My last blog post got a whopping two views on my website, and a lonely solitary like on my LinkedIn page (thanks Dean!). I briefly registered these facts the day after I posted it, and then I went on vacation and didn’t give blogging or LinkedIn or social media likes a second thought for several days.
But I woke up one night midway through vacation and the ONLY thing my brain could think of was that post. It was one of those irrational cold-sweat moments, and for 15 minutes I laid still in bed with the shame monster running rampant through my head. And, yes, the term “shame monster” makes me think of the wisdom I’ve gleaned from both Big Mouth and Brené Brown over the years. But I digress.
In this instance, the feeling/monster showed up as a voice that was telling me I’m never going to be good enough and that I had no business putting my ideas out there (via my blog or any other way). I should never blog again, was the voice’s clear and compelling command. The lack of likes and views was solid evidence that this voice was 100% correct and I needed to make myself smaller (invisible!) to feel better. Really, to feel and be less vulnerable.
I eventually fell back to sleep that night. The next morning I resumed vacation, forgetting about the post and what its underperformance (or lack of performance) might mean about me and my worth.
When I got back from vacation, I opened my laptop and the first thing I saw was my LinkedIn page. That ugly, one-liked post was staring me in the face, like a flashing light of incompetence.
My first impulse was to delete it so no one could see my obvious failures and declare me an idiot. So I clicked on those three little dots in the top right corner of the post and hovered my mouse over the “delete” option that popped up.
But just before I clicked away my shame, I realized a few things.
First, we can’t click the shame away. Reducing it in a meaningful way requires some intentional work and reflection.
Second, I can’t control if someone is judging me for a badly performing post. And if they decide to write me off because of it, well, that says more about them than it does about me. Boundaries, Jeff, boundaries!
Third, I’m admittedly a LinkedIn and blogging novice. I’ve had LinkedIn in for a decade or more, but it’s not my go-to social media platform. I’m a photographer in my spare time, so I’m more adept at Instagram than anything else. And though I’ve done a lot of writing over the years, I’ve never blogged regularly.
I realized I needed to cut myself some slack and not only be ok with learning but to actually appreciate the process of learning and at first not doing very well.
Fourth, and related, my initial blog posts will be my worst by most measures. How could they not be? It’s a new practice for me and it’s not something people who know or follow me expect me to be doing.
That final realization made me think of a quote from the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who said your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. I am all too familiar with this reality in my photography practice, as I approach 9,000 photos shot. I look back at those first couple of thousand–even the ones that I was convinced were Pulitzer-worthy at the time–and I wonder why I ever thought they were good. Judgement, of course, is relative.
One reaction to this reality is to simply not start something because it’s almost certain that the good stuff–your best work–is weeks, months, or years away. Stay small, stay safe, stay still. Don’t create or try.
But the reality is that you’re not going to get to that good stuff any other way, unless you’re a prodigy. For most of us, though, if we want to do something and we want to do it well, we need to learn to navigate some failure and vulnerability on our way to success. We can’t let the shame monster win.
To defeat the shame monster, we can reframe failure as an early sign of progress and growth. We come to understand that we fail so we can learn and do better.
So I didn’t delete the post after all, and I’m now kind of happy to see it there in all its awkward glory. I have a similar affection for those early photographs, too.
Shame, failure, and vulnerability are all frequent discussion topics that my coaching clients raise. This whole episode was a fresh reminder for me about what so many of us struggle with, and how we can pull ourselves out of a downward spiral so we can learn, feel good, and move forward.
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