Seven years of failing at social media has taught me rather a lot about succeeding with myself.

I have failed at social media.

There. I said it.

And I’m not using failure in that fashionable way where someone tells you they failed because their launch only made R700,000 instead of a million. This is also not a miraculous comeback story.

Objectively, the numbers are there, giggling at me. 

I’ve been plugging away at this online thing since 2019. Sometimes intentionally. Sometimes less so. Always consistently. 

In 2022, I challenged myself to contribute daily. This year I’ve approached visibility as deliberate practice. I even joined Cohort, a visibility programme, where I have watched other people make extraordinary strides in engagement, followership, opportunities and sales.

Me?

Not so much.

And it is effortful. Really effortful.

I float between moments of defeat and moments of resolve.

The moments of defeat tend to come when I let the numbers become my narrator.

Clearly nobody cares.
This isn’t working.
Maybe I’m just bad at this.

The moments of resolve come when I become the narrator again.

When I choose the meaning I make.

When I wield the power of perspective.

When I refuse to take it personally.

When I remember:

This is not about ALL of me. And this is not forever.

And somewhere in this long, apparently unsuccessful experiment, I’ve realised something.

For failure to actually matter, self-leadership is essential.

Without self-leadership, failure can simply become evidence for every terrible thing we’ve ever suspected about ourselves.

With self-leadership, failure becomes material.

Something to examine. Question. Learn from. Metabolise. Respond to.

Something from which we can create.

And, strangely, this failed journey with social media has taught me more about myself than many of the things I’ve done successfully.

I don’t do social media particularly well. I do content well.

This distinction took me a while to see.

Social media asks me to understand distribution, attention, algorithms, hooks, trends, audience behaviour, conversion and all the other machinery that gets content seen.

The evidence suggests I have quite a way to go.

But content?

I am devoted to content.

Because content isn’t merely something I produce so somebody else will consume it.

✾ It is one of the places in which I meet myself.

✾ I write to discover what I think.

✾ I speak to hear what I know.

✾ I wrestle with an idea until I understand where I stand.

✾ I put language to something I’ve experienced and, in doing so, make meaning from it.

Content is self-expression.

And self-expression is one of the practices through which I grow and become the leader of me.

So yes, I’d like considerably more people to see the bloody stuff.

I need to get better at social media.

But the absence of an audience cannot make the practice meaningless.

The audience is one beneficiary of my work. I am another.

I have the frustration. It doesn’t have me.

I remember the terror with which I once approached new technology.

Everything felt complicated. Overwhelming. Beyond me.

It doesn’t anymore.

There’s still much I don’t know. I still get frustrated. Sometimes spectacularly so.

But there is a very big difference now.

I have the frustration. It doesn’t have me.

It is an experience I am having, not a state that owns me.

It passes.

❉ I’ve learned to soothe myself instead of stopping myself.

❉ I’ve learned that disappointment doesn’t require withdrawal.

❉ I’ve learned to metabolise frustration meaningfully instead of allowing it to decide what happens next.

I have, in a very real way, reclaimed dominion of myself from frustration.

That feels like confidence to me.

Not I know how to do everything.

But:

I trust myself when I don’t.

I learned to obey myself

I’ve always been good at obeying.

Give me a measure and I’ll figure out how to meet it.

A deadline? Done.

A requirement? Done.

Someone else’s expectation? You’d be amazed what I can make happen.

Except when the commitment was to myself.

Then the excuses and justifications, all beautifully rooted in logic, could reign supreme.

Social media has given me nowhere to hide.

There is no boss.

No instruction.

No requirement.

No standard.

No deadline.

And no consequence imposed by anybody else when I don’t do the thing.

Which has given me an extraordinary space in which to practise something I hadn’t realised I needed to learn:

Obedience to myself.

❈ For no other reason than that I said I would.

❈ To treat my word to myself as law.

❈ To see myself as worthy of my own respect.

There is something deeply confidence-building about repeatedly experiencing yourself as somebody whose word to yourself means something.

Come tomorrow, I do what I said I would do.

Not because someone is checking.

Because I am.

I learned that being witnessed won’t kill me

Owning your opinion is one thing.

Owning it while other people witness it is something else.

They can evaluate it.

Challenge it.

Dispute it.

Dismiss it.

Disregard it.

Or perhaps worse for someone trying to build an online presence, simply scroll straight past it.

I used to brace when I heard someone had read something I’d written.

I don’t in the same way anymore.

I’ve lived through being seen.

And I’ve lived through being unseen.

Again and again.

There is an unexpected freedom in both.

