#002 You don't need another social media strategy. You need a personality.

Okay so like... can we talk about how I literally spent $25,000 on therapy and disappeared from social media for TWO YEARS because I was out here posting every damn day and getting absolutely nowhere?

Yeah. That happened.

This episode is basically me spilling alllll the tea on why your strategy isn't working and it has nothing to do with the algorithm or your posting schedule or whatever new trend is happening on reels right now.

You're not IN your content. And people can FEEL it....thats why.

We're getting into:

• Why I didn't sign a single person for an entire year (embarrassing but we're owning it)
• The day I realized I was building a business that didn't even feel like mine
• How I put $25K of therapy on a credit card because I knew something had to change
• Why the version of you trying to "sound professional" is literally repelling your people
• The hard questions I had to ask myself (and you need to ask too)

This episode gets a little spicy. I'm talking about why traditional employment is a trap, why you need to stop playing small, and why that thing you're scared to post is exactly what someone needs to hear.

If you're over here like... "Why is everyone else's content popping off but mine is getting nothing" or "I'm doing all the 'things' but nothing's converting" or maybe "I feel like I'm pretending to be someone I'm not"

Then girlie pop this one's for you.

No fluff. No "just manifest it" BS. Just a conversation about the inner work that actually makes the outer strategy work.

Also I basically tell you to stop waiting to feel ready because spoiler alert: you literally never will. It's a decision, not a feeling.

 Your people need the messy, real, unfiltered you. Not the polished version you think they want.

Grab your tea (or wine, no judgment), put your AirPods in, and let's get into it.

