e195 The Dark Side of Vulnerability Marketing
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[00:00:00] Welcome. Welcome to the Rewild Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Gill Moakes. Thank you so much for joining me again this week. I wanna talk to you about something that I'm seeing at the moment in the online business world that feels like a little bit of an epidemic, particularly actually in the coaching and personal development space.
And that is that business owners are hearing the message that they can differentiate themselves by being vulnerable. Yeah. Great advice. Great advice. Being vulnerable and sharing vulnerability. But there's a problem with this that I wanna dive into a little bit. Welcome to Rewild Your Business, the podcast for women doing the work, their soul intended.
I'm Gill Moakes. I'm an international business coach and I'm a guide for women doing the work that matters. [00:01:00] Rewilding your business means cutting away what doesn't belong to allow, what does to thrive. Finding simplicity in your work, and it's about bringing the whole of who you are to the table. Whether you are building something new or finding your way back to what really matters to you.
I'm so glad you're here. What happens is that they hear that message that's encouraging them to be vulnerable online. And so they share their story, they share their struggles, they often share their breakdowns, their trauma that they've been through or even worse are going through. And the thing is, it works, at least at first, right?
People respond. Feel seen maybe for the first time. You know, if you're someone that has toed around with this, you're gonna exactly what I'm talking about. Now, let's take for example, there was that trend a while back [00:02:00] of posting photos with no makeup on that because to bet always bothered put a of makeup on either.
But there was this trend of posting these people almost trying to look as bad as they could. What happened was it elicited a response. People engaged and so they share more. Suddenly you're finding yourself sharing some really raw, tough stories. I've seen business owners sharing things around their eating disorders, around their divorce, their bankruptcy, abusive relationships, you know, the rock bottom moments.
Of are responding comments are gonna pour in. Thank you so much for sharing this. You so brave. I needed to hear this. Right. You know, that happens and of course the A engagement [00:03:00] goes through roof, so they start leaning in harder until the problem is the day then arrives when they realize that their entire brand.
Their worst moments. Every post is like a wound on display. Everything is about a crisis managed. You know, every launch is framed around trauma and crisis, and here's the problem for those women. They can't understand. They can't figure out why they're attracting the clients who are drowning, not clients who are ready to build, not clients who are ready to do the work and move forward, and they can't understand why their business is suddenly feeling heavy and exhausting.
But to be honest, they're constantly reliving the worst parts of their life instead of moving beyond them and building forward and upward. [00:04:00] And creating inspirational and aspirational content. Now, I don't want you to think this is an all or nothing argument, and we're gonna go into this, but there is an element of the online world for whom trauma has almost become currency and your worth starts getting measured by.
To be in public, and I don't
believe in vulnerability. I think doing your listeners.
The vulnerable side of yourself, but there is a huge difference between vulnerability and performance. Real vulnerability is when [00:05:00] you're sharing something that is true, but it's something that you have processed, you've metabolized, right? Not because it gets engagement, but because it serves your audience's transformation.
You share it once, maybe twice, right? You reference it when it's genuinely relevant to the conversation, to the teaching, to the coaching, but it isn't your entire identity. It's not your hook constantly. It's not how you open every bloody conversation, right? Performance, vulnerability is different.
Performance vulnerability is when you share your trauma because.
It works from a marketing perspective, it gets clicks, it gets comments, makes you feel seen. All of those things we want from marketing, I get that. But the problem is if you haven't completely [00:06:00] processed that format, if you are still even the tiniest bit in it, and if you are still performing it every time you hit post, because somewhere deep down.
You believe that your pain, your trauma, your crisis is the only thing that makes you interesting, then that is just performance. It's not in service of your viewers, your listeners. Your readers. Real vulnerability feels clean. You can share it without. Needing a specific response. You've done the work, you're on the other side.
You've learned a lesson that journey has brought to you, so now you're sharing wisdom. You're not sharing this open wound, whereas performance, vulnerability, that doesn't feel clean. It feels sticky. It feels like you're searching for the [00:07:00] validation. It feels like you need people to tell you that you're brave.
You need that engagement to feel like the pain means something Real vulnerability is really generous because it's all about the message in there for your audience. Performance vulnerability is all about taking something from your audience. Here's where this becomes a business problem. When your brand is almost inextricable from your trauma, it's built on your, it's on everything that's ever gone wrong for you, everything that's ever struggle for you, then it's incredibly difficult to establish authority.
