0:00:00 - Michelle Pualani
You're right. Oh hey, let me just you ever get tense in your mouth. You know what I need to start doing is like vocal, like warming up, vocal exercises and face exercises. Let out some of that tension.
0:00:13 - Joanna Newton
Oh sorry, I just took a drink. Let me, I forgot I was starting. Okay, nope, nope. This is like not going. This is a sign of what this episode is going to be like. Okay, let me try again. This is a podcast, a platform to help online business owners, coaches and creators gain the confidence needed to build a successful business while creating a sustainable lifestyle balance.
0:00:37 - Michelle Pualani
We are here to help you prioritize yourself in business and life, so we know you've questioned it before Should you focus on quality over quantity or vice versa? Today, joanna and I are going to discuss the matter of quality versus quantity. What should you focus on? Should you wait for that perfect, absolutely beautiful and amazing post piece of content, product program, or should you actually focus on trying to get as many things out there as possible as you move forward through your business, through your life? So today we're talking about an excerpt from Atomic Habits, which is the book by James Clear, a New York Times bestselling author and kind of the introducer of this idea of like small habits that really change your life. Now there are some other habit books out there that are really wonderful, but today we're focusing specifically on an excerpt from this article that he posted onto his blog. So I'm going to read a little segment of it to really just set the stage of what we're talking about today.
In the book Art and Fear, authors David Bales and Ted Orland share a surprising story about a photography teacher. This story just might reframe the way you think about setting goals, making progress and becoming better at the things that are important to you. On the first day of class, jerry Olsman, a professor at the University of Florida divides his film photography students into two groups. Everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained, would be in the quantity group. They would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced. On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student. 100 photos would rate an A, 90 photos a B, 80 photos a, c and so on. Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the quality group. They would be graded only on the excellence of their work. They would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but to get an A it had to be a nearly perfect image. So at the end of the term he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.
During the semester, these students were busy taking photos, experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the dark room and learning from their mistakes. So in the process of creating hundreds of photos, they actually honed their skills. Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection and in the end they had little to show for their efforts other than unverified theories and one mediocre photo. It is easy to get bogged down trying to find the optimal plan for change, the fastest way to lose weight, the best program to build muscle, the perfect idea for a side hustle, and we are so focused on figuring out the best approach that we never get around to taking action.
As Voltaire once wrote, the best is the enemy of the good. So, really, the question that we're asking you today is the process that you're going through towards a specific outcome, that perfectionism, that sense of I need it to be incredible quality before I release it to the world, before I put it out there, before I do something, before I publish? Or is there something to be said about actually using the time to produce from a quantity perspective and improving along the way and actually getting better and better and better? Will you reach that perfect image, that perfect video, that perfect program, that perfect thing that you're trying to do, or at least get closer to it, by creating the quantity through the entire process?
0:04:11 - Joanna Newton
I absolutely love this story. I've heard it before, before you brought it up, michelle, and I think I love it because I so relate to this idea of producing quantity of things to get your result, to achieve some sort of desired result, and I always thought it was something that was kind of wrong with me.
I saw that, as I'm not obsessed with something being absolutely perfect as long as it's good enough, and I always thought that was like made me bad as a marketer in one way or another. And what's funny is, I would say, outsiders who don't people who don't know me very well would think I'm a perfectionist. They would call me a perfectionist because I do care about the details, I do care about the things, and there are certain things, especially if it comes to social media posting. There's kind of this checklist of things in my head. A social media post has to have to perform its best on a platform, but when it comes to actually hemming and hawing over the graphic or the video or the caption, I think there's only so much you can do.
And I think about my approach when I was in school this talks about school. It reminds me of being in high school was in the honors group of kids, but I was probably a middle performer, grades wise, in that group of honors kids. I would always feel so strange because we'd have an assignment due the next day and everyone would talk about how they stayed up all night getting that paper perfect and I was like I don't know. I was in bed by 10 o'clock. I wrote the essay, I did it, I said it was done and I moved on, and I think I had this desire to just be like. This is good enough. And the truth is, at the end of the day, our grades weren't that different. I don't think the amount of time they added, perfecting it, necessarily got them the desired results.