Because confidence, I’m discovering, isn’t about becoming indifferent to what other people think.

It is about not requiring their response to determine what I think about myself.

I learned that some of the most important boundaries are with myself

I’ve spent years thinking about boundaries between people.

What’s mine to carry?

What belongs to you?

Where do I end and you begin?

But the online world has been teaching me another kind of boundary.

The boundaries I hold with myself.

❧ The boundary between learning from what works and allowing it to dictate who I become.

❧ Between receiving feedback and handing it authority.

❧ Between adapting my communication and contorting myself for approval.

❧ Between sharing myself and making my life available for consumption.

❧ Between visibility and believing that visibility entitles anyone to all of me.

There are things I could share that might make better content.

I don’t.

There are parts of my life that belong to me.

There are parts of other people’s lives I have no right to turn into content, even when those stories include me.

There are trends I could follow. Things I could manufacture. Ways I could present myself that might make me more consumable.

Sometimes I will experiment.

Sometimes I will change because the feedback is useful and I want to get better.

A boundary isn’t a refusal to be influenced.

It is knowing where influence ends and self-abandonment begins.

That isn’t a judgement on anyone else’s choices.

It is clarity about mine.

My standards are mine.

And sometimes I pay a price for them.

Happily.

Because I’ve discovered something else.

I can metabolise disappointment. Self-betrayal is much harder to metabolise.

That stuff is poison to the soul.

I learned what is mine

Perhaps nowhere has this become more practical than in an idea I return to often:

My business.
Other people’s business.
God’s business.

What I create is my business.

Whether I honour my standards is my business.

Whether I publish is my business.

Whether I learn, adapt and improve is my business.

Whether somebody likes it, shares it, buys from it, agrees with it or thinks I’m talking absolute rubbish?

That’s not entirely my business.

And the outcome?

Increasingly, I understand that as God’s business.

When I started my business, one of my most frightening thoughts was that if I couldn’t make it work, I’d end up homeless and hungry.

Well.

It hasn’t worked in many of the ways I imagined it would.

And guess what?

I’m not homeless.

I’m not hungry.

Even when the prospect of losing my home actually loomed ahead of me, it wasn’t nearly as terrifying as the version I’d rehearsed in my imagination.

We are so flippen resourceful when we discover that the things we thought would destroy us often don’t.

And my faith has asked something deeper of me.

Qadr (Divine decree) is beyond what I do, and even beyond who I am.

I have increasingly surrendered the idea that provision is determined by resource.

Provision is determined by Source.

My job is simpler.

Honour my Fitrah (my innate, God-given nature and disposition).

Do my work.

Tell the truth.

Keep my word.

And release what was never mine to control.

I learned that failure needs leadership

Perhaps this is the lesson beneath all the others.

Failure does not automatically make us wiser.

It can make us bitter.

Ashamed.

Defensive.

Risk-averse.

Obsessed with proving ourselves.

Or so desperate for a different result that we’ll betray ourselves to get one.

Failure needs leadership.

It needs us to ask:

What here is fact and what is the story I’m telling about the fact?

What is this experience teaching me?

What needs to change?

What doesn’t?

What part is mine to influence?

What am I making this mean about me?

What choices can I create from here?

Self-leadership doesn’t turn failure into success.

It does something more useful.

It prevents failure from becoming our author.

We remain the meaning-makers.

The storytellers.

The choice-creators.

The leaders of ourselves.

Maybe confidence isn’t what I thought it was

I used to think confidence had much more to do with competence and outcomes.

I’m increasingly convinced it has something to do with relationship.

How do I relate to myself when the numbers say no?

When somebody disagrees?

When the opportunity doesn’t arrive?

When someone doing precisely what I’m doing appears to fly while I remain stubbornly earthbound?

Can I experience disappointment without turning it into self-rejection?

Can I change strategy without deciding I was stupid for trying?

Can I receive feedback without handing somebody else authorship of my worth?

Can I honour my word when nobody is checking?

Can I remain my own storyteller?

Can I trust myself to meet whatever happens next?

Maybe that’s confidence.

Not:

I know this will work.

But:

Whatever happens, I know how I want to be with myself.

Success might have taught me that I could succeed.

Failure has taught me something I may have needed more.

That I can remain.

That I can learn.

That I can change.

That I can hold a boundary.

That I can disappoint myself and repair.

That I can be disappointed by the world without abandoning myself in response.

That I can obey myself.

That I can lead myself.

And perhaps that is why my failed social-media experiment has taught me more about confidence than success ever could.

Anyway,

Here’s to more social-media debris on the internet from me. 🙃😉