I'm not for one minute saying that authority is about being perfect, or pretending that you have never struggled with anything. The guide, not the wounded protagonist who's [00:08:00] still kind of stumbling through the story, struggling. For example, let's say I'm looking for a business coach. Well, I want someone who is on the other side of the struggles that I'm facing in growing the right business For me, I'm gonna be looking for someone who has already metabolized the lessons, someone who can really see clearly.
Going through the struggle. I don't want someone whose entire marketing message is like.
I don't wanna hire that person. I might find their content empathic, but I'm not gonna part with my hard earned money to hire them as my coach to get me from where I'm now to where I wanna be. If you're looking for coaching, it's not the same as someone to commiserate with you. I'm gonna want the look I've [00:09:00] been where you're, I figured out the way through.
So now let show you. That's how I position my coaching with my clients. I've been where you're, I figured it out. Now lemme show you. That is authority. And when you're leading with those kind of open wounds with your trauma, you are actually positioning yourself as a peer who's in struggle rather than a guide through it.
Can you see how this really well-meaning message that we've had, sort of ram down our throats a bit? You know, share the vulnerable, share the problems, share what you've been through. You know, it's a bit muddied, and the result of that is learned that you attract people who wanna sit in the problem with you, not the people who are beyond ready to solve it.
And then you're wondering why your clients are exhausting you and why they're not doing the work [00:10:00] and why they want through the every tiny decision that they make. It's because.
On your expertise. And here's the deeper problem with this. When your trauma becomes your brand, it also becomes your identity and our identities are really hard to let go of. I know this because it's something that not only have I been through, it's something that I coach women through. Time letting go of an identity that they clinging to for dear life in order to become the woman who has the business that they want.
So when your trauma becomes your, and if all identities, even painful ones, are hard to let go of, you can see what's gonna happen, right? You've built [00:11:00] an audience around being the person who overcame x. Created.
I help people who struggle with this help because I struggled with that. If that is the sole sum of your positioning, then what happens when you're finally beyond this, when you actually heal and move forward when the trauma isn't fresh anymore, the alternative is that you show up differently. Okay. You don't.
Stop ever being vulnerable, but you share processed wisdom, and that's what happens when you take your experiences. So even the painful ones, even the things that were super challenging for you, and you do the work to really understand them, learn [00:12:00] from them. Most importantly, extract the transferable insights, the stuff that you can go on to use to help other people.
You don't have to do this performance. You don't have to share the rawness of the trauma. To get the engagement, you have to break that connection. Instead, you can share the story and you can highlight the lesson. Could sound like this. You know, three years ago from now, I was on my bathroom floor. I was sobbing.
I was wondering if I would ever be, and my business was failing or my marriage was falling apart, and I felt like a complete fraud. But I picked myself up and now help women feel.
Processed wisdom might sound like this. You know [00:13:00] what? I spent two years of my life building a business that looks successful from the outside actually made me miserable. And what I learned is that misalignment doesn't just feel bad. It actively sabotages growth's how to spot the gap between what you building and what you want.
Can you see the difference between those two examples? The last one is actually true. That is my story. I did spend two years building a business that looked really successful from the outside, but I didn't enjoy running at all. Can you see how if I had just shared the bit about how I was literally on the bathroom floor sobbing and I didn't know how I was ever gonna make the changes I wanted to make in my business, and it was so painful and it was so hard, and here's what it felt like, right?
[00:14:00] That is centering on the pain. The second example centers on the insight. I actually say the end. Here's how to spot the gap. What you actually want, it's focusing on the lesson. The lesson that means something for your audience. So one keeps you as the hero of your own struggle story, and the other one positions you as the guide.
It positions you as the guide who has the clarity that is actually gonna help them. Still gonna sense empathy. Don't worry that this kind vulnerability isn't gonna. It's just that it's gonna do it in a way that your audience can actually use. I mean, honestly, it's like everything in marketing. One is about you, the other's about them.
How many times have you heard people say to you, you know, you need to re-look at your website [00:15:00] copy because you need to make it about your ideal client, not all about you, your LinkedIn profile, you know, whatever. It's, that is a real like 1 0 1. Isn't it? You need to make it about your ideal clients. So even if you are sharing a really vulnerable story, it can't end there.
You can't just do it performatively for the engagement, and I get it. This is why it's so hard to shift because the performance vulnerability does get rewarded. At first. You post about definitely gonna get engagement. The more extreme you're with that, the more engagement you're gonna get. On LinkedIn and if you could be bothered, or maybe I'll link to it in the show notes, not in a performative way, but to demonstrate what I'm sharing with you now.
I posted a post about losing my husband to cancer back in thousand 16. The reason I posted it [00:16:00] was because of all of the lessons that Phil taught me and how I now use those lessons in my business. I think it was on the anniversary of his or his birthday or something like that. And honestly, this is the God's honest truth.