And in my day to day and the work that I do, working with creators on a regular basis, I see this trap of desiring perfectionism completely stall out projects and businesses. Someone will get hung up on one little piece of a project and not be able to just move on and put it out in the world. And one of the beauties about digital products, digital content you can always edit it. You can always take a post down, you can always change a landing page. So if you're sitting there feeling stuck getting something out because you're hemming and hawing over two different headlines, my thing is just pick one, pick one, start promoting that thing or sharing that course or putting that piece of content online and if it's not working, edit it. If it didn't post, take it down, try it again, and I think that this quest for perfection keeps people from trying.
0:07:13 - Michelle Pualani
So I think there's a difference of having expectations and wanting to hit and meet those standards. Right, like if you have these qualifications of every time I post a post. These are the things that I want to include, but not worrying about what the presentation of those things are from a quality standpoint. Right, like it's more, like this is the best iteration of this thing. It's okay to have standards and expectations when you're working on your larger life goals and your business and the smaller tasks and the things that you're doing, but iterating is the process of learning and understanding and improving. I think that's kind of the discussion that we're having today. Is that the more that you publish, the more that you get things out there, the more that you take action and try, the better you are going to get, and you can't just sit back.
And I think that there's a sense of I've been thinking a lot about this sunken cost fallacy. That's not just finances, that's time and energy input as well. And when I was first creating my original course, I had this sense of like this has to be my end all be all course. This has to be my life's work, this has to be everything that I know, everything that I want to bring to the world and I don't want to have to record it again. So I meticulously created all of the slides, all of the content, the accompanying workbook, and then recorded and then meticulously edited and we were just talking about post production for the podcast afterwards. And I still retain a little bit of that, but not as much as just like putting all that time and energy into ensuring that the quality of what's going out is the best that it possibly could.
Now, putting certain standards in place is important. Right when we started this podcast, we wanted to have certain standards, get the right microphone, have the right video set up, present ourselves to the world in a way that we saw fit that represented the integrity of who we are and the brands that we're creating. However, we have also dramatically improved over the course of iterating. We've improved our interview skills, we've improved our speaking skills, we've improved our presentation on camera, we've improved the post production, we've improved even just how we speak in general, and I think that we get so stuck on this idea of wanting things to look a certain way, be a certain way, but we're only going to get closer to that if we keep taking action, and that's something that I learned much too late in my business.
So, as you're thinking about how you can start to apply this to the larger and broader context of your life and your goals within your business, predominantly is what are you holding back on, what are you procrastinating, what are you putting off, what are you thinking, saying to yourself that, oh no, I just have to get it right before it gets out into the world, because that headline, that body copy, that product, that caption, it can all be redone, and it is actually going to be redone over and over and over and over again, and you should be looking at creating hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of content through this process. So you don't need this optimal plan. You don't need the perfect strategy. You really want to focus on this idea of if I take action, how is that going to clarify what it is that I'm doing and allowing yourself to do something, do something, do anything, just iterate, give it a go and see what happens.
0:10:36 - Joanna Newton
One of the reasons in my day-to-day work, when we work with clients on creating courses, we focus on an MVP approach, especially if it's someone's first course, and an MVP is a minimum viable product. We teach people. If they don't have a course, they're new to digital products. Let's make the easiest, simplest version of your course. You know, let's get 10, 6 to 8 minute videos. That's an offer that you can create that you think is going to really resonate with your audience and get it out in the world. The reason is you need to get it out in the world. You need to get your reps in. You need to create those videos. You need to get feedback from real people and real customers validate your offer, understand if it's something anyone even wants and is going to want to purchase. If you take six months to define the perfect $1,000, $2,000 mastermind but haven't actually gotten any customers, you might take a lot of time and money to create something that you think is perfect. That isn't actually what your customers want. But if you create that MVP, that first level, you get feedback. You can make adjustments. You find out from your customers. We think that this whole section is missing from your course. Great fine, you made it. You can go back, update, edit, add, make adjustments as you add value to that course. You can raise the price of the course. You can really make that course creation a collaborative process. And I think the same thing goes for creating social media content right, building a following through social media. If you are so stuck in this idea that I have to get the thing that's going to resonate with my audience the most and you never post any content, you're never going to get any feedback. But if you post five different ideas, you're going to start to learn what your audience likes, what works for you, what you can post in the world and get traction and engagement with, but if you post nothing, you're never going to benefit from that real-time data.
