how can you be authentic when posting or sharing on social media?

One of the top questions that I get asked is how to be authentic when posting on social media. So I'm going to go ahead and read to you something that a lot of my readers, my audience has found helpful, and I might insert comments along the way. And I look forward to seeing what you think of this. So here we go. Have you ever stared at a blank screen knowing that you should post something for your business, but then feeling a sense of exhaustion before you even type or speak a single word. Anyone relate to that? Okay, now where does that come from? A reader once wrote to me, I'm not sure I can sustain a presence on social media. It feels exhausting to have to keep up an image of who I am, and honestly, I'm afraid I'm going to run out of things to say. So there it is, right? It is. The exhaustion comes from trying to be something that we don't want to be, right? So let me continue. If I had to pretend to be someone I'm not or constantly uphold a polished facade, it would exhaust me too. But there is a different way. We can show up authentically without the burnout, without the pretense, and without attaching our self-worth to an algorithm. Okay, so I'm gonna just name something here. The fact that I'm reading to you a transcript is already an example of this, right? Like most people might, some people actually use AI to change their, they're reading a transcript, but they use AI to change where their eyes supposed to be looking, so it looks like they're looking at the camera. But I'm just being authentic to you and telling you that I'm reading a transcript because I have found that this kind of content, people find it helpful. So I'm going to continue on here. The exhaustion we feel often comes down to a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset. Okay? A fixed mindset prioritizes maintaining an image. We feel pressure to create a brilliant work of art every time we post something. It has to perfectly address exactly what our audience wants, eloquently written or spoken, right? This is the pursuit of so-called perfection and trying to create perfection. It's not sustainable. It's just simply not. I mean, you might sometimes be able to, you know, muster a lot of energy and work long hours and finally create something that's— you can— you think is perfect. But of course, later when you look back on it, it's rarely the case that you still think it's perfect because things can always be improved, right? That says a perfectionist here. Okay, so Trying to create perfection is simply not sustainable. It's often just continuous self-punishment, the repeating inner voice of a strict authority figure from our past. Okay, does that resonate with you? Um, for those of you who may have grown up with strict parenting, you know, or, uh, in a, in a culture that tends to be more strict with, you know, academics or whatever, myself included, you might particularly have this within yourself, or maybe you just, you know, were born with that particular, you know, pushing yourself really hard. Okay, so the alternative is presence. Gary Vaynerchuk, famous YouTuber, has a great saying, document, don't create. What does that mean? It means, well, let me continue here. When you release the pressure to create a masterpiece, you free yourself to simply document the present moment. You show up as you are with your current thoughts, your evolving insights, and a heart of humble service. And I would say a heart of, um, desiring to connect with, with somebody who might find this useful or meaningful. Okay. You don't need to plan the next 5 years of your content, right? Instead, Take your— the divine gift of just one day at a time. What is energizing to you now? What are you learning today? What surprised you recently? Just document it. Document it. This turns your social media into a kind of public journaling, a reflection that may happen to benefit others. Okay, so I really have been using this idea ever since I started posting consistently on social media. And by the way, social media, I mean everything from YouTube to Instagram to, you know, Substack to Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Yes, even LinkedIn. Okay. Let me continue. Think about how you act when you are with a true close friend. You don't script what you're going to say. Well, funny enough, that's exactly what I'm doing here, but I'm always integrating things that I think what I would— I'm imagining reading this blog post that's been helpful to a lot of other friends to a friend who maybe hasn't read it or hasn't read in a while. So, that's the take that I'm bringing here. You don't worry about the exact order of your sentences. You feel like you can just be yourself. Sometimes you're funny, sometimes you're a little boring. Some days you feel highly energized, and other days not so much. A real friend accepts all of it. They care about you through thick and thin. Okay? Why shouldn't we treat our audience the same way? Particularly our ideal audience. By definition, your ideal audience is like this real friend. If you're willing to show up authentically, you gradually develop an audience who likes you for exactly who you are. You simply share what's on your mind today, what you think might help, and what you think would help connect you with them now, right? Just like connecting with a real friend. Showing up consistently is an empowering practice. It is the expression of your unique energy signature. In fact, I don't, I don't think you understand your energy signature until you express yourself enough to find, to feel into the times when you are particularly alive, when you're talking about something or writing about something, and the times when you're like, "Um, yeah, that doesn't feel like me." And it takes the practice of continual expression. Okay? "However," okay, and I said the world needs that unique expression. "However, we must address the issue