. There are enough people for you, no matter who you are, no matter how you want to show up as. No matter if you never change your background, video background, no matter if you never change your shirt, no matter if you look a certain way that people don't like. I. I don't. Doesn't matter. There are enough, more than enough people for you to build a full, thriving business for the rest of your life. That's really, that's amazing thing about online marketing. And as I've said many times, the easiest way to do that is through Facebook ads, which is why I teach it. And people love taking that from me. So bottom line, all right, Think of social media authentically. Authentic social media, like an authentic friendship. How would you be in an authentic friendship? Do the same thing on social media. In an authentic friendship, you would enjoy the person you know, show up as you are. They enjoy you. You try to help them. You share the thoughts that you're going on. When you go hang out with a friend, you go, I gotta prepare. Okay, I gotta be funny today with my friend. I gotta like, yeah, there's an order of topics that I should talk to my friend about. First I need to talk about this, and then, and then, and then. And then next time I meet with them, I should talk about that. And then next. Some of you are so worried about the order of topics. Oh, my God, George, should I do this? Talk about this first and then this and then this and then this. I don't care. So, in fact, when I was. As I started talking about this, I'm like, oh, the video I just made previously was kind of on the same topic. I should have switched it up. So this order of today's topic is not the right order either. So I should have. There's lots of topics I could have talked about. I should have talked about another one. So even the order of topics is wrong in what I do. So it doesn't matter. Like the books that I release. The order is not perfect. I'm reading Principle. I'm releasing Principles of Authentic Business now. That probably should have been my first book. It doesn't matter. You worry too much if you're thinking about these things. What you need to do is show up and run Facebook ads. And that's what you need to do first. And then you look back on the data, and then you can organize better, but if you don't have any data yet from your audience, how do you even plan your business? You don't plan your business without data. I think that's probably the biggest misconception that so many of you have. Oh, I got to plan my business or I got to plan my content? You don't plan in advance. The whole point of authentic business is that you can be yourself and build a six figure, seven figure, whatever, eight figure. It doesn't matter how much money you want to make. You can do that being yourself. Did you know that? Without using funnels. And I mean, if you like using funnels, do it. But you don't have to either, right? You could be yourself and as long as you distribute your content enough. But you can't just show up on Facebook and expect that people, millions of people, will find you. You can't put a blog up and expect people to find you. You have to know how to distribute your content. That's part of the game. The easiest way to distribute your content is through Facebook ads. Easiest way. Search engine optimization is not that easy. Although that's something I've taught a class on. And you could take that class if you want to do that way. Doing interviews is another way to distribute your content. Being interviewed by other people, you can trade interviews, but anyway, it's just, it's, that's it. Authentic social media is like an authentic friendship. Think about that and work on that and show up as you are. Again, like I said, with a friend, I don't think, okay, I gotta like, think about these things to say. And no, I show up to the meeting with a friend and I just say, here's what's on my mind today. You know, I was thinking or like, hey, I'm so glad to see you. I have something that I want to, I want to work through with you. I'm like, I have this particular topic I'm so passionate about. Let me talk about it with you and see what you think of it, right? See what you know. Let's have a conversation about it. That's authentic social media right there. You don't plan so much. You show up and show up that day with whatever is alive for you right now and you just do that. That's it. You don't think with your friend, right? You don't think, oh my God, I got to have stuff to talk about with my friend for the rest of my life, for the rest of this friendship. Like, I don't have. There's not much to Say on social media, it's even better because it's not one authentic friend. It's, you know, first it's one and then it's five, and then it's 250 and then it's 5,000 or lots of authentic friends and you have lots of things to talk about for the rest of your life. You don't have to plan so much and worry so much. You don't have enough content for the rest of your life. You just show up today. Even if you said the same thing last video like I did, the last video was the same thing. Same basically, except slightly different order of words, right? You just show up