There was a time I was working with a startup. We were starting to launch and getting social media content out there and posts just got stuck in this approval, back and forth, editing images, changing captions this like over-editing of content. At the time the accounts were brand new. They had something like 50 followers. Right, it's not like something was going to go into the world and be seen by 10,000 people immediately. So we would hem and haw and then not post anything.
I always felt like if we had just posted those things, we would have had an account reach of a couple thousand that week. Instead, it was zero. Zero people were put in touch with our brand versus potentially thousands, and I see this as being a true problem in this space of people who are just stuck waiting on perfection. I don't think you're ever going to achieve perfection with content. That's just a reality, because what perfection is is very subjective. Right, there are some objective standards and things content should have and do, and all of that, but at the end of the day, perfection isn't achievable and the only way you're even going to get too good is if you put in the work do the repetitions, get on camera, post, create a course, create a landing page. You're only going to get there by trying.
0:14:08 - Michelle Pualani
If you invest in this process, as the journey, as the experience, and know that this is what it's about, as opposed to the outcome. I was just at a conference this past weekend and we had this conversation the outcome is important, right, when it comes to goal setting, when it comes to deliverables say, you're working on a course or a product or a program, or you're trying to reach a certain revenue goal or a certain follower count Having the goal in the first place is important because it'll dictate the steps and the tasks that you take along the way, the actions that you're doing. So you set the goal, you look forward and you say, okay, how do I get there? You reverse, say step by step, reverse engineer. Okay, this is what I'm doing. But when you believe that the process of what you're doing is exponentially more important than the outcome ever will be, then you start to realize that the process, the iteration, the journey along the way is what you're invested in. That's your life. It's not the outcome.
Once you reach the goal, there's nothing that changes you, essentially right, whether that's a financial goal, a follower account goal, a business goal, even like a weight goal. If you think of your lifestyle, you think, because losing 10 pounds is going to change you as a person? No, but you know, what is going to change you as a person is getting to the gym consistently, eating the right foods, thinking about your body differently, all of the lifestyle habits, the daily actions, the choices that you make. Those are the things that's going to change you as a person and are going to be worth the effort of what it is that you're doing, because that goal is just there as a catalyst in order to change your habits. I mean, that's exactly why James Clear focuses on atomic habits, really tiny, small habits in your life that make up who you are as a person and how you show up your behaviors, your patterns and your relationships, your work life, everything. So you can start to think a little bit more critically about what that looks like and invest in the process and know that the iterating and the work that you're doing now it is the point. That is the point of it. It's not the outcome, it's not the goal. So really just learning from this experience, learning from the mistakes, learning from your failures, learning to improve by doing the thing and being OK with not being good.
When we look at certain artists Ed Sheeran, in an interview, actually played some of his original guitar and singing on camera ones and it was terrible. It was so bad, but now he's an internationally recognized, incredibly successful, award-winning musician. The people that you look at who are successful are not successful because they waited for perfect. They weren't focused on sitting back and just waiting for quality to happen or perfectionism to make them better. They iterated, they took the shots, they showed up, they made the art, they created the music, they pumped out as many videos as they possibly can to improve and I hear that sometimes about me on being on camera.
Oh my gosh, you're so comfortable on camera. You present really, really well. I'm like, yeah, well, I've been doing this for a while, I've been trying this for a while. I have failed at this before, I have felt super awkward before, I have said things that I probably shouldn't have said, but it's through that process that you get to where you are in improvement and being better and getting towards your goal, reaching your goals and actually accomplishing that thing that you're working toward.
0:17:48 - Joanna Newton
I don't know if you've ever seen people make compilations of Taylor Swift through the ages, from when she came out when she was 15 to now and the vocal quality improvement that she had over the years. It's pretty astounding. Now Taylor Swift came out with a fantastic voice for a 15, 16-year-old, Don't get me wrong, but when you hear the way she improved throughout her career it's astounding. And I think one of these things that can be, I think, sort of a fallacy is that people are just naturally good or bad at something and of course people have natural talent they do. There's people who are inclined to certain things, have a natural talent for something, but if you don't have a natural talent for something, you can learn it, and if you do have a raw natural talent for something, you can improve it, grow it, change it, and it's never too late to learn something or do something.