of engagement, likes, comments, and shares. Most of the time, you will not get as much engagement as you see other people getting." This is the key, right? Because let me ask you, how much engagement is enough engagement? How do you even know that? You probably gauge it based on you yourself scrolling social media and noticing, oh, this person got 10 likes, this one got 100 likes, this one got 1,000, you know, whatever. Social media shows you whatever is popular. Okay, let me continue on here. Most of the time, you will not get as much engagement as you see other people getting. Your mind will likely tell you, It's because people don't like me. My work isn't valuable. You have to understand how social media algorithms work. When you scroll through your newsfeed, your social media feed, you are only seeing the tiniest percentage of posts. Did you know that? The tip of the iceberg, the things that have already received massive engagement, right? Because the social media companies want to keep you coming back. And so they're only going to serve you things that other people like you have already engaged with, which makes it much more likely that you're going to engage with it too. Okay, um, you do not see the vast majority of posts that have received near zero engagement. Having posts with no likes or comments is actually completely normal. It's actually more normal to have posts with no likes or comments than it is to have posts with 10 likes or 1,000 likes. Now, depending on your audience size, obviously, if you have a huge audience, then it's, you know, it might be normal for you to get 100 likes on a normal post. Or, you know, for someone with a huge audience, 100 might be their zero, right? But 1,000 might be like, okay, this is a decent one. And 10,000 likes might be like, okay, this is one of my best, better ones. So it depends on your audience size. But for most of us, Most of us, right? Myself included on certain platforms. Zero is normal. And like, if you don't normalize this, you will always go, well, my thing is not valuable. No, it's— you're getting— but you're getting— you're still get— you're still touching people's lives by people viewing. A lot of people don't click like even though they actually felt shifted by whatever they read or whatever they saw. Okay, this is important. All right. Let me continue on. If you use your newsfeed as a measuring stick, you're going to constantly be discouraged. Okay, um, when I posted this article, uh, some time ago, one of my commenters, Carissa Lane— thank you— commented that Facebook— and we could say social media— but she wrote, Facebook stokes our early attachment wounds. I love that. And we often— and I'll continue here— we often make a false connection, telling ourselves, if I get more likes, I'm more worthwhile. For a while. It's— you have to understand that that's a normal reaction that you have to catch, as catch, you know, catch yourself. Like, notice yourself going, ooh, did I, did I just look at my likes and feel a certain way? Let's catch myself and return. Okay, let me continue on here. Return to, to source. Your worth as a human being is unlimited. We must detach social media engagement from our value as a human being. When we forget to do this, we lose our groundedness and authentic power. We start attention-seeking, studying tactics of popularity, and when they fail, we feel resentful. Here are a few practices to maintain sanity and authenticity when posting. So here you go, this is the, um, the step-by-step method that, that, uh, my, my readers liked. First, reconnect before you post. Right before you hit publish, take a deep breath. Reconnect for a moment with your source of infinite worth, whatever that is for you. May be God, it may be, you know, um, the ground of all being, it may be your higher self, it may be your trust in life. But reconnect with your source of infinite worth. Take a deep breath. I do what I call an energy reboot. You can look up my YouTube videos about energy reboot. I've demonstrated it in, uh, over the years in various YouTube videos. Okay. Remind yourself that you are not posting to get people's approval. If not, then what are you doing? You are posting to practice expressing your deep resonant truth and your energy signature. You're posting to sense into what is your most alive energy posture that makes you want to keep doing this for years and years and years, because if you keep doing this for years and years and years, you are much more likely to stumble upon the gems. And the gems are what are— is going to build your business, to grow your audience and build your business. Okay? But you can't stumble upon the gems until you test a bunch of things. Okay? So step 1 is reconnect before you post. Reconnect to your source of infinite worth. Step 2. Post, post, you know, expressing your energy signature, practicing, right? Practicing sharing what is true for you now. Post that and then walk away and then leave the computer and put the phone down. Once you publish your content, go do something else. Do not keep checking your phone to see if there's engagement every 5 minutes or every, you know, hour or whatever. In fact, you may want to turn off all your social media notifications on your phone. I don't know if you have it such that every time someone likes something or comments something, it pings you. Long ago, I turned all that off on my phone in terms of notifications. I think it's— maybe you have as well, I hope so, because I think it's insanity to keep receiving those. It creates this dopamine loop that reinforces, oh, you are worthy, you are worthy by having someone click like, and you don't want to connect to that, right? Turning off social media notifications on your phone strengthens your boundaries and increases your authentic power, your internal locus of motivation, instead of depending on the external locus of motivation. So step 1, reconnect before you post to your authentic