and be your authentic self. Now, as I said before, you show up and start the video before you write. You do one minute of energy reboot. I have talked about my energy reboot before. Those of you don't know, it's basically four breaths. That's how I do it. You might have a different way of grounding yourself, but you just, you know, I hold literally this is what I did before I started this video and it only takes me 20 seconds. This is literally what I do. I breathe in love, breathe out total security, which I believe is the reality for you and me. Total security. And that's part of authenticity. Let me finish the energy reboot and I'll talk about the why total security is part of authenticity. So first one is breathe in love, breathe out. Total security. Second one, breathe in love, breathe out playfulness or joy or gratitude. It's basically one of those words as a second out breath. And playfulness is great. That's part of total security. And then third breath is I breathe in my sort of the virtue focus of the week today, this week, it's joyful discipline. So I breathe that out into my life. And then the final one, I think about what I'm going to do next and I breathe in and then I breathe out love and wisdom into that thing I'm going to do Next. Text takes 20 seconds. And now I'm ready to do my video or write my article. Even though I didn't feel like it before. And even when I started recording this, like I said, I didn't feel like doing it. I am like, oh, my gosh, you know, my. My wife is going on a trip today and I you. I just, I'm not in the right mindset. But I'm here because otherwise I'll keep putting it off. That's what I know to be true about me. Right? So total security. Why? So to show up so authentic friendship, right? You can only have authentic friendships when genuinely authentic friendships happen, when you are a secure person. And yes, all of us are on the spectrum of feeling secure or feeling insecure. And there's days when we're not and days where we are. And so I'm not saying that you're insecure forever or you're secure forever, depends on the situation. But it is something that we all, I think, need to work on every single day. What is your practice? To become more and more secure psychologically and spiritually, emotionally, mentally, every day. And that leads to financial security too. But that's another thing. Total security to me means that no matter what I do, I've said this before, I'm not afraid of death. I'm not. I think it's because of my faith, it seems, because of what I believe about the afterlife and the spiritual world. I believe it so much, I mean, it is so real to me that I literally, I don't believe that death exists. I think it's just a change of consciousness. It's the consciousness state. This, this vehicle called the body dies, and then the consciousness keeps going. You'll see yourself, if you've seen near death experiences or you heard about, you see yourself above your body, you float into the tunnel, blah, blah, blah, go see your loved ones who passed on and on to the next stage of evolution. So I'm not afraid of death. And I know that this life is only one of 100 years, of 5 billion trillion years I'm going to be. My consciousness is alive. So it's not a big deal. This life is not a big deal either. So we're here to play. I mean, we're here to play in a sense, but we're also here to grow. That's primarily, I think, we're here to grow and not grow in more money, more power, more prestige, more pleasure, but to grow in psychological security, essentially, and playfulness and grow in virtues. And so all of it, all of this business, building all of it to me is just about spiritual growth. None of it really matters. None of it really matters whether business goes up and down, whatever. Am I growing spiritually? Am I taking that situation and finding benefit in it, finding, finding joy in it, finding the next step of courage in it, you know, and am I serving, Am I serving my highest good? My highest and your highest good, you know, so it's like none of it really matters. So when you show up, when you show up with your videos or with your writing or whatever content you're creating, you Are giving yourself that opportunity to explore, to get to know yourself better. And so that's what the friend does, their authentic friend, you know, you are there for him or her to explore him or herself. And you are there and they are there for you to explore your greatest and deepest and highest self too. And then, you know, and same thing with social media. That's what we're here for. I don't. This is a. This might sound interesting. Strange. I don't like using Facebook. I don't like using Instagram. I don't like any social media. If I, if I, if I could serve you all without using social media, I would. I don't like social media. I don't enjoy it. I mean, I do it for business. I do it for, I do it only for business. I don't, I don't go on social media in my spare time. I only look at my clients stuff. And so I only do this stuff for business. I don't, Yeah, I minimize my social media because I don't like it. I don't enjoy it. I mean, it's, you know, I prefer to like watch YouTube videos