This is something in my life. You know one of the things when I was an actress I was not a belter, I had like a highly oracle kind of soprano voice which puts you into certain types of roles in musical theater, and one thing I was always frustrated with was people saw me as someone who could only ever do that. And then back in my head I was like, well, I could learn how to do that, I could learn how to belt, I could get with a vocal coach and learn those skills. But I felt very pigeonholed into this one thing because at that moment I didn't have that skill. But you can learn and grow and you don't learn and grow unless you do it, unless you try, unless you go out into the space and work on it. Unfortunately, I think there's practice you can do in your house, in your office, away from anybody's eyes. But if you're creating something, the best way to practice is to put it out in the world for people to see.
0:19:51 - Michelle Pualani
Really putting in the repetitions and presenting yourself to the world and kind of getting that feedback. Listening to Brennan Bershard at Kajabi Hero Live, he said that he would just put up his camera, whatever setup he had, and he would go live and he would do that over and over again this was before he was even being booked as a speaker is that he would stand up in his room and speak to a make believe audience as if he was presenting to them and he would work on speaking just from his heart or whatever came to him. Taylor Swift Iris Tour is such a great example. You could not have had the Iris Tour without the Iris right, there would be nothing to reference. So Taylor Swift didn't just come out into the world and say Iris Tour, this is it. This is going to be my showstopping, amazing, world consuming presentation of who I am as an artist and everything that I've done. Now and if you actually look at her first night versus her last night on the Iris Tour, there are huge differences in the way that she's showing up in confidence and how she improved through her own process of doing the tour. But she wouldn't even get to that point if she hadn't started when she was 15 or 16.
And I think we forget that people have been doing what they've been doing for so long. They have been putting in the work, they've been putting in the time, they've been putting in the effort. Michael Jordan how many shots did he take? And actually I don't even know the statistics because I'm not a sports person, but he didn't make all of his shots and most professional, successful sports players they actually miss batting, miss shooting, miss scoring. They actually typically miss more shots than they make, but because their quantity is so high, they can still break records of their successful hits, scores and wins. So that focus on quantity is critical. Not only is it going to make you better, but it's going to improve your overall batting average.
0:21:49 - Joanna Newton
To stay with the sports references, allowing yourself to embrace the repetitions, yeah, and I think some things that we've talked about, that some of these examples have in common that I've seen in my life there are certain things that are important. Right, having standards standards for just basic standards for what that content should look like should be Looking at some really general basic guidelines for best practices and what that should look like. That's important. Having a goal, having a strategy, is all important, and then you don't get lost in the details. Let's think about a really practical example for a minute. Say you've decided you want to start creating content. So you're going to get started on TikTok. You do some research, you think about what your niche is, what type of content. Maybe you make your list self a list of 10 different content ideas and you're going to start posting and you say I want to get 5,000 views a week. That's my goal. I want to be consistently getting 5,000 views a week.
If you obsess about creating the perfect video and post one video a week to try to hit that goal, you're banking on that video, doing all the work. One video, getting all 5,000. And say you spend five hours to create this one video a week. Right, and it's perfect. You have transitions and editing and splashy things all over the place, if that video doesn't get 5,000 views, you've missed your goal. But if you say, okay, I have five hours to create content, I'm going to make as many quick videos as I can in five hours and post them throughout the week, that's what you've decided to do. Say you make five videos in five hours because of that, then you have five chances to hit that 5,000. And maybe one video does amazing and gets like 2,000 views and the rest get a couple hundred each. Well, you're well on your way to making that goal, finding your followers, finding your audience way faster than you'll be stuck on trying to perfect one video, and I know that feels really backwards, but it really isn't.
And you might get to a point where you have a team, you have editing. You can change that standard for your videos up a notch. One example is my company. We have no social media right now, which is hilarious because we help people with social media and we are planning on launching our YouTube channel next year and we are taking some time to have really strong video production quality. We kind of need to because one of the services we sell is video production and editing. So the standard, like the sort of minimum standard we need to hit, is at a certain level. If you're a therapist wanting to talk about therapy content, you're not selling video production services. Your standard, what your minimum standards are for your content, is different and that's okay.
