EP 15: The Content Popularity Contest

Does playing the traditional content creator game feel a little like you’re a kid in school again, trying to break into the cool kids crowd?

This week I’m talking about the feelings of rejection that sharing our content can bring up for us—especially when we are starting out and don’t have an audience yet, and especially on social media.

I dive into how the system feels like a popularity contest, and how we’re all trained to follow the crowd or the most popular/successful influencer. I share a few questions we can ask ourselves before we take on any advice or strategies from those influencers, so that we can remain true to ourselves and avoid disappointment.

I then explore more of the psychological side of how we can manage these feelings of rejection and, ultimately, how we can break the mold of the current system together.

Do you ever struggle with feelings of rejection as a content creator? How have you managed these feelings? I invite you to share in the comments below. Enjoy the episode!

Below is a transcript of the episode for your reference—please excuse grammatical errors!

Hello, creators, and welcome back to episode 15 of the Mindful Content Creator podcast. I have a question for you today: Does keeping up with the traditional content creator game, especially on social media, make you feel like you're a kid in school again trying to break into the cool kid crowd?

This might not be surprising, but I was not a cool kid in school, so for me, social media in particular feels like another giant popularity contest that I'm not winning. And maybe you were the cool kid in school, so this might not translate to you as well, but I imagine that trying to keep up with everything in order to solidify and maintain your cool kid status is also stressful. It can feel like you're constantly running a race and have to keep up with the person ahead of you.

I wrote the other week on my other podcast, The Soul Journaling Sessions, about my feelings around rejection as I started putting my creative work out there more and more. And I realized that that's something I should probably be talking about here because it's about sharing my content with the world. And sometimes the whole game of content creation can trigger these feelings of rejection in me, and something tells me that I'm probably not the only one that this happens to.

I really feel all of this with my content when I look at the numbers, which of course is, you know, not surprising, but when I'm looking at the unsubscribes list, or when I'm looking at the number of followers, or how many people commented, or liked, and then even on platforms where people can leave reviews, I find myself kind of going down this, uh, dark hole of being sad about, you know, three star reviews on Insight Timer instead of five star reviews and, sometimes people can be a little bit harsh. But I've really felt this rejection feeling the strongest over the years on social media because it really is kind of like one big popularity game with the influencers at the top and the rest of us kind of just trying to catch up.

And it really seems that success, especially on social media, really depends upon following what the crowd is doing. So the big influencers, those ones who try to sell us the courses about how we can become big influencers, too, it's all around following exactly what they do, and then you getting what you want.

The overall message of that marketing is if you behave exactly like me and copy me, you can have what I have. But the reality is that it's just not that simple, and I think many of us know that.

But this is really that entire course creation model, and I actually saw people recently on Substack talking about this with Amy Porterfield's Digital Course Academy, and I even saw it in my own inbox, which is why when I saw these posts I was like, oh yeah, I get that.

There's all the people that she has that she's friends with promoting her course as affiliates and saying, you know, wonderful things about it, but it's just this constant barrage of messaging around “You can have no following” and you can have a very, uh, small audience or just be starting your business. And you can be, you know, rich too off of your courses! I teach people how.

But these courses rarely take into account that these people who got all of that money, who had that big smash success, they had the right mix of things that hit at the right time. They're kind of the outliers. And a lot of the time, the stuff that they did worked two to three years ago. It doesn't take into account the nuances of the time now. And it certainly doesn't take into account who each individual person is, and what's actually best for them and their expression of their work.

There really isn't anyone who can give us a true formula for success. Maybe if we copy them, exactly. But if we want to be ourselves and share our art, our creation, our messages in our own unique way, there really can't be a formula that works for everyone. I also think that people can sense when we aren't being ourselves.

So even if you do get lucky that first time and hit it big with following that formula or that rule, now you're stuck in that place of, “Oh, I have to keep up with this. And do I even want to, do I even like what I'm doing? Does it feel like me?”

So, of course, we're left wondering what's the solution when we're confronted with things like this. Well, I think we have to learn to apply what's useful from these strategies, what resonates to our own practice in our own way, and kind of create our own path. But it's hard when the main message from the top and all around you is, “But if you take this exact path, you'll be the most successful!”

So with any course or advice or strategy that we take, I want to encourage all of us to stop and ask a few questions. Really just take a moment to pause:

• First, what about this advice or strategy resonates with me?

• Second, what feels aligned? What doesn't?

