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IN THE END, YOU’LL RETURN TO WHO YOU ALWAYS WERE

When I look back over my old journals, or revisit the annals of my various websites, bringing to remembrance the way I used to do things in online business before I knew anything, before I was anyone, I often don’t know whether to laugh or scream.

Over and over again, the more that time passes and the more ‘high up’ I go as an entrepreneur, the more frequently I find myself declaring I ‘hate it!’ about something fancy my team has created for me (always based on my direction, to be clear!), and that we ‘just need to go back to the way I used to do it 10 or so years ago’.

Last night my brother and I pulled apart my website, for example, going through piece by piece on the visuals of it as well as overall functionality and direction. Ash was properly explaining or suggesting things, weighing up pros and cons and asking me for my feedback and I was sitting there like a grumpy teenager throwing my arms up in the air and saying ‘hate it!’ as I basically slashed red lines through the whole thing.

No wonder I hardly look at my own website, somewhere along the way from it being a completely DIY hack job to being a branded fancy-girl shizniz, the ME-ness got completely cast aside. I built my first sites my self, and then when I did get help in the early years it was a little here and there from my blog tech guy. My most recent site is purposefully built, YEP based on my direction of course, to show me as a ‘brand’, a high-level badass who the world needs to see.

And, that’s what I thought I wanted … needed … what I thought it was time for! Gotta go to the next level, right? Can’t keep DIY-ing all your shit forEVER, right? Right? Anyone?

But when I look at it now, while there are elements I would keep (okay, one photo), pretty much ALL of it is not.fucking.me.

And?

I HATE IT.

I found myself pulling up screenshots of my website which I made myself 10 years ago … then pulling up the homemade site of a guy I follow online which pretty much fits the ‘old school’ model of what a bloggers ‘site looks like … and basically mapping out the redo of my current site to return it to exactly how I had it all before I knew anything, was anyone, or was in any way trying to present myself as fancy.

It’s funny to me, because had you have asked me, at no point along the way would I have SAID I lost sight of just being me, but yet it happened. Somehow, some way, it just crept up on me.

It’s hilarious to me (and mildly frustrating, although I forgive and fully love and accept myself anyway!) just how many things in my business now seem to be being returned to the way I did it when it was just little old me.

Not just the website, but the funnel, the optin, the way I get my message out beyond just my own audience, the way I intend to grow MUCH bigger in terms of following and income for next year, all of it.

Nearly daily I find myself saying – ‘God! This is all too fancy! Let’s just go back to the way it was before I had the whole team or knew what internet marketing was!’.

The K.I.S.S. principle is one we could all stand to remember, I think maybe I need it tattooed onto my forehead in mirror writing! Keep it Simple, Stupid!

I think it’s natural, when you’re a driven person, to want to improve thing, but when you couple that with some lingering self-worth stuff which causes you to continually question if your own way is right or ‘allowed’, you can find yourself on a pretty dangerous path. Often, the more you try to improve things, the further from alignment you get!

This might be partly because we grow up being told we are not inherently enough, that in order to succeed, do it right, be the best, we need to ADD to who we are. Maybe some teachers or mentors encourage us to find our natural gifts, but usually with the proviso that ‘of course we need to polish them, and present them properly’.

The thing is … your natural gifts will be polished just through using them. I don’t believe it’s meant to require ADDING stuff to them, ‘tricking them up’, so to speak, in order to be better seen and heard.

With over 12 years experience in online business, and having built a purpose-driven empire which makes millions of dollars per me and is also (despite all the fancy extras I’m now shredding) built on a solid foundation of me just being me and sharing my message, I can tell you that the best way to be seen and heard, as well as PAID, is to keep it as simple as possible, adding little or NOTHING to the message and the ‘you-ness’, and getting it out into the world in whatever the most straight-forward manner possible happens to be. No fluff added!

As I said to Ash yesterday – “fancy plans should always be treated with the greatest of caution! We need to keep a close eye on ourselves whenever we start trying to come up with a complicated way of getting to the next level!”

I would add to this now and say that anytime you start looking OUTSIDE of yourself, with an idea that somebody knows better than you, is a time to stop, press PAUSE, and connect back to your core.

You could ask yourself –

“Would I even be entertaining this idea if I believed that me just being me could be enough?”

“If I had a magic wand, and could do it TOTALLY ON MY TERMS, and just the way I want and which feels like I SHOULD be able to …. AND I CAN … then what would I do?”

Invariably, and again I speak from YEARS of experience, not just the past 12 years in online biz, but numerous years prior to that building my personal brand offline, the way you end UP doing it which also WORKS is gonna be the simple ‘oh, that would be too basic / silly / unprofessional / lazy’ way you dreamed of doing it at the start.

You may be untrusting enough of yourself, as I’ve so often been of myself, to first spend years, or tens of thousands of dollars, or MUCH time and energy and emotion, doing it every other possible way at first! But when you finally realise that MORE FANCY OR PROPER IS NOT BETTER, and I suppose also when you finally reach your ‘fuck this shit’ point ’cause the whole damn thing is SO draining and soul-sucking, do you know what you’ll do?

You will return to who you were at the very start.

Before you knew anything.

Before you were anybody.

And when you either couldn’t afford to, or just hadn’t considered, the idea of looking outside of you for a perfect fucking system.

Here is what else:

ALL of this is true not only for the moving parts of your business and how you deliver or present your message and content, it is also – and MOST importantly – true for who you are and what your message IS.

Without exception, if you are a soul-led creator at your core, you WILL return at some point to the thing that it’s always been.

You ARE WHO YOU ALWAYS WERE, and nothing is ever going to change that.

The shit you journaled on a decade ago … a hundred years ago … or simply have daydreamed over too many times to possibly count, THAT is the shit you will ultimately get known for, and fall into flow for.

You’re not going to find flow or ANY level of TRUE success tricking it up.

I know your fear mind screams at you that THAT can’t be enough, YOU are not enough, people wouldn’t buy that, why would they pay for that, how would you sell it ANYWAY?! And you find yourself continually TRYING to get seen, heard, worrying about how things should look or what’s a better way to sell or share it. Poring over every like or comment you get or don’t get, and adjusting accordingly.

NONE of that will pay off. Except in the sense of course that it’s a fabulous exercise in remembering who you were in the first place, eventually!

But wouldn’t you like to save the time and effort, and just go straight to where you’ll inevitably end up anyway? The place where you’ve said HATE IT and FUCK ALL OF IT and I DON’T CARE ANYMORE about ANYTHING that is not just the bare naked YOU, and where you just SHOW that you to the world –

Take it or leave it –

And of course because now your true peeps can actually SEE you, since you’ve stopped hiding under all that nonsense, they TAKE it.

If you could have it your way –

(and you can)

and do it TOTALLY on your terms –

(and you can)

and just show up and bare your soul to the world, no fuss or muss added –

(and you can)

and succeed beyond your WILDEST DREAMS (so long as you keep dreaming ’em, to allow the next level througha!) –

(AND YOU CAN)

then what would you be?

what would you do?

and what would the people say,

about you?

In the end, you’ll be who you always were.

You’ll do it the way you always wanted to.

You’ll tear down ANYTHING which in any way covered that up, or diluted its power.

And you’ll be known not because you were the fanciest performer with the bestest tricky tricks –

But because the light of your damn SOUL shone so brightly that people couldn’t NOT be drawn to it.

And finally,

You stopped covering that shit up.

 

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