0:24:48 - Michelle Pualani
Working with women in health and wellness, when I was focused on that, we would shift this goal, outcome, habit idea and what we would do is, instead of focusing on the goal and outcome being a number or some sort of physical thing or some sort of mental, emotional, reaching, we would focus on the habits being the goal, the things that you are actually doing. So say, for example, you want to improve something about your body, whether that's your strength or your core stability or any of those things. Instead of that being the thing that you focus on the outcome, you actually start to think about it in terms of the habits or what it is that you're choosing to do. So if, instead, the goal is not about the core stability, but I'm going to hold a plank for 30 seconds three times a week, then you can know if you're on track to hit that goal really successfully. Did you do it three times a week and did you do it for 30 seconds? It's a lot more simple and a lot more accessible, and then you can think about how that fits into your schedule, how that fits into your time and what it is that you're doing. To Joanna's point, it doesn't have to necessarily be oh, I'm going to gain 100 followers this week. Even though that's an okay goal, it can be my goal is to post three times a week, and these are the types of content pieces that I'm going to post, and then you can actually focus on the building of the habits, the activities that you're doing, the consistency of your processes, your systems and how you're showing up in your business and in your life, and that's really what's going to matter. And now those are the things that are going to actually propel you forward and move you closer to your overarching goals.
Not a bad thing to have goals, not a bad thing to set them and look toward that outcome.
But how can you transform the outcome to be something that you're actually in control of? And I think that's an important piece here. Right, like you're not actually in control of how many followers you reach, you're not in control of how much money you make. But if you can say, if I reach out to 10 new clients and I closed two of those clients, then I have the opportunity to make X number of sales, even though I can't control those people signing up and I can't control X number of sales, what I can do is I can reach out to 10 clients and I am in control of that.
So starting to think about the things in your life that you are in control of, the habits that you can build, the actions you can take, the tasks that you can put on your calendar and prioritize that are part of the outcome, so that now your process and your goal is so tied into one another that there's no way you're not going to reach it because you're putting in the reps, you're taking those actions. So starting to think about how can you plan for getting in those repetitions, what does that schedule actually look like for you, so that you're focusing on the volume and the quantity of what it is that you're doing, as opposed to that end goal, that quality outcome.
0:27:50 - Joanna Newton
I would add to that because I love that concept that you shared. I've never really thought about it like that. I think I have approached things like you just mentioned, but I never really kind of thought about that in a systematic way. But one thing you could do to take that a step farther is you've set yourself a goal I want to get my first 100 followers on Instagram. You've said I'm going to do that by posting three times a week. You control that right. You post three times a week.
You can take moments then to reset and say I've achieved my first 100 followers, so I'm going to keep doing that. I'm just going to keep doing my three posts a week. Or you can get to a point where you say I posted three times a week consistently for two months. I haven't received my first 100 followers on this account. What should I do differently? You might say, okay, I was only posting photos. Now I'm going to post two reels and one photo a week. I'm going to see if that helps me get that 100.
You've changed those tasks that you can control if you're not getting your outcome Doing that consistently. And then I would recommend set a date where you reset, say, okay, in two months I'm going to look at this and see if I need to change my strategy, because in that I've seen people in the opposite direction change strategies way too fast. They say, okay, I'm going to post three times a week to get my 100 followers. In the first two weeks they don't have 100 followers, so they throw out their strategy entirely and either stop or pause or start over. I think you have to give a strategy time and set yourself a point where you're going to say, okay, I'm going to try something different because that wasn't working.
0:29:32 - Michelle Pualani
Being able to pivot and actually look at what you're doing, see the results of what you're getting out of it is critically important. But again, if you don't make it as much about the outcome, you're more invested in the process. As we head into the new year, thinking about goals, thinking about these repetitions, thinking about outcomes, most businesses that I am familiar with they often work in 90-day sprints because we're on that quarterly system, so January, February, March, April, May, June, et cetera, et cetera is thinking in those 90-day sprints of what am I going to accomplish in the next 90 days? Yes, you can have revenue goals. Yes, you can have client goals. Yes, you can have follower count and growth goals. Your reach is related to those other success metrics. However, making the process an integral part of your goals, I think, is critical and then giving yourself the time and space in order to put that into practice because, it's true, You're not going to see those results immediately and too often people think, oh, it's not working, Therefore I'm going to stop, and they just really don't give it enough time.
When I was thinking about my social media and my social media content creation, I used to get really stuck in the fact of this isn't working, I'm not getting the reach that I want, I'm not growing in the way that I wanted to, and so then I was really inconsistent about my posting schedule and I realized that it wasn't about the type of content that I was creating necessarily.
