The risks of visibility and trying (and why to do it anyways)
Subscribe to the Sunday Soother here.
Happy Sunday, Soothers. I just finished a period of "launching" (aka, simply just selling something that has a concrete start and end date to the selling period) my dating course and I was doing some reflecting on it afterwards. Being a recovering codependent, people pleaser, and perfectionist, but also highly driven and ambitious, launches and anything to do with selling my services, especially intangible services that fall in the self-development and mental health sphere, really... how does one say... trigger the f*ck out of me.
It's really scary putting your work out there in the world and asking people to pay for it, and while it has absolutely gotten easier for me over time, launch periods are still a bit of a transformational, dread-inducing rollercoaster for me. I know I won't finish a launch the same person who started it; I'll have grown in my identity as an entrepreneur, as a coach, as a teacher, as a public figure, as a writer, as a marketer, as a salesperson, as somebody who does her best to participate in commerce but not capitalism. (I spoke on this recently on my biz coach Dielle's podcast, Black Banked and Booked Out.) I will have engaged meaningfully with fear.
During launches, I have to do a lot of steadying of my mind and nervous system to make sure I don't drop off a cliff of despair if it seems nobody is signing up, and I also have to stay aligned and not go straight into fawn response and try to overgive in an effort to get people to sign up, or go into increasingly desperate or convincing energy to try to get people to enroll or at the very least not unfollow and not leave. I journal every day; I do nervous system work every day; I do my best to step away from my computer and get into nature and connect with loved ones.
Most importantly, probably I connect multiple times a day with my inner child, who has a serious abandonment wound due to some past experiences, most significantly a friendship abandonment when I was in elementary school, plus some other breakups and friend experiences.
I realized recently that a significant part of me had been running my business through this abandonment wound, trying to convince people to stay around, not unsubscribe or unfollow or judge me, trying to please people, make sure everybody was happy, that I wasn't annoying them too much. (Oh, the wound I have around being "annoying!" It's a big one.)
So when I went into the launch for my dating course I promised myself two things:
I wanted to get really good at launching through this process (figure out what works for me, what marketing messages work, other sales tactics, etc).
And I wanted to go all in. No faint efforts. I was going to do several podcasts, send emails every day, and post frequently on Instagram and other platforms. Not from a place of desperation, but from a place of working to prove to myself that I could indeed be "too much" or "annoying" to others possibly and I was still going to love myself anyways and have wonderful success. From a place of KNOWING that the dating course is the bomb, it creates love and self love for anybody who takes it, and from a place of wanting to shout that from the mountaintops and not let a single soul who needed this course go uninformed.
The universe always provides... Here are the stats:
During the course promotion and launch...
I lost 100s of Instagram followers
A few hundred people unsubscribed from my email lists
I got no less than 5 comments or messages that were critical of my content or the volume of it
And...
I made over $40,000
And I'm going to help 53 people find incredible amounts of love and self-worth in their life.
The first three bullet points were the costs of the other two bullet points, and it was a cost worth paying.
And it was also hard. Every day I would notice the unfollows or unsubscribes and steel myself and say, "We're still going."
Each time I got a critical message I felt that pang of panic and sinking in my stomach and I forced myself to let it sit, and journaled to my inner child about how I and the other people who mattered would never leave her. A couple messages I chose to respond to with compassion or neutrality and the others I simply deleted or blocked, because I didn't really owe that person anything.
So many moments came when I wanted to disparage myself, shame myself, call myself pathetic for trying, greedy for wanting to make money, egotistical for wanting to create impact, lame for thinking I could help others.
But I chose to not listen to those thoughts this time, and I kept going.
These things I'm mentioning, I know in the grand scheme that they are not big deals especially in light of all the horror and pain in the world right now, and I was never in true harm. Yet, if you are in the throes of codependency and people-pleasing, you too know that people criticizing you, leaving you, judging you, can truly feel almost like a death to your nervous system. There is a panic that arises out of this hypervigilance, a sense of dread and even self-loathing that can come along with this ride, that is so excruciatingly painful. Of wanting people to stay, of wanting people to not misunderstand you. Of wanting to feel safe and loved.
Anyways, all this to say: the risks of visibility are real, and also, you must not let them make the decisions for you.
People need your help, your medicine, your wisdom.
You deserve to make money and get value exchanged for the services you provide to the world.
The only person whose opinion matters is that of your inner child, what she thinks about you and how you are treating her.
You're not too much. You never were.
And when you engage in visibility efforts, I know you run risks, I know your deepest and most painful wounds can get poked. And I still think, as long as you have the help you need, and the tactics to support yourself through it, becoming more and more visible in your work is a process that it deeply worth it for your soul and your identity.
After this last launch, I came out knowing a few things:
I didn't realize that, even though I have been running a successful business for the last couple of years, I truly have been still engaging in massive amounts of people-pleasing and staying small to try to avoid criticism.
However, it is inevitable that people will judge and criticize me as I grow, and it is now safe to let them do that and I don't have to try to convince them I'm a good person or of my meanings and intents.
There are going to be people in your life or in your audience who say they want to see you succeed but not really mean it. They mean more, they'd like to see you succeed but in a way that they define as acceptable or approved. When you exceed that they may attempt to shame you. It is up to you to define your own version of your success and hold fast to it.
People will unfollow and unsubscribe and not only is it great that they do that (because they are making their own choices about the content they consume and the time they spend), but it's also not your job or an important part of your business to try to get as many people to stick around as possible. That dilutes a lot of what you are here to offer to the world.
Finally, I came out more convinced than ever that I have a lot of work to do here on this planet in the sphere of helping people pleasers and perfectionists run businesses and make money. We have SO MUCH to offer to the world from our hearts, our compassion, our empathy, our healing, our intellect, our ability to hold space. Yet we are ham-stringing ourselves when it begins to intersect with money, self-promotion, business, visibility, success and our fear. Stay tuned for my next course, Secretly Ambitious, coming out later this summer, geared towards sensitive folks who are ready to move beyond people pleasing and fear into learning how to start their own service-based business.
Have courage, my fellow codependents. There is a path for you in this world where you meaningfully engage with your painful fear of others leaving you; there is a time when people will judge or misunderstand you and it won't feel like a death or the end of the world; there is a future where you will do your best to be aligned to your own integrity and heart and not dependent on others defining that for you; and there is a time when you truly will feel safe to be seen, just as you are, in all your weirdness, your too much-ness, your whatever-ness, and you will feel that in your heart.
And whatever it takes to get there: it will be worth it.