I posted that sitting on the loo having a wee. Just to clarify, it was one of the quickest posts I've done. I just typed it in. I put a lovely photo of Phil and I posted it. To that post because it talk about the death of my husband has far and above the most reach any post I have ever created has closest thing to going viral that I've ever done.
Perfect example of this. Now, I wasn't posting it in a performative way. I actually feel like that post was sharing something that was useful for my audience. I'd love your thoughts on it. Go and take a look at it. I'll link to the post [00:17:00] in the show notes, but see what you think. You'll get the point I think about how engagement just spikes.
And doing that every now and then. I haven't posted another post like that one since then. And that was, God, what, maybe a couple years ago. I haven't posted it. That's not what I'm all about. That is not my brand. My brand is not sitting in struggle. So when you share that, what Autumn? Yes. The comments are gonna pour in.
Algorithm gonna light up, that can feel a little bit addictive. If you spent years feeling really unseen and unheard and you've made that mean something like, I'm not good enough, suddenly that pain and struggle has a purpose and you know you're getting this validation. I get it. I get how it's so tempting to use that vulnerability to use trauma, to use your wounds to make you feel worthy of attention.
The problem is, and this is what I think, we [00:18:00] don't really stop to think about, that engagement is not building your business. It's building your ego, but it's not building your business. The people who are commenting, oh, you're so brave, they're most likely not your ideal clients. Wounded people looking for commission to stay stuck where they in their and the shares and the saves.
You know, they're not sales on that content. They're not making someone think. I'm glad she shared that extremely raw story. She must be the woman that I wanna work with that's building an audience of like Commis. So it's really, really important that you're building your brand on authority, not on sympathy, not on empathy, honestly, because that is not where your.
Are gonna come from the clients that you love working with, that you get the best results with. Have the budget to pay you, right? That's not where those [00:19:00] clients are coming from. That's not what's gonna build the business you actually want. All it does is keep you performing in that same story. I think that for some of you listening, this is gonna be hitting hard.
I'm not gonna apologize for that because I think this is such an important message for you to hear. I.
Vulnerability in your brand, and often that can be because we don't really know who we're without it. If your pain has been your identity for so long that the thought of actually being known for something else is terrifying, then of course it feels safer to stay there If you are like constantly asking yourself questions like, what if I'm boring without the drama?
Or what if people don't actually care about my real experience or how I can actually help them? I just don't want you to believe that the only thing that made you interesting was how much you've suffered. [00:20:00] I get the fears around it, but it's honestly bullshit. You're not more interesting because of what you've been through, because of the challenges you've faced, right?
You're more interesting. When you've transformed those wounds into wisdom and you are genuinely on the other side, living a life that proves that the work works, then your clients who don't need another person who only understands their pain, they need someone who understands where they wanna be, who has.
So they need that process. Wisdom. Okay. They need the guides, not a fellow traveler still flailing around in the words. Outta the woods soon. Anyone else get lost in the woods? As a child, I can remember getting lost in [00:21:00] the local woods, inal, where I used to live near Mastone in Kent. I remember getting lost in the woods as a child and literally having thoughts of Bear would've been proud of me.
I was having thoughts of, I wonder how many days I'm gonna be walking through these woods until I get to the other side. Literally, these woods are like a square mile. Not even that, but I can remember thinking, am I ever gonna see a road again? Too dramatic. I come from a family of very dramatic people has said, so how are we gonna make this shift?
First thing, let's stop sharing trauma in real time. If something difficult is happening for you right now, if you're going through some kind of crisis, some sort of meltdown, some kind of major struggle that hasn't been processed into wisdom yet. Therapy material that is not material to share with your audience, with your ideal clients.
So do the work first. Get to the point where you've processed it, where you understand it, [00:22:00] extract the lesson from it, and only then consider whether sharing that story or not serves your audience. Is audit your content. So go back through your last 20 posts or videos or podcast episodes, whatever. It's that you create, how many of them center on your pain or lead with your struggles?
And then ask yourself, what would this piece of content have looked like if I led with the insight instead of the wound? Reposition around transformation, not empathy. Your brand shouldn't be simply. I've been through this terrible thing, so I understand your brand should be, I've learned this crucial thing and now I can teach it, or now I can help [00:23:00] you with this.
Now I can show you fresh insights, fresh ways to look at this. Understanding alone. Yes, you understand their struggle, but understanding alone doesn't create transformation for them. Your expertise does. Clarity does. Authority does. Fourth thing, this one, you're gonna love me hearing me say this. I can't even believe this is gonna come out my mouth.