It was about the inconsistency that I was creating based on the fact that I was disappointed in my outcome, and I was too invested and attached to the outcome that I let it dictate emotionally what I was choosing to do. And only when I was able to actually get into the rhythm of consistency batching, scripting, filming, editing, et cetera and publishing on a consistent schedule. That's when I started to see the reach thousands upon thousands. I mean, I don't have a big social media following at all. I only have about 300 followers on this particular account that I'm speaking to and even with that small following, have a reach of 30,000 within a short period of time. Because I was focused on the consistency, Because I was more invested in the process than I was in the outcome.
0:31:45 - Joanna Newton
And then there's also the key here of what's that ultimate goal? Because I think sometimes in the world of influencers we look at an account and say, oh, I only have 500 followers, or I only have this much of an audience, it's still an audience. It's still people listening to you, interacting with what you do In real life. If you went and spoke in front of an audience of 500 people, you'd be like this is amazing, I just gave a presentation to 500 people. And so I think too, sometimes because of influencers with millions of followers and millions and millions of views, we get this idea that to be successful, we need to be there. If your goal is, I want to be an influencer with brand deals and all of that, that might actually be what you're going for. But for a lot of us, if we're business owners who are using social media to promote ourselves, find clients, grow our business, you don't need a huge following to do that.
I'm so not consistent on my social media, so I'm not the person to preach us. I would love to be someday and get there where I'm consistently posting, but one place that I post often and try to grow my network is on LinkedIn. When I post on LinkedIn and talk about what I'm doing. I keep my profile updated. I have a nice profile picture. I've thought about what goes into that. People reach out to me and I've gotten clients through LinkedIn. I have something like.
I don't even know how many LinkedIn connections I have. I think it's in the 500 or 600 range. It's not huge, but it has made me money for my business because I'm showing up in a positive way, showcasing what I do, and then someone will say, hey, I think you might be a fit for this, or this is a good opportunity for you, or can I hire you has happened through that platform, and so I think sometimes, too, we think something needs to have millions of views to be successful, when, in actuality, you just need the right person to see your content and connect with you, and that's something that you have to keep in mind as you're putting yourself out in the world. You may think, oh, that video only had 200, 300 views. That's bad, I'm going to stop. Actually, that's good If two or 300 people want to watch what you have to say. That could still get you a sale or a client or some sort of partnership that you're looking for it's such a great reminder in this realm because there's so much online.
0:34:16 - Michelle Pualani
We talk about this often of the numbers and the metrics and the hundreds of thousands and the millions and all of those big things, but the little, more intimate connections can be really important. And I get into this trap as well as thinking like, oh well, I don't have enough followers yet, I can't be successful in the online space because I don't have that and actually just going to. So I was just at the Business by Design Live event hosted by James Wedmore and team and I'm hearing from people who have 530,000 followers, millions of followers across platforms, people who have six, seven, eight figure businesses, and they all would agree that the smaller, more intimate community that you're able to create and cultivate is invaluable. And, yes, they have a ton of reach, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the conversions are there. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're reaching that entire audience. It doesn't necessarily mean that those are their customers, their buyers or people who are really invested in them, and they definitely shared that. Having that smaller reach and audience was a much more impactful time for them and it gave them an opportunity to iterate and try. And back to this conversation of the process and really learning through the quantity versus the quality is that when you do grow that follower account, when you do have that influence and impact, now you do have to maybe be a little bit more critical about what you're posting, because there is a lot of backlash that can come in the online space and when you do have a small account, you can test things out without worrying as much about the impact.
Okay, yeah, maybe you get one hater or a couple of comments, or someone sees it and it has a mistake, no big deal. I think that the stakes are a lot higher and a lot of us wish for oh, if I only had 100,000 followers, if I only had a million followers, if I only had this amount of influence. But the actual responsibility that comes with that influence is a lot higher. The stakes are a lot higher, and wouldn't you like to be a lot more practiced and have a lot more experience until you get to that point? So you don't have to internalize a lot of those things? You've built up the armor, you've built up the success metrics and the habits that are in place so that when you actually do attract that large audience, you're prepared for it, you're ready for it and you feel confident in delivering that content.