Transcript

Welcome & Costly Burnout

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Hi, Queen. Welcome back to Call Her Coach. And today we're going to be talking about something that honestly took me way too long to figure out. And it cost me years of burnout,$25,000 in therapy cost, and a two-year break from social media. I had a whole lot of content that just honestly fell completely flat. It flatlined. And when I started in this space about a decade ago, I had no idea that running a business online meant that you wore a lot of different hats. In the beginning, you are doing all the work yourself because that's all your budget can afford, right? In the beginning of running a business online, you have to be sales, you have to be the marketing department, you have to be HR, you have to be PR, public relations, you have to be the CEO, you have to be the manager, and you have to be the employee. And for those of you that have had a background in being an employee, moving into business ownership and entrepreneurship is going to feel very, very, very foreign. And your identity isn't going to understand who you are trying to be and who you want to become. Building a business on social media has a lot of strategy to it. And strategy is sexy. It really is. I love me a good strategy. It's literally my love language. And sometimes I have to fall back and remember that when I started, strategy is not what got me to where I'm at now. It's it was very messy for me in the beginning. And that's what connected me with my audience. The thing that changed everything for me was when I realized that all the strategies, all the content calendars, all the things without me in it won't convert. You can have the perfect posting schedule, you can have the best sales funnel, all the right hooks, the hashtags, the CTAs, and still nobody will engage with you, nobody will buy from you, nobody will do anything with your content because people don't buy strategies and algorithm hacks and things like that. You can't hack your way into that type of conversion and community with your audience. People buy people, and we're really smart. Human beings are very smart, we're very intuitive. They will buy your energy, they will buy you, not the strategies. The strategies are there on the back end. But for you to have conversions and community and feel like you're really making a difference on this planet with the work that you're doing, you gotta go deep in and go full in and commit to the inner work that's going to actually make your marketing work. You have to understand how to find yourself in a sea of everybody else on the internet doing the same thing. There's billions of people on the internet and on social media today, right now, this very minute. So, why do you matter what is your unique value perspective? What do you bring to the table that someone who's doing the exact same thing as you does not? That is the reframe that will literally change your entire business. And I want to paint you a picture, okay? Story time here. There was a version of me years ago who was doing all the things that she was told to do, right? Post every day, which is important. Consistency is important. I will die on that hill, posting every day, having an omnipresence, following the scripts, using the templates. And when I started in this space in the online social selling community almost a decade ago, I did that for an entire year. And for those of you that don't know my story, I was in a little like a makeup skincare company. That was my first experience into the world of entrepreneurship in some capacity. Okay. Now I was not successful at all. I don't even think I got one business partner for a year, year and a half. Not a single one, not my friends, nobody. And I was like, what the hell is wrong with me? What is wrong with me? Instead of asking, like, what is wrong with people? I went inward. I'm like, okay, there's something that I'm doing that's not converting. And I was so busy trying to sound like what I thought a successful entrepreneur should sound like that I completely lost myself in the process and people could feel it. They didn't know what was off, maybe, but they knew something was off. And I did too. It didn't feel authentic. So when you're when you're not being yourself, it's not that people are gonna be rejecting you per se. They just won't connect with you at all. And you're gonna become forgettable and scrollable, and just another person on the internet trying to sell something, another person on the internet with a business, and you're gonna get lost. The wake-up call for me was realizing that I had been building a business that didn't even feel like mine. I was burning out trying to copy what every other person out there that was successful was doing. And then when it didn't work, I was burnt out and I disappeared for two years completely off social media because I was like, you know, maybe I'm not meant for this. Maybe, maybe I'm just a main employee the rest of my life, even though that never felt good either. I gave myself time to find myself in those two years. At that time, I had, you know, I was working as a corporate sales executive. And I really, I mean, for the most part, like it was enjoyable. It was a job. I had more freedom than, you know, my previous, you know, being behind a bar, bartending, serving, things like that. I had more freedom, but I still I wasn't building anything for me. If I stopped working, the money would stop working. And I knew that wasn't a life that I wanted to live. And I knew the only way out of the matrix was through entrepreneurship. And so those two years I gave myself, I didn't have the money to invest in a therapist at the time, but I found one that I really resonated with. And to this day, we still talk. She's still my therapist, my life coach. She's the person that I go to when I need a refresh and a reframe. She was$250 an hour. I did not have that back then. I was paycheck to paycheck, but I knew that if I wanted to get to the version of me