My dearest readers,

I hope you had a good weekend. If not, know the you’ve been strong and resilient enough to have made it past the weekend. You’re fully capable of this. I know.

During my life coaching course, it never really occurred to me that it takes time and energy to create your own clientele, and that it takes a lot of marketing to get your name out there. Whether it was my ignorance or my genuine lack of knowledge speaking, I graduated with the mindset that, “Tell people you’re a certified life coach, talk a little bit about what you do, hand them your business card and they’ll surely sign on!”

But little did I know that this does not work and my mindset was very naive, and if you’re like me, I hope reading this will save you the trouble and embarrassment. But as I saw my peers and those that I admire excel at what they do, I wanted to do things the same way they did because I could clearly see that it had worked out for them. But not being aware of the infinite factors that come into play, I couldn’t do things the same way they did and when I didn’t see the same results, I was utterly discouraged. Being someone who blames herself for anything that goes wrong, this didn’t go well for me and my self-esteem suffered. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience, and you’ve learnt something similar, but here’s mine -

Often, we feel like we can’t do something because we’re not able to do it like someone else. We find someone, whether it’s on social media or in person, and we compare ourselves to those we consider more driven, purposed, successful, skilled for a specific task, or someone who’s just been working on it for longer. And when this comparison starts to find its way into our heads, our need to become better at that task changes into a need to make it look like someone else’s work. And when we go try it and don’t end up like them or sound like them, we think we’re not good at it. We end up putting disclaimers on ourselves and limit ourselves just because we’ve given ourselves the message that other people can do it better and I can’t. And this message isn’t always outspoken, blatant or harsh, or even negative in nature, it can be as subtle as looking at someone across the room or looking into your phone screen. It’s looking at people on social platforms who write better, come up with better captions, take better pictures, sing or dance gracefully and our mind fools us by thinking that they’re the real storytellers, they’re the voice and I’m not.

We end up putting disclaimers on ourselves and limit ourselves just because we’ve given ourselves the message that other people can do it better and I can’t.

And this is when we start to put ourselves down and put godawful disclaimers on ourselves when we actually very much have the capacity to these things, or simply just need to work a little bit harder to get there and become good at it, which is what it is for most things. We might just be at the beginning stages, we might just be at the point where we’re learning.

And the reason why I mentioned social media earlier is because the instagram culture has become to subconsciously toxic to the point when people are unable to feeds like someone they admire or when they’re not able to edit their photos like someone else, it affects them so much that it takes an emotional toll on them. And it is so blatantly obvious that we constantly have this compulsive need to put pressure and compare ourselves to others (and I only say need because we’re at this point in time where we know comparison is unnecessary and yet we keep doing it!) and put ourselves down because we don’t do certain things like others.

What we should really be striving for is becoming comfortable and familiar. Starting small or at the beginning doesn’t make us any less than, doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything worthy of sharing. We’re allowed to engage in the process of learning and be proud of where we are.

Wake up instead with the mindset to learn, instead of striving to be like someone else, or to create content like someone else. It is an immense feat and it takes a lot of courage to have confidence in what you birth, and let people appreciate you for what you truly create, For those wondering about the anxiety that comes with sharing original content, I understand it and I’ll get to that one day.

For someone who’s still pretty much at the beginning of, well everything, I can’t wait to see what the middle and end result will turn out to be.