0:36:31 - Joanna Newton
And it all, too, matters on your overall brand positioning, like who you are, who you're trying to attract, who you want to connect with. And one thing I find really interesting is, more and more our creators that are growing in popularity and influence are more normal. They're not showing up perfectly looking on camera, they don't have a perfect house or backdrop behind them. They're being truly authentic and I kind of think that in this is a prediction that I have in this being in this space is that as AI content creation becomes bigger and bigger, actual human creators are going to be need to be more and more authentic, because people aren't going to trust what they see. When someone's background is perfect, hair is always perfect, they're going to feel like an actor. They have no filler words in their speech ever and pronounce everything perfectly. People are going to question is that a real creator or is that just an AI? With an actor?
We can be our authentic selves and attract our correct audience for us, and obviously it matters who you're trying to attract in this case. If you have a fashion account or you're showing high fashion, then you need to match that and your decor and your branding and all of that have to go with that. If you're someone trying to reach struggling parents who need parenting advice or tools to better manage their household, showing a realistic household might be just what that audience needs to connect with you to say this mom is doing it, she's handling it. I can listen to her and get those tips because we have the same life. She's not living some life that's so different than mine. She doesn't have so much more money than me. Like I can get that coaching from her because she's in it and doing it alongside me. So recognizing that the way you show up on camera, what everything looks like, does actually need to match the audience you're trying to attract and be authentic in that way.
0:38:39 - Michelle Pualani
And really be relatable and connect when you're thinking about trying to reach that perfect state of being or that quality piece of content that you're putting it out into the world. One thing that I've learned is that I'm actually teaching my audience and teaching prospective clients and teaching people to not iterate on themselves and to not be authentic to who they are and where they are. On that journey, I heard this interesting thing once you bring up the background in the perfect home, is that when someone comes over to your home and you make some sort of comment or excuse or you say like, oh sorry, it's not completely picked up, or you do try to clean extensively before they come over, and then they come over and they're probably internalizing certain things about themselves like, wow, your space is really clean and mine isn't, and there's some comparison there. And that's not to say you can control what they think about or how they feel, but it's more the fact of if you're trying to put yourself in an unrealistic state of being by being perfectly coiffed, perfectly put together, having no spelling mistakes or giving the final touch to whatever it is that you're doing over and above the top, it's almost like you're putting up a wall in between your prospective audience, your clients, and the people who are gonna be attracted to you. And there is something about energetics and people are gonna tune into that. They might not always know why, but they're going to feel it and they're gonna be aware.
So if you are creating content, feeling like this just isn't reaching the people that I want it to, it's not getting the engagement. Like, obviously there are tactical things, there are strategic things about the hook and the length and keeping their attention and blah, blah, blah. But realistically, are you being the person that is gonna connect with them? Are you energetically showing up in a way that they are gonna tune into and say, oh, this is a person that I feel connected to, this is someone that I'm inspired by?
And one thing that came out this weekend that I think is really important that we forget about is often in our marketing, we're almost speaking to the struggles, the pain points, the negative states of being in which we're trying to get to the people. At right, they have a problem, so we're speaking to that problem, but sometimes we do it in a really disempowering way and again that gets received. I've done this in the past of almost making someone feel bad for where they are in their circumstances, as opposed to seeing and honoring who they are where they are and then being able to encourage them that they can get to that next level, that next step, whatever that looks like in terms of whatever your offer is really putting yourself out there in a way that's going to attract, draw in and really connect with someone at a human level is very critical to everything that we're talking about today.
0:41:22 - Joanna Newton
I'll also add, then, when it comes to that sort of perfection and authenticity concept, being obsessed with the area in which you film, what you look like when you film If you set the standard for yourself of having to have a full face of makeup, a perfect hairdo, a perfect outfit, a perfectly clean background, you're also gonna end up minimizing the amount of reps that you can do with your content, especially if you're trying to grow on TikTok.
I'll add that I think this especially applies to TikTok creation. If you're like, oh no, I don't look great today, but I have a TikTok idea, there's a stitch I could do or a trend I could do that's happening today, but I can't do it today because I don't have my exact set up, my exact lighting, my exact hair, my exact outfit, you're going to miss opportunities, and so if you set your standard at so high, you're likely gonna create less content and that's going to do all of the things that we've talked about doing being a problem. You're not gonna get those reps in, you're not gonna post because you don't have the perfect conditions, and then you're going to lose out on reaching your goals and whatever it is. I think that that's just really clear to me, with the creators I've worked with and with myself. When I'm obsessed, or they're obsessed, with these perfect conditions, let's get done. And then, if their long-term goal is core sales, digital product sales, getting clients, they're going to get fewer clients in the end.