who could live the life that I wanted to live, I would have to figure out a way to invest in my skill set and the inner work inside of me to become that person. That's what it starts with. So I disappeared for two years. I was off social media and I would see her once a week. That's a thousand dollars a month that I did not have, you guys. I did not have that. But what I did have at that time was great credit. And so I was able to get an American Express platinum card, and I put all of my therapy expenses on that card. I had a$25,000 limit, and I knew that that would give me 25 months to really go inward and work on my damn self. Everything else after that would just be strategy. Clearly, strategy wasn't working, so I had to go inward. And you're probably asking, right? Like, how do you find yourself in all of this? How do you do the inner work? And I get it. I had the same questions and I resisted it for the longest time. When you're starting out in business, you've most likely you're just being told to copy what someone else is doing, what's working for them. And for me, it felt like I didn't even know what I was doing. I was just out there throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what worked. But I want you to sit with this and I want you to ask yourself, what would I say if no one was watching? Seriously, what would you post if you weren't worried about looking stupid or saying the wrong thing or losing followers? That is your voice. That's raw, that's unfiltered, that's the thing that you're censoring, and it is gold. That's what's gonna set you apart from everybody else. The thing that you're afraid to say is usually the thing that people need to hear most. Ironic, isn't it? And at that time, I was terrified. You know, I started my high-ticket business back in December of 2022. I was terrified really to talk about how I hated the hustle of working for like$20 commissions. I was afraid because I had made all these connections and these friendships with people that were in that industry who loved it. I was also afraid to talk about how I hated traditional employment and how the trap was being in the matrix. You want to take the red pill or the blue pill? I took the red pill. I'm pretty sure that's the one that you take to get you out of the matrix. Y'all can fact check me on that. Um, but I took that, but all of my friends were still in traditional employment, 99% of them. How could I be authentically me, sharing my perspective and my opinions when everyone that I loved, I might hurt their feelings? Those were my fears. I had a fear because I believed that women should be making$20,000,$50,000,$100,000 a month for themselves, not$3,000 or$300 in some like low-ticket MLM. But again, I didn't know anybody doing that. So who was I gonna hurt? Who was I gonna offend? Those were all my fears. And when I finally just sat with it and I asked myself, who the fuck is more important? Me, myself, my husband, my family, my future, or the opinions of other people. In this, this is where my neuropsychology brain kicks in. There was a reason that my strategy wasn't working and it wasn't the algorithm. And again, strategy and algorithm and data and all those things are my love language to my core, but this piece comes first because you can't outperform your self-concept. If deep down you don't believe that you're the person who can make 20, 40, 50,$100,000 months, you will sabotage every single strategy that could get you there. Your subconscious is running the show 95% of the time. It will sabotage you. If you don't believe that people want to hear what you have to say, then you will only post half-assed content that proves yourself right and doesn't cause any division. There's no, there's no meat and potatoes to it. The inner work that I'm talking about here isn't some woo-woo extra thing that you do when you have time. It's the priority, it's the foundation, it's the whole thing. And if you're not making them out of income and money that you want to right now, ask yourself: have you been half-assing the inner work? Have you been avoiding it? If the answer honestly is yes, then there is what lies so much power within yourself. Your business will only grow to the size of your identity. So who are you becoming? Not who you want to be. Who are you actively becoming right now, today, and how you show up? If you want to be a millionaire, that's only like$80-ish thousand dollars a month. Break that down per day. It's really not that much. What are the action steps that you have to take in order to make that a reality? What is someone who's a millionaire doing every single day? They're making sure that their income-producing activities are first, nothing else. I think, you know, this is really understandable when you put it in terms of fitness. Okay. If I wanted to have six pack abs and compete in a bodybuilding competition, which for those of you that don't know me, I do not have six-pack abs because I'm not the person that's aligning themselves with the behavior of someone who has six pack abs. Okay. I'm just not right now. Can I? Absolutely. Can you? Absolutely. Am I doing those things right now? No. So having realistic expectations about the things that you're doing right now and the results that you're getting because of it. So I can't be upset that I don't have six pack abs if I'm not doing the things that get me six pack abs, right? Now, what are some things that someone who has six pack abs and is training to be in a competition would do? They would have a fitness coach. They would have a nutritional plan that they're following and not deviating from it. They would be working out consistently, not just when they felt like it. No, especially when they didn't feel like it, right? And then so you do these things, you're gonna have the results. But when you're not doing and taking the action of the person that you want to become, you can't get frustrated, you can't get mad, you can't blame nobody else except yourself because your reality is not matching up