How I’m Stepping Back From Social Media To Grow My Business

Tomorrow, I head off on a spontaneous trip to Seville.

I'm going to walk through the sunny streets of the city, start a fresh book, pause for too many cups of coffee and lose my evenings to too many glasses of wine.

And I cannot wait.

Because there is something about travelling that offers me what I crave. Yes, the joy of exploring a new place, a step back from the daily mundane and the exhilaration of the unknown. But it's also an opportunity to be invisible in a way that I don't get in the place I grew up, where people still chub my cheeks as though I'm a child, or the small town I moved to, where everyone knows I order a cappuccino and a slice of peanut butter banana bread wherever I go.

When I travel, I get to slip through the cracks in a way that my system craves. And in doing so, I get to think a little bigger, colour outside the lines and hear what I really desire, not just what I think I should.

A dance I grapple with daily.

As a 6/2 profile, the Role Model/Hermit, I often find myself two-stepping between two worlds.

One where I am recognised for my work, sought after for my words and booked out for my brilliance.

And another, where no one knows what I do. No one needs me for anything. No one cares what I have to say.

Of course, it's not about choosing either of those paths because, in reality, both would be denying an essential part of who I am. It's about finding a way where both of those parts can co-exist in sweet harmony. Something I'm exploring many avenues in the pursuit of discovering.

One of which is how much time I spend online.

Because confession: I'm an avid doomscroller. I get swept up in the scroll so damn easily that I'm ashamed to admit it out loud. I see my screen time stats and I spiral, then scroll to escape that shame. Make it make sense.

And in doing so, the hermit in me ends up screaming at me to stop. To have space. To consider how unnatural all this information is and how much it's stealing my capacity, my best ideas and my visionary thinking.

So last week I deleted the app with the intention of logging on to share, connect, consume a healthy amount and then vanishing from thin air.

My 6/2 is rejoicing in response.

Every time I've stepped back from the scroll, the words find their way onto the page again. Every misalignment I've been pushing through becomes abundantly clear. The ideas I save for my notes app actually start seeing the light of day. And most importantly, I enter into the visionary energy of imagining what is yet to exist.

And I think so many of us are feeling a call to step back from social media in some sense.

The clients I speak to describe this huge resistance to even sharing their work in the very spaces they're trying to move people off of. Contributing to the noise they're trying to help people quieten. And it creates this deep unnaturalness in how we create and in how it's received.

When we, as visionaries, spend so much of our time in consumption, we suffocate the ideas that need space to find their originality. Because if you are here, reading these words, you are supposed to be a part of the change the world so desperately needs. And the part of you responsible for that needs space to breathe, to be bored, to feel blank.

Something the scroll steals both from us, and the people we serve, daily.

And I think this is bigger than just a social media habit to manage. It's a real questioning of how we've been told to show up - consistently, persistently, visibly on. Showing proof that we still exist and still have something worth saying.

That's the bit that exhausts me more than the visibility itself.

Because I know I can show up fully, with everything I've got. But only when it's on my terms and in my time. The second it becomes a quota to fill or a box to tick, something in me quietly, stubbornly refuses. And it’s supposed to.

This is the visionary rewriting.

It doesn’t end with the work we create; that’s only the beginning. It’s carried in the way we move that work through the world. The words we attach to it and the spaces we share it in. And when there’s a disconnection in either of those, there’s a disconnection with those we serve, too.

The very act of being a visionary means the need for original methods of marketing. It requires you to challenge the standard, especially when it comes to spaces like social media.

That’s exactly what I’ve been doing recently. Switching off, to log back in, share, consume (a healthy amount) and then letting myself breathe in a blank space, in bodredom, where I know my best ideas come from. Where I know the ideas that are going to be so unequivocally mine are going to be birthed from.

And that didn’t happen overnight.

It happened with hours spent writing resonant messaging that finds people without me needing to show up and be seen all the time.

That’s the entire ethos behind my business, and I am a living embodiment of that.

Something I dive into in this week’s podcast episode.

And in my latest Substack.