or whatever, you know, So I only do this for business. And when I say business, I mean spiritual growth. I only do this to explore what I'm thinking and to serve you and to figure out what you're thinking so I can serve you better. And as I explore in a way that's useful for you, I might say that I explore in a way that's interesting and useful and helpful to you. That's why I use social media. I don't do it for fun. Lots of other fun things to do. Why am I doing this? So use social media for your business. And knowing that business is really for your exploration, your inner exploration and growth. That's it. And service to the highest good of all. That's it. So I was, I didn't even say that. The main thing I wanted to say today, which is document, don't create. This is a term that was popularized by, maybe coined by Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk. Chuck. Some, some of you hate him, some of you love him. I used to hate him and now I love him to a certain extent. I think he's a little bit too attention hogging. That's not, that's not a great thing. I think he has enough money, he has enough attention. He's just trying to be like the most famous person in history. That's not necessarily a good thing. I think chasing money, dominant, being dominated by money chasing is, I think, just as inefficient for spiritual growth as being dominated by attention seeking. So it's like, money is important, attention is important. But when we're dominated by either one, it's not the most efficient use of our life purpose. Right. So I think so I'm all about efficiency. But when it comes to spiritual growth, right. And the highest service. So document, don't create. But I like this phrase from him, which is the idea that some of you are just getting so nervous about creating content because you got it. You know, you are. You're thinking, you got to be perfect. You're thinking that it's got to be good. You don't want to offend people, you don't want to turn people off. You don't want to make a good first impression. All these things that are stopping you. And Gary Vaynerchuk says, listen, stop that and just document your journey. That's it. And by documenting your journey is what I. What you see me doing all day long. You know, every time I show up here, I'm talking stuff through. I'm like saying, this is alive for me right now, or this is what I've noticed is alive for you right now. Then let's explore this together. I'm documenting my journey as I go along. Document. And just like my secret side project, which I'm due for another video and blog post in the next couple weeks, I'll tell you about that. It's ongoing, obviously, I'm documenting my journey. I'm telling you what's going on and what I'm learning and documenting. I think what Gary, the way Gary talks about it is a little bit too frequent. He says, oh, you should be doing multiple things every single day. You should be making a video multiple things on social media every single day. That's a little bit much for me. Like I said, I don't like using social media. I just do it. I just do it to grow personally, you know, to do it to grow professionally. That's it. So what about you? Are you documenting your journey? And what Gary says I like, it's like you're going to look back on your own documentation of your journey and you're going to be so proud of it. You're going to be so glad that, look, I was there before and now I'm here. And some of you already do this through journaling, through private journaling, and that's wonderful. Now I'm interested in having you do public journaling. And, you know, I'm so Scared of public journaling because what if I could turn people off? People don't like me. It's not as good. I damage my reputation for the future. Forget all that. You know, this is something I've been around. I've been around the Internet for a long time, ever since, you know, the late 90s. And something I've learned about the Internet is that memory. Yes, you could say the memory. The Internet's memory is very long. But at the same time, really for audience building and business building, the memory is very, very short. You don't have to worry about public journaling being somehow bad for your future. And you can always remove it, too. You can always remove stuff in the future. But as long as you're not out there to offend, as long as you're being honest and you're trying to be helpful, people will sense that and people will forgive you till the ends of the earth. You won't damage your future reputation. You will not damage your future reputation by public journaling. Now, you don't want to, like, put anything lewd up, you know, like no naked pictures and things like that. That's, you know, use your common sense, right? You don't want to. One thing I also say about public journaling is vulnerability is good. As you can see, I'm vulnerable in a lot of my videos. But. But there's a. There's a formula to vulnerability that is beneficial and not beneficial, right? If you just say, woe is me. I'm having a bad day, this bad thing happened to me. I'm feeling sad, I'm feeling angry, blah, blah, blah. And that's all you say. People think that that's authentic