I wonder how often you go online and are left with a feeling of lack. Noticing and judging yourself against all the things that you see online that others seem to be achieving.
The emotions can be one of feeling you lack knowledge, skills, relationships, joy, money, beauty? The list can go on and on depending on your vulnerability at the time you see or hear something that triggers this emotion. I have learned that this comes from a need for us all to understand our own personal desires, dreams, ambitions and definitions of success. We need to clearly know our values and what really matters to us personally.
There is a very clever message being sent out, almost the new form of marketing. To make you feel you could be more. Even making you feel you SHOULD be more. The agenda is to help you, to improve you, to develop you, however, there is often a commercial agenda that seeks to sell to you. I have witnessed so many programs and ‘guru’s’ who have such clean intentions to help, but sometimes their messaging can actually make us feel worse. I don’t want to go online all the time and feel I should be more, I like to see real people, having real life experiences, talking in a real way.
These ‘be more’ messages can be highly motivating if they hit the right nerve. But if you feel vulnerable, if your self-worth is low, if you are in scarcity, if you are lonely, these messages can panic and depress.
In 2002 I did my first speech in a professional paid way. It was to a group of ladies at BT. I was hired to talk about “being yourself; and you are enough”.
This was just the beginning of the social media world. Ecademy (the social network I created and run for 14 years) had been growing for 4 years, LinkedIn had just launched in 2002, Facebook launched in 2004 and Twitter in 2006. Social Media had great promise for humanity, but I already sensed the “compare and despair world”. The ways way we could compare, compete and rise or fall.
Individually, we have the be very aware of the marketing techniques that are being used to make us feel we can never rest and instead build on who we already are, and most importantly, build the way we want to live and lead our lives.
This is your life, lead it the way you want to, not through the lens of someone else. Remember, online, you see the one dimension of the person’s life you are seeing, but you know the 360 degree person that is you, comparing all of you, with one dimension of the other person does not equate. So today, perhaps love yourself for how amazing you already are. The cocktail of you is simply amazing.
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