I'm gonna say get comfortable being boring Sometimes. Not every single post piece of content that you create needs to be emotionally gut wrenching, right? Not every piece of content needs to make people cry Sometimes the most valuable thing that you can share is a clear framework, a simple strategy, the answer to a commonly asked question.
You don't have to be constantly bleeding [00:24:00] to be valuable, to be interesting. Okay, so practice every now and then stepping back from the need to be disruptive or to be. Are gonna need to take some time to potentially grieve the old identity you had. And that doesn't matter why you're changing your identity, upleveling your identity.
And remember, when we talk about upleveling our identity, we're not talking about becoming someone, we're not talking about becoming more of the person we're. Sometimes there is a feeling of needing to grieve the old identity, to be able to let go of who you've been up until now, to be able to let go of constantly being the survivor, the wounded one, the person who is defined by what they've overcome.
You are becoming someone new. We're all becoming someone new every single time that sunrises we're ever coming, someone new. You are becoming [00:25:00] someone now who is defined by your wisdom, not those wounds, not those the trauma, not the raw vulnerability that you've been going back to time and time again. And that is an identity shift.
And identity shifts are meant to feel uncomfortable. You do it anyway because you know that you need to change.
Identity wants and needs, and when you start performing all of that trauma and start sharing that processed wisdom as I'm calling it, then I think everything does change. You start attracting different clients. You are gonna notice this really quickly. You'll start attracting people who are ready to do the work.
The people who just wanna sit in their story, who just wanna stay comfortable in that story that you have [00:26:00] demonstrated so beautifully with your own trauma sharing that you understand those are not the clients I want for you. I want the clients for you that are ready to do the work, that wanna grow, that want to move forward.
And you build different authority. You build that authority as the guide, not the peer, the expert. And that allows you to create different content. So now you know the fruit of that is that you get to create different content clearer, more useful, much more valuable, less emotionally manipulative actually, because honestly, that performance vulnerability, that is emotional manipulation, that's not okay.
Doesn't feel good. That's gonna make you feel different. You're gonna feel lighter and you're not gonna be boring because you're doing this. You're still gonna be incredibly powerful. You're gonna be more powerful because of positioning yourself as the [00:27:00] authority, because you're sharing the insights that your journey through a challenge brought for you.
And here's the thing that actually surprised me probably the most when I made this shift because like most things I share with you is process wisdom. This is something that I've made this mistake myself in the past, and here's what surprised me, is the people who truly value you do not need you to perform that pain they value.
They value the wisdom that you have, the authority, the frameworks that you have, the ideas, the way you have of helping them see what they can't see yet, right? The value that you have, because you're on the other side, they're not seeking the you that's still in it. And the clients that are willing to pay premium prices, they're just not looking for someone to commiserate with.[00:28:00]
They're for someone who's figured it out and can show them the way, and that is who you become when you stop leading with that raw vulnerability. This is all about balance. It's all about where you need, actually, it's not about balance. I'm gonna take. Often think of balance as 50 50 equal. It's not about that.
That form content, that vulnerable content should form a small part of your story. The insights that came. Now you're the other side of it should form the lion's share of the story. I have an invitation for you. Experiment with taking a full week off from any kind of vulnerable content one week where you don't even reference a single struggle.
I've rock bottom [00:29:00] of that social pro social media person emails. I consciously. Only share things you know, share about how you get transformations with your clients. What are your frameworks? What are the strategies you use? What are the insights you've learned? Load it and lead with wisdom and see what happens.
I said, do it for a week, but you know what, if. A ton of content every week. Try this for a month. Nothing's gonna, nothing is gonna wrong if you do this. I would just love you to see happen when you take out. I've probably formed of that kind of content. Now, if you're listening to this and you're saying, you know what, Jill, this isn't landing, I don't think I do that, then that is brilliant.[00:30:00]
Not every episode of this podcast has to, to the same degree with every single listener or viewer. But if you are listening to this and thinking, oh my goodness, yeah, that is really landing with me. Then I think it's gonna make a big difference for you to do this experiment. I think it's gonna really highlight for you what you've been relying on and what it can feel like to transition away from that.
I think you'll surprise yourself as well. Think you'll surprise yourself in how entertaining and how compelling.
Someone who is building that legacy business who wants to be defined by their wisdom, right? Then reach out to me. I'm gonna put the link in the show notes because I work with a small number of women who honestly are really [00:31:00] done performing and are absolutely ready to lead from a different place. I'll drop the link into the show notes, but for now, it's goodbye for this week and I'll see you here on the podcast.
Same time, same place next week. Bye for now.
