Ep. 04: Posting Used to Scare Me Shitless. Here's What Helped.

Posting used to make me want to throw up.

Like actually. Heart racing, full body fatigue, replaying everything I said for the rest of the day kind of scared.

I'd stare at the post button. Overthink every word. Check my likes obsessively. It was exhausting.

I don't feel like that anymore.

And the shift wasn't about "doing" something different—it was about becoming someone different.

In this episode, I'm breaking down why showing up online can feel like a literal life or death situation and what I did to teach my mind that showing up is actually okay.

We're talking about:

• Why your primitive mind thinks posting is dangerous
• The identity shift that changed everything for me
• How to microdose being misunderstood (yes, this involves a tiara)
• What it actually looks like to show up without needing validation

If you're the type of person whose nervous system gets wonky when you post, this one's for you.

Transcript

0:00

Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the In Your Bones podcast. Today we're talking about one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur, and that is showing up on social media. I am spilling the beans, getting raw and real about my own journey with it, and I'm sharing the one shift that has made all the difference for me because I'll tell you right now. For the longest time when I would go to post something, I would feel so dysregulated doing it like 10 years ago. I could not even post a picture of myself on Facebook without it feeling like I was about to get mauled by a bear. And when I became an entrepreneur, this was one of the things I desperately knew I like, wanted to do. I knew it would help my business. I knew it would help my reach. And every time that I would get in those like moments of actually doing it, it would just be like I would feel so unstable. I would look at my screen and I would overthink every single word in my caption. And when I would go to hit the post button, it felt like a life or death situation. And after I posted, if I did post it, I would think about that post the whole rest of the day. I don't feel like that anymore. And. The question isn't necessarily what I did to get here. That's part of it. But for me, it's more about who did I need to become to be the person who can now post and I feel neutral. I can put something out there and it isn't living in my mind for the whole rest of the day. And, and that's like such a shift that has like boggled my mind to be able to experience that. Because if you would've told me 10 years ago that I would be able to post something and I would feel close to neutral about it. Almost like you're ordering a coffee from your favorite barista. That's the neutrality that I feel now posting something online. If you would've told me that 10 years ago, I would've never believed you. I would've thought how? How is that possible? I mean, I can vividly remember sitting in my therapist's office back then and crying and telling him, why do I feel the way that I feel when I'm posting something? I can see my friends posting things all the time. Why is it so different for me? And I didn't get much of a great answer from him, but I'm going to share a better answer with you now. It felt so sticky for me to have shown up on social media two years ago, three years ago. Because at one point in our lives when we were so tiny, our lives depended on the approval of the adults in our lives. So let's think about an 18 month old. Let's name her Ashley. Ashley's whole world is dependent on the person that brings her food. And changes her diaper and takes care of her needs. And during that time as an 18 month old, you start getting more of a sense of what's going on in your world. And so then she starts learning that there are things that please, the person that feeds her. And then there are behaviors that don't. So maybe Ashley has a potty accident. And then she sees the frustration and the reaction from her mom or whoever it is, and it creates this feeling of, oh my God, am I even safe? Because Ashley instinctively knows that all that needs to happen is that she gets left somewhere and she's not gonna be okay. So she knows other people's judgment was truly. A life or death situation. And we eventually do get older. We're eventually not that fragile anymore, but what we learned about our fragility gets baked in to the concrete foundation of our mind. So it can still be there. And because it once was a life or death situation to receive the approval of others, it can still feel like that to a part of your mind. And that's what it was like for me when I would post about my freelance copywriting business years ago. I genuinely felt like I might die. As I was sitting there looking at my Instagram post, like my heart would race, I would go into this weird free state. Where I would get so tired, just completely fatigued for the rest of the day. I don't feel like that anymore. My body doesn't react that same way. I feel much more neutral. I can get on with my day after I post on socials without thinking too much about it. And when I post now, it has a different energy to it before I would post and I would think, I wonder if that was valuable to somebody. Or I would look and check to see if there was likes in order for me to then get that validation that what I posted actually was a good post, and now I know the value of my knowledge, and I'm not posting for someone else to, approve of it. What are the words I wanna say? I wanna say I'm not posting for someone else to reflect that back to me. I'm so rooted in what I know is valuable and so I'm not looking for it to be reflected back to me. I'm just. Out here, like the, the energy that I bring to my post now is, I know this has benefited me, and I would like to share that with somebody else. I know this has made such a difference in my life and I would like whoever reads this to find it and have it also benefit them. That's a very different energy. Before it was like, please let me know if this is valuable. Please let me know. And here it's like, come enjoy this with me. Right? Very, very different. I'll also share that before. I also would feel dysregulated even having normal conversations with family and friends. Like I would have these experiences where I would lay in bed at night and I would play back conversations that I had, and I would overthink everything that I said and I would think, I wonder if that offended them. I wonder if I said the right thing there. And it also had that same energetic. Component of I hope that this other person liked me. And it's not to say that I don't replay conversations now I do. now I either changed the channel and move on to something else, you know, shift my thoughts to the next thing. Or I think about, well, maybe there was a more valuable way to have said something versus did I say enough to get that other person to like me. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, well, I do get a little bit wonky when I post, or I tend to sometimes overthink conversations, I want you to know it's such a normal reaction. So many people do this, and this is something that I've worked really hard to cultivate the skills to not have that same dysregulation reaction anymore. And I'll share what I did in a second, but I just want you to know it is a hundred percent okay if you find yourself getting into a space where you're dysregulated when the spotlight's on you or dysregulated when you have to speak in front of other people or when you do post. It is. Okay. And it's also possible to slowly shift that. So here's what I want you to know. If you're thinking. Yes, I do want to get more comfortable being able to speak up and post, and that is our inner mind learns from our behaviors. What is dangerous. There's a part of our mind that's our more primitive mind, and it learns that what we go out of our way to avoid is dangerous. And what we go out of our way to do is not. It doesn't look at whether it actually is or not. It looks at our behaviors, so that's why you can be a smoker and smoke cigarettes every day, and a part of your mind thinks that it is not at all dangerous. Or if you go out of your way to avoid eating cabbage, then a part of your primitive mind thinks it must be dangerous. Your primitive mind observes these behaviors and then takes in that information. So as a child, we went out of our way to do things that would make the adults in our lives approve of us. And then we went out of our way to not do things that would make the adults in our lives disapprove of us. And that was intelligent of us to do. That was so smart. It helped us when we were under the care of our parents that served us and now as adults, this pattern. No longer is beneficial if we wanna be getting out there and making an impact in our business because making an impact, getting out there will always lead to people disapproving of you. The more eyes that are on you, the more that will happen. People will project their own insecurities, their own stuff onto you, and you can absolutely teach your inner mind. That it is okay to have people misunderstand you, and that happens incrementally. So if you're teaching someone to swim, you wouldn't wanna throw them in the deep end, right? You would take your time, take them down the steps. You would start in the shallow end, maybe with some floaties. That's what I did with my daughters. So the same thing applies here. By the way, if this is really serving you, I have a private podcast called The Visibility Lab. I'm hopping on in real time sharing, like raw unedited me, how I deal with self-doubts and nervous system dysregulation, and all the stuff that comes up on a day-to-day basis. Being a business owner who's posting online, I share how I am shifting out of it, like what I do in real time. To not let that sink me and collapse me for the day and keep showing up. So it's $33 a month If you want in, shoot me a dm. I'll make sure you got it. So. The number one thing as we're teaching our inner mind is to microdose letting people misunderstand you. Like little tiny moments of letting people disapprove of whatever it is that you're doing. So it could be wearing a tiara to the grocery store and letting people look at you funny. Or it could be singing out loud while you're on a walk around the neighborhood. I mean, I definitely do that. I dance, I might even do some squats and exercises as I'm walking around my neighborhood. I've got no shame. Or maybe it's bringing store bought goods to your kids' bake sale. I know that there's so much like mom stigma that's like you must have everything be homemade and you must dot all the i's and cross all the T's. So let yourself. Be judged by the other moms and do the lazy thing, let it in. Or maybe you can even be having an interaction with your coffee barista and ask them an obnoxious question. Something that you would never ask. Something like, about all the different dairy free milks they have and. Ask them what makes them different and like, keep going on this little tangent. Put yourself in situations where you are purposefully letting people misunderstand you and lean into the tension. That you can feel in your body when that happens. And for me, this was such a big learning curve. It took so long for me to be able to even microdose those little moments of disapproval that I could sense from people, and I would go to bed even thinking about it. So take your time with this one. Maybe it's a smaller step than you even can think of. Something tiny to just get yourself warmed up to the feeling of it. You can even think in your mind, you can even start imagining a scenario where you're doing it first. That could be your first step. I know. That if I'm trying to do something too fast, if the end point feels too far or I'm trying to reach for something that's too high, I get disappointed in myself when I can't do it, and then it leads to this cycle of I can't do it, and further disappointment. So. Here, it's about taking micro steps that feel a hundred percent doable and taking that action and then letting yourself feel into the feeling of, oh, I did it, it wasn't so bad. Or maybe it's a little bit bad, but I can, uh, open some space here for that feeling of discomfort. And it's this journey, you can think of it like a discovery, like you're just letting your freak flag fly a little bit more. I know, I know. It's gonna feel so good to let a little bit more of that little freaky fry, freaky freak, freaky flag energy out. It does. It feels like for me when I'm like, damn, it feels so good that I don't feel so like entangled in like the expectations of someone else. It feels so freeing to be able to know that my nervous system has the capacity to deal with the discomfort of disapproval. Then I can speak up easier and as you speak up easier, you take on the identity. Of a woman who speaks up. Now you're that woman. Now you're the person who has no problem or at least feels a lot more neutral about posting. And now you're the woman who knows. You can rely on yourself to say the thing that you wanna say. Now you're the woman who knows. You can say no. When you get that invitation that you don't feel is aligned, now you're the woman that can speak up for needing alone time when you need it. Now you're the woman who can say, what's the loving thing that might hurt someone's feelings? So it's this whole new identity you step into with letting people disapprove of you and fuck, it feels good. and I already see that for you. I see you as this passionate woman who has no problem speaking up about the causes that she cares about, who has no problem standing up for her community and the changes she wants to see in the world, and has no problem saying the things that she cannot hold back any longer. You're taking the energy that would've been gone to those overthinking moments, overthinking that social media post, overthinking that conversation, and now you're directing that energy. It's no longer going to that, and now it's going to all the things that you wanna build and that you can see yourself building and your vision and your community and your family and all of that. That is the power of getting comfortable with the disapproval of others. You're already making big strides. I see it for you. I see it. All right, that's it for now. I'll see you in the next one.