to your expectations. There's a disconnect there. Your business will only grow to the size of your identity. Who are you becoming? Not who do you want to be? Who are you actively becoming and choosing right now, today? When I rebuilt my business and really myself from the ground up, I came back to three things. And these became my non-negotiables. Number one is consistency. But consistency in showing up as you, not as some character that you're playing, it's gonna feel like you, but a different version of you that you haven't met yet. That's when you know you're doing it right because your nervous system doesn't recognize that person yet. But it's okay for your brain to start programming that person into you. Number two, authenticity. Saying what you actually think, even when it's uncomfortable. If you drop the F bomb, drop the fucking F bomb. If you like to do certain things, like to say certain things, say it. Do them. Don't feel like you have to be this polished, buttoned up Wall Street person if you're not that person. If you are, fabulous. You're gonna find your people like that. But if not, don't fucking worry about it. I spent so many years trying to like water myself down and make sure I'm professional because I come from the corporate space. But it never feels like me. Well, felt because you know, like we we step in into the authentic version of Stephanie. Stephanie's multifaceted, and you will be multifaceted as well. So saying what you actually think, even when it's uncomfortable, you may piss some people off. That's okay. Piss some people off. There's not a person on this planet, and I want you to think about somebody that you really look up to and admire. Maybe it's Tony Robbins. Everyone knows Tony Robbins, right? He's pretty well known for helping people take massive action and change their entire reality and their perspective in just one conversation with him. Like, how incredible is that? But you have people on the opposite side that hate that man's guts. And imagine if he were to listen to all the haters, how many people he wouldn't have helped if he would have done that. So authenticity, be you, show up as you. Number three, this is the foundation to anything. Coachability. Being willing to look at yourself honestly and do the work to grow. You have to be coachable. You need to get a coach, you need to get a mentor who can see areas of opportunity in you that you cannot see. You can only go so far by yourself. You can do a lot of work by yourself, but you can only go so far. You're gonna be capped. You have to get someone who is playing at the level that you want to be at, a coach and a mentor. That is the number one biggest life hack for success for business, especially for women. Now, did you notice what's not on that list? Number one was consistency, number two was authenticity, number three was coachability. Do you know what was not on that list? Tactics, hacks, trends. Tactics are replaceable, they evolve as we grow our business. Strategies will change as well. Systems will change. Your energy will not. You will not. You will change, you will evolve, you'll grow, you'll be better, but you will still be you. People will forget your carousels, they will forget all of that. They will never forget how you made them feel. They won't forget that you said the thing that they were thinking, but were too scared to say themselves. They won't forget that you made them feel seen and understood and heard. So, what does the inner work actually look like? Because I'm not here to just tell you to journal and manifest and hope for the best. Like, I'm not gonna do that. There's actual work that needs to be done. I would absolutely recommend getting a therapist, a trauma coach. I have one as well. Um, coaches and mentors. This is gonna be huge for you. But really, in order for those things to be successful, you have to do the work. There's no hack, there's no other way to put it. That's the only thing that you can do. You just have to decide that you're gonna do the fucking work. That you're tired of being where you're at. You want to raise the ceiling. You want your ceiling to become your new floor. Now, what this is gonna look like in practice is asking some hard questions. Okay, and being completely real with yourself. For me, as a type A woman who primarily operates in her masculine. Now, there's a difference between masculine and wounded masculine, which we'll cover in a later episode. But in her masculine, you have to have a flow of femininity and masculinity in business. You can't have one without the other. You just can't. You will not make money or you will burn out. One of two things. Now, I primarily enjoy working in my masculine and my business, but at home, I am really in my feminine. That's how I balance the two. Now, you're gonna have to ask yourself some hard questions. Question number one, and if you're listening to this and you're not driving, here's a great time to go ahead and get your notebook out. These will also be in the show notes as well, so you can come back and reference them. Question number one, where am I performing instead of being real and authentic? Number two, what am I afraid people will think if I say what I really think? Number three, where am I playing small because it feels safer? And number four, what would I do if I fully believed in myself? You've probably never sat and actually thought through the answer to each of these questions. When you do that, you're gonna have so much clarity. You're gonna be like, oh shit. Well, that was easy. Now I get it. Now I know my mission. Now I know my purpose. Now I know my voice. It's gonna make sense. I don't come from a journaling background. That's actually a learned skill that I had to force myself to do. Um, but it's been the most clarifying thing that I have done for my business and the projection of where I want to take it. Now, when you water down your message, it's because you're worried about judgment. So when you're going through these things, I want you to think about