0:42:54 - Michelle Pualani
I get stuck in that trap and have been for a really long time of really needing to be in the right place, look the right way, present myself the right way. And social media is really a trending platform Like, yes, you should have original, unique content to you, but it really rewards speed and taking action and it rewards paying attention to what's trending and leveraging that and speaking up about it in whatever way makes sense for your brand and however you want to demonstrate authority. So if you can respond a little bit more quickly and rapidly, you will put yourself at the forefront of whatever you're trying to accomplish and again, not being so invested in the outcome or the goal, but being invested in the process, and if that means maybe getting yourself ready in the morning so that you have time throughout the day where in which you do respond and set yourself up for that. One thing that I've actually thought about recently with content creation specifically, is that the best time I think to actually create is when you're scrolling, because that's when all the ideas come in and when you actually prep in advance, save your videos, maybe, you make some notes and then you go back to film. You almost have to put yourself back in the ideation process.
So one thing that I'm going to be working on and I'll stay committed to hear me now I'm saying it on the podcast and now it has to happen is that the time that I'm actually looking at videos for inspiration is the time that I'm going to film so that I get myself ready, got the space, whatever the setup looks like for me, and then, once I find something that I want to do, I do it right then, as opposed to waiting, because I have in the past, put in too much time for strategy, too much time for planning, too much time for thinking ahead how is this going to look, what's it going to sound like?
I've got a script, it and everything else and that was the other conversation that happened this weekend is just do it, iterate on it. Don't take 30 minutes to create a post. Take two minutes. Let it be something that fits your life and let that creativity and the inspiration shine through. And that is going to be an even bigger connection point than if you planned out the most perfect or ideal language caption video of the content that you're creating.
0:45:06 - Joanna Newton
I love that and I think that's so important to just get things out in the world. To think back about some of the things that we've discussed in that process. When I create strategies for clients, I call these posting standards. You're going to have your posting standards in your head. What are those minimum things that posts need to have? Some of those things should be an engaging caption, having a caption that encourages engagement. You ask them a question, you ask them to do something. Depending on the platform you're in, you likely want hashtags.
I highly recommend putting captions on your short form video so that if someone's not able to listen with the sound, watch with the sound on they can still be engaged. I think putting a nice title in a video is important because it stops people in the action. You're in things, depending on you, your platform, your audience, that you want as this minimum level of standard every post should have and then, other than that, just create. Create within those bounds. Get things out in the world, try things, do things and don't be afraid If it's not exactly perfect. If you pronounce a word funny, post it anyway, right? Real people pronounce words funny sometimes, or real people stumble a little on those words and that's okay.
0:46:20 - Michelle Pualani
Doing that.
Really oftentimes we wait for the confidence, we wait for the inspiration, we wait for the opportunity when really we could be creating those every single day by doing the things that we're wanting to do.
So, whatever it is in your life that you feel like I can't, because I want you to come up with a reason why you can do it today. I can because I can because I have the time, I can because I have the space, I can because I have the inspiration, whatever that looks like for you. And take something that you've been putting off because of this perfectionist idea, because of the quality idea, because you're still learning, because you're still thinking about it, because you're still processing internally. All of those things are important. But if you want to be in this space whether that is content creation, being an influencer, being a course creator, being a service provider, being a personal brand or having an online business or presence in some way obviously direct sales do your thing, but if you want to have a presence in this sense, it's going to take putting yourself out there and committing to the consistency, committing to the process and not just the outcome.
0:47:33 - Joanna Newton
Thank you, michelle, for sharing that. I hope, if you are listening, that you've been inspired to just go out into the world and create. If you do create something, start a course, start a social media account. Please find us in social media, connect with us. We'd love to support what you're doing. We can like things, comment, be engaged with what you're doing and push you along, and we actually have something exciting that we're working on to help us engage as a community. Stay tuned and pay attention, because we will have a special announcement coming in the next couple of weeks. If you've enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, share it with a friend and leave us a review. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and be sure to catch our next episode. That is one thing you can do today to prioritize you in business and life.
Transcribed by https://podium.page