• Third, how can I use this advice or strategy to be even more authentically me? (And this could be even contradicting or ignoring the advice or strategy entirely. It could be inspiring an idea to do something else different.)

• And fourth, how can I adjust this so it fits me and my mission or vision better?

Those are just some questions that kind of came to me when we're confronted with these, you know, strategies and pieces of advice that may be well intentioned, but don't always work perfectly for us.

But what I really want to address is the psychological side of all of this, where we get those feelings of rejection that come up, where we're wondering, “Why am I not getting the visibility that I think I should get? Why are people not seeing my work? Why are they not liking it?” It can really send us into a spiral.

And I want to share something that I heard on a podcast today that was really great. And it's from Jen Weigel. She has the Jen Weigel Show. She is an author and she's how I kind of got introduced into a lot of spiritual topics, her and Cassie Uhl actually. So I hope one day—I had Cassie Uhl on the podcast recently—I hope I have Jen Weigel on the podcast someday! But she shares things in ways that really just hit home for me. And she was actually talking about energy in this episode, in this interview that she was doing with a medium Nick Lodato. And she said that with our light, we should “keep it bright and tight.”

And as I said, she said this in reference to our energy, right? But I think that our creations, our creativity, the content that we create, are all expressions of our energy. It is us putting our energy out there. And a lot of us would think that our focus should be to shine our light as far and as wide as possible, reach as many people as possible.

I mean, that's what we're told to do, right? But if we try to shine our light out so far, This takes up a lot of our energy. It sends a lot of energy back to us, too, that's hard to manage. We'll expel a lot of energy trying to get everyone to soak up our light. But as that light travels further, it actually gets weaker and weaker. Our work is watered down. It's less impactful. That light's just not going to shine as bright the further out it goes. The message is not as strong.

But if we keep it “bright and tight,” as Jen says, we reach those who most need this exchange of energy, and that exchange will be uncluttered, it'll be pure, it will be strong, it won't be watered down.

So with that kind of idea in mind, I've said it before, I'll say it again, I'm saying it to myself too right now, it's time to focus less on the numbers. Focus on finding that tight knit community that needs you. That's more impactful than a wide reach that tries to pull everyone in. And honestly, we've probably heard this same messaging too, I'm thinking of it now, with people pleasing and things like that—trying not to cast such a wide net to get everyone to like you.

It's true, it takes up a lot of energy to try and do that, and I'm one of the biggest people pleasers, I'll tell you that right now. So this is something that I am really having to work on myself. So if you're sitting there saying, “Oh my gosh, Marcy, so much easier said than done,” you know what, we're all in this together, and we're gonna give it a try!

And then some other things I want to mention about this: If people do happen to give you strong feedback that lights you up, consider creating a document or a notebook where you can save these as a reminder to just keep going and look at it when you need to. This reminds me of, I'm embarrassed to share this story, but in middle school when I was having trouble and, and I felt like, I, you know, wasn't a cool kid. I didn't really fit exactly anywhere, but there were people who were nice to me and I had friends still. I had some um, core good friends. And so I actually put inside of my daily journal, I wrote quotes of people giving me compliments or telling me that they liked me or that I was good at something. And so that it would remind me that even if I felt like this really uncool, weird kid that not a lot of people liked, that I'd remind myself, actually, there are a lot of people who like you and who have said a lot of nice things about you. So don't go down that spiral.

And you know what? We can do that today as adults, reminding ourselves that there are people that really appreciate our work and those negative comments will come and go, but those positive ones have a lasting impact.

On the flip side of that, you can also keep a list of improvements that you could make that resonate with you, just trying out some things. So, a piece of feedback that I got and have been struggling with, uh, on Insight Timer specifically, is that I talk too fast, and that's definitely not something you want to hear about meditations you create, right?

And, uh, for me, when I sit down to record, sometimes I can talk pretty fast, admittedly, because I'm recording when my baby is sleeping or when someone else is watching her and I know she might need me again soon. So in the back of my mind, I think I'm just kind of like, Oh, you got to get this done. You only have so much time and, and, you know, this is the window, so get it done now. And I think that causes me to rush. But, you know, that can be helpful feedback. And so I've been really working, you know, the last couple weeks on slowing myself down. And I don't know, maybe you've noticed it with these recordings. I hope somebody's noticed it. I'm trying really hard, you guys!

Uh, but... you know, sometimes this, this stuff is valid, and if it's not said in a nice way, you don't have to remember the not nice words, but in there is something that you could just, you know, give a try to. See what happens. Slow it down like I did. See what happens.