social media. I think that's just saying too much. I think that's just being that. I think that's just polluting the consciousness of the world with negativity. So be vulnerable, but do it this way. Woe is me. But that's the first part of the formula. Second part of the formula, and this is what I did to recover, or this is what I'm doing now to go to the next level. Okay, you can say, woe is me. Oh, I made a mistake. I failed doing this. This is not working well for me. And this is now what I'm doing to go to the next step. This is now what I'm learning from it. That may be helpful for you as well. So if you do authentic social media that way, share what's really on your thoughts, be vulnerable sometimes, but woe is me. But this is what I'M doing about it. Okay, that's a good formula for vulnerability. And just share what's really real for you right now. That's all you've got to do. You've got to do that enough. Where you become. That's become normal becomes normal for you. You no longer worry fear and perfectionism about showing up. You just got to show up. Just got to show up. You will get stronger over time. You'll get become a better communicator over time. You'll get more confident over time. And being confident makes you a better communicator, makes you a more interesting communicator, whether it's writing or whether it's in videos or whether it's a podcast or whatever, photos, whatever you're doing. So document your journey. That's all Gary Vaynerchuk asks of us to do. And that's a great idea. Documentation rather than creation. Don't worry about creating. It's got to be in order. It's got to be this. Forget all that. Just document what's real for you and alive for you and might be helpful for the audience right now. And then the other, the other dichotomy to think about is presence over perfection. All I want is your presence. All I want is you to show up. You don't have to be perfect at all, because guess what? The whole journey is perfect. That's the secret. The secret is perfection is already here. The secret is you don't have to try to be perfect because you already are. Not that. When I say you're perfect, I don't mean that you don't grow anymore. You're going to grow infinitely, forever. Keep growing and learning and becoming more wise, becoming more loving, becoming more powerful. But what I mean is you as you're perfect in a sense of you don't have to try to do something to be secure, metaphysically, spiritually, foundationally. There is a perfect security that's already there. And you don't have to try. There's a wonderful song, look this up by Daniel Nahmod. Nahmod, that's his last name, Daniel. First name, last name Namod. N O N A H M O D and the song is called the Race is Over. He said, what if the race is over and we've all already won? You know, the race is over. You don't have to try to race and everything. It's already over. Everybody's already won. And now we're just here to play, to grow, to explore, to become better versions of ourselves. Not because then we'll be more secure psychologically and spiritually. But because it's fun to become a better version of ourselves, it's enjoyable. We become more powerful and creative and loving and wise. Document. Don't create. Just show up and say what's important for you now and what you think might be useful and interesting to your people without having to plan so much. You can plan when you look back on the data of what posts are working. Look back on my previous video on that. But I hope this is helpful. I've gone on long enough. See, this is partly. Also, what happens without planning is I go on too long. But that's okay. That's okay, too. All right, thanks. For those who are joining me live here, Captain Dan, Roberto, Miriam, Gudrun. Kiem. Tucker. Linda. Steve. Isabel. Carissa. Who else? Arturo. Sweta. Thank you all for your. For your presence here. I appreciate you very much. Yeah, yeah. And Carissa says. Yeah. Yikes. Public journaling, that does scare me. You know, get used to the platform. Maybe part of what you need to get used to is just the technology itself, right? That's part of it. So start a secret Facebook group with three supportive friends. Ask them first, of course, start with two or three supportive colleagues, friends, whomever, maybe people from this community, from people from my community. Hey, who wants to start a secret Facebook group where we are accepted for the content we put up there? Public journaling in that secret group. Then you're going to get at least get used to that, the platform that. The technology of putting yourself out there on the technology in a secret group with a few people, and you'll see that people are supportive of you. And now you'll get a bit more bold and start doing a bit larger group. And then maybe publicly. So maybe start that way is a good idea. Thank you, everybody. And I wish you playfulness. I wish you joy as you step out and share your journey, which is a unique one. Your journey is certainly unique. Nobody has lived the life that you have. Trust me on that one. Nobody has had the exact thoughts that you have. You need to be out there. You need to share those. All right. Blessings. You.