worth. Step 2 is to post authentically, right? Basically sharing what is true for you now, speaking as if to a friend. And then walk away, not looking at notifications. I know step 2 is a lot. Step 3, start small if you need to. If documenting— actually, I would say this is— sorry, I realize these are not steps. The first 2 were steps. The 3rd one's a tip. Start small if you need to. If documenting publicly still feels intimidating, do this. Create a small private group. Invite a few supportive friends or colleagues to witness and encourage your experimentations. Really, I've taught this to clients over the years, and people who have done it found it very helpful. Create like a private Facebook group or an email message thread with, with a few friends. Well, first ask your friends, ask a few friends that are supportive of your journey, of your business. Say, hey, could you Could I get your support for the next— and don't just say this is a forever thing, but could I get your support for the next 4 weeks? I'm practicing posting authentically on social media, and I, I want to do it, um, knowing that at least somebody is reading it. Um, and, and so would you be one of the people that, uh, supports my posts? Um, you know, every now and then when you see it, and I'm going to share with you whenever I do post something so you can take a look at it, and you don't have to read, you know, just tell me to read the whole thing. You don't have to watch the whole video, but if you could give me a like or give me any quick feedback, I'd be super grateful. I'm only— and tell them what your rhythm is. I'm only gonna be posting 2 things a week, just 2 things a week, right? Something sustainable. If you're gonna create a group like this, make your rhythm sustainable for the group so they don't feel like they have to read your thing, you know, twice a day or something like that. Okay? Okay. So here it is. Start a small group. Private group. Invite a few supportive friends or colleagues to witness and encourage your experimentations. By the way, you could even do it as a mutual thing. Hey, could we all support each other? Or you could just do it like, hey, can you support me? That kind of thing. And if they want to create a group, you can be part of it for supporting them too. Once you feel comfortable posting in, in your group consistently, slowly expand your circle. Okay, so the, the exercise here was instead of posting publicly and sharing the link, which is one way of doing it, posting publicly and then sharing the link immediately with your group to get their feedback or support, knowing that at least some, some caring people are reading it. And by the way, knowing that some caring people are reading it means you can create with them in mind. These supportive, caring people you're creating with them in mind could be clients too, some, some current or past clients. Okay. Um, so, or if you, if you're shy about posting publicly, then just share something to the group. Just share, just share to the group for now. And then if you get particularly good feedback about certain things, then you might consider posting it publicly. Finally, finally, review monthly. Once a month, look back at what you created. Notice which pieces organically got more engagement. Yes. What topic resonated? If you feel inspired, and only if you feel inspired, create more content like that. Treat good engagement as a delightful surprise and a chance and a signal from the market that they want more of that. Not as validation of your self-worth, but simply a signal from the market that say, this served us. This was helpful. Okay, so this is what I'm doing here, right? I found that people were coming to my website to read this blog post, so I said, at least it's been a long time. I think I've done this topic before, but it's been a long time since I've done it on YouTube, so might as well bring it back to YouTube. So I'm practicing this too. If you want to understand this better, look, look for a YouTube video from me called The 3 stages of content creation. Again, the YouTube video to look up, the 3 stages of content creation. This will explain this method of looking back and then repurposing. Okay. Okay. Finally, ultimately creating content is simply a practice. Okay. It's a, it's a practice, meaning it's not something that you know, you're supposed to be instantly good at, right? And you post, you start creating content, you're like, how come this one didn't, you know, how come my content isn't getting dozens of likes? You're not like, most of us don't, myself included, most of us don't start being really good at this stuff. I had to practice for years before I started getting regular engagement. Really, those of you might know my journey, I posted 100 videos getting almost very little engagement before I, then I started getting, getting some traction because I practiced a lot finding my energy signature, finding what is authentic to me and empowering, enlivening to me. And then I continued in that way, right? Okay. So if a post gets little engagement, remember, remember, remember, by creating it, you practiced expressing yourself. That in itself is immensely valuable because most people don't practice, but you can. You hopefully will and do. Okay, keep showing up, keep sharing what is true for you right now. You will inevitably improve, especially if you follow the tips that I've just said, particularly reviewing monthly, seeing, noticing what's resonating with others, serving others, right? Keep posting what is true. You will inevitably improve, and you will eventually build a true fan base of like-minded, like-hearted people who eagerly respond to your authentic journey. And then there's a quote from Baz Luhrmann that says, the race is long, but in the end, it's only with yourself. I hope this has been helpful. I look forward to seeing what parts of this resonate with you and if you have any questions. Thank you so much for watching.