And also remember that you are not for everyone. Again, the people pleaser side of us might struggle with this, but that's something that we do need to constantly remind ourselves. Not everyone is going to love our work, love our content. It's not just gonna resonate with every single person. It's just not meant to. When you have an impact on someone, that's a unique thing. It's a unique experience, and not everyone can feel something deeply or it wouldn't be that special. So it's about finding the people who need you and your message right now.

And along those lines, it might not be the right time for everyone to hear the messages you want to share. They could be having a bad day. They could be going through a rough phase. Maybe two years from now, they hear you saying the same thing and it resonates. It's really just about where everyone is in the moment and what's happening for them. And it's not really anything personal.

And remember that if you're truly being you and not copycatting others, you're not going to get that perfect score. You won't be the most popular or the most liked, but you will feel greater satisfaction. And you will feel more inspired in the long run.

And as I was writing about this episode, I was starting to take notes and, and gather my thoughts. Some other messages came through that kind of just flowed out, and they were in response to this question of, “Why does it feel so hard to have my work be seen?”

Because when you're first starting out that is really the biggest hurdle to get over is just starting to get those few people in to see it. And I really feel that question deep in my bones. Especially because I'm just starting out. And we did talk about this a little bit in episode 13 with Cassie, so again, please go back and listen to that conversation if you haven't yet But as I was prepping this episode, I really just kind of started writing nonstop all of a sudden, um, all of these thoughts.

So I'm clearly feeling this quite strongly. So for this portion, I'm going to actually go ahead and read to you what came through to me about this question and how to resolve the feelings we have around, “Why does it feel so hard to have my work be seen?”

So first, internally, we need to have patience. We need to keep going and not let the system as it is now force us into silence. Silencing ourselves, giving up on sharing our creative work is not the answer. Maybe it isn't your main source of income for a while, or maybe it isn't ever, and that's okay. But as a creator, you do need to keep creating. It's what you came here to do. So don't let that go because of a popularity contest, because of the current system and how it works.

And as far as what we can do beyond ourselves and managing our own emotions, this is going to be a collective effort. We need to lift each other up. We need to stop competing to be seen and be heard. We need to pause the scrolling to stop and like each other's work. We need to remember to pause and give the person next to us some genuine words of encouragement, even if we're struggling ourselves.

We need to share each other's work. We need to collaborate more, and not with the intention of making more money, not with the intention of getting more eyes on our work, and not because we want someone to share in the heavy lifting and workload of creation. But rather, we need to collaborate with the intention of helping the person next to us on this journey be seen, with the intention of increasing our impact because we're doing it together, with the intention of helping more people on a deeper level because we did it together. We truly need to help each other be seen. It's the only way to break this cycle as it is now.

And if you're wondering what collaboration can look like, it can be really simple. It doesn't have to be launching a full program or hosting a huge workshop or an event together. It can be having someone guest post on your blog. It can be spotlighting other creators and their creations on your platforms. It can be having them as a guest on your podcast and jointly sharing the content that comes from it. It can be going live together and having a casual conversation.

These don't have to be huge partnerships or commitments, just simple steps to bring more people into the conversation and into the spotlight. Do this with the people you feel most aligned to, of course, we can't all collaborate with everyone. But I believe we all have our people and our communities out there, so if enough of us start to do this, there will be a ripple effect.

So I really wanted to share this message today in hopes that it starts that wave in motion somewhere. I intend to do this with my own platforms as well, starting with having a lot more guests on this podcast.

We are all going to be much better off in coming together as our own unique individuals than we will be if we follow that one popular leader or try to replicate their style.

Following someone else can lead to burnout or disappointment, but following yourself can bring more joy and confidence to you and everyone around you who is inspired by your example.

Okay, that's really everything that came through for me on this topic. Like I said, a lot of this just kind of flowed out, so I'm sorry if it felt a little choppy or, uh, if it was a little bit, um, over the top even, I don't know. But I wanted to read that portion rather than talk freely about it because I really didn't want to miss anything.

I'd really love to know if any of this resonated with you. Do you struggle with feelings of rejection as a content creator? Does it sometimes threaten you to stop creating or from creating authentically? And maybe you have your own tips and tricks for managing these feelings and you want to share those with all of us.

Let me know. Share your experience with the community over on Substack at themindfulcontentcreator.substack.com.

Thank you again to all of you for being on this journey with me. Until next time, happy creating!