that. When you post something that doesn't feel like you because you saw it work for someone else, why? What are you avoiding? When you lessen yourself, when you dim your light because someone else might be uncomfortable with it, you are robbing someone. That person never bought anything from you. I don't care. If you shared a perspective that could change their life, that's worth all the money in the world. You gotta choose yourself over and over and over again, even on the days you don't want to, even when it's scary, even when people don't get it, even when people don't get you, because that's all that's gonna happen, that's real, even when this is the hard part, even when the results aren't there, even when they're not immediate, because more than likely they won't be. I'm gonna be straight up honest with you. You gotta keep going because your vision and your mission is so much bigger than yourself. The inner work isn't about fixing yourself per se. It's more so coming back to self and remembering who you actually are underneath all the conditioning from childhood, from past years, from previous relationships, from betrayal, from all that bullshit. It's coming back and remembering who you actually are. So I want to bring this back to business because at the end of the day, you're building a business and your goal with that business is to make money, right? Yes. People buy transformation. They don't buy product, they don't buy services, they don't buy none of that bullshit. They buy transformation and they can only believe in their transformation if they believe in you. When you're being authentically yourself, a few things are going to happen. You will repel the wrong people immediately. And if you struggle with any type of self-confidence, this one might sting a little bit, but I want you to really hear me. This is a good thing. Stop trying to fucking be for everyone. You are not for everyone. You will not make any money if you're trying to be for everybody, you're trying to be liked. You will make zero dollars. You will magnetize your actual people when you do this. The ones who think like you, who value what you value, who are ready for what you have to offer, who are ready for transformation, who are ready for all of that. And sometimes the cool part is you find a really great friend in this process too, because you had the courage to be you in doing this. Your content is going to become effortless because you're not trying to be somebody else. You're just talking, you're documenting the journey. And that's what people get confused a lot of the time. Like, I can give you all the strategies on the planet. My team has so many strategies for social media because that's my love language. I am a certified social media strategist. I have helped multiple companies like launch and manage their socials. And I did that because I was really bad at it. Social media is a skill, but you have to know who you are first in order to plug that into the skill set and the strategy. And doing that, you're gonna build real trust with your audience and your community. And you're gonna have just this wave of people that support you. And it's the most amazing feeling. You're not gonna have this like, oh my gosh, I hope this person knows what they're talking about, type of like people in your community. They're gonna know that you are the person that they can trust to get them to the transformation. Marketing isn't about convincing somebody that they need something, it's about being so undeniably yourself that the right people can't look away. They come back wanting for more. This is why we binge reality TV. There's something in it that's so relatable for us. And it's not perfection. You are allowed to have opinions that other people in your industry don't have. You are allowed to call out the things that don't work instead of pretending everything is fine and amazing and perfect. You are allowed to build a business that looks different than everyone else's. And in fact, you should. It should be different. You are allowed to want more, way more than what people tell you is realistic. Be wildly unrealistic. Unrealistic AF. The version of you that's trying to fit in will never make the money the authentic you is capable of making. Authentic you isn't competing with anyone at that point. You are in your own lane, you are irreplaceable. The only competition you have is yourself. Here's what I want you to take away from this. Yes, strategy matters. I am not saying throw out your strategy, none of that, because you absolutely do need it. Strategy is the vehicle, though. You are the fuel, and a vehicle without fuel will go nowhere. The inner work of finding yourself and owning you, your voice, showing up as that person consistently is what's going to make everything else work. And it's going to become easier for you. Now, for my perfectionists and my procrastinators, this one's for you. Stop waiting until you feel fucking ready. You will never feel ready. Feeling ready is a decision, not a feeling. Do not wait until you have it all figured out. Your people need you now, in this season of your life, right now, this messy, imperfect version of you. Your people need that, not the version that you think that they want to see. That version will come later and you'll connect with different people at that level. You don't find you and you don't find your voice by just thinking about it. You find it by using it. So, yes, well, I gave you some questions to answer and to journal through, you have to take radical responsibility and take action and put those things into process. So go use it, post the thing that scares you today, say what you actually think, be the person you're becoming, not the person that you used to be. And if you need someone in your corner who gets this, who understands that the strategy only works when you're in it, I will probably have some resources available on the website uh shortly that you can plug into. Um, so I'm Steph. This is Call Her Coach. I'll see you next week.