One of the hardest parts of making money independently is knowing which version of yourself to showcase to the world. There’s a delicate dance between communicating the ‘you’ people recognise and understand (the person with a clear career history and track record in your space) and the ‘you’ that your heart and soul is telling you to express.
Recently I ran some mentoring sessions with my longtime internet-friend and fellow Substacker, Kel Rakowski (go subscribe to her publication Popular, it’s fab!). She was embroiled in this very dilemma, on a tightrope teetering between two identities: the legitimate, successful, exited founder the world sees, and the creative, edgy tastemaker she knows herself to be.
When we started working together, Kel was showing up online as the version of herself that made strategic sense. Her positioning was tight, her offers were strong and she was following the so-called playbook. But despite having a solid strategy she felt viscerally opposed to executing it. The whole thing gave her “body and being the ick”.
This wobble between two directions (safe-but-misaligned and authentic-but-unproven) is common. I see it all the time with my mentoring clients and more than once, I’ve lost my balance and tried to create a more marketable, palatable and monetisable version of myself because I thought that’s what the world wanted to see.
There’s a twisted irony in working hard for your freedom and then choosing to build another cage.
And so, Kel and I very quickly scrapped her strategy and built a new 3 month plan centred around exploring two areas of interest: the creative process and taste. She approached her curiosity with discipline and rigour; developing a curriculum and lightly defining success in terms of inputs (what she’d do) and outputs (what she’d see from the market and how she’d feel within herself).
Then this happened.
“[After our sessions] I took the first week of March to build my DIY Taste Education (studying and researching the concept of taste over the next 3 months). I was excited and studious. [Soon after] Popular grew from 3,596 to 6,838 readers, a 90% jump in six weeks. Once this happened I was gassed up and started writing squarely in the zone of creativity, process and taste. A literary agent reached out, It’s Nice That interviewed me for a feature story, I have podcast invites, and I opened a weekly paid newsletter that has earned me a bestseller check mark and hit #4 in the Education charts. My IG account has also gone from 137k to 147k. I was finally able to relax enough and focus on the real reason I exist.”
By stripping off the coat of other people’s expectations and leaving it at the door, Kel started seeing the results she wanted all along. In exploring every inch of what she loves, what she’s good at and what sets her heart on fire, the market finally validated her identity, niche and path.
I wonder if this approach could work for you too?
What if, instead of trying to preemptively force yourself into a persona or niche or offering, you gave yourself the permission to explore? What if, instead of pushing towards what feels comfortable, safe and expected, you allow yourself to be pulled in the direction of your dreams?
Walking the tightrope between what you enjoy, what you’re good at and what the market will pay you for isn’t easy or quick. It took me 32 years to discover my love of writing, another 18 months before finding the portfolio career needle in my curiosity haystack, and almost 5 years of self-employment until I learned how to make good money from both.
This stuff is the quest of a lifetime. It will ask a lot from you. Awareness. Courage. Action. Determination. Faith. But if you keep moving forward through the fear and frustration, you might just find yourself balancing perfectly at the intersection. You might stop performing. You might find your footing as the person you were always meant to be.
PS. You can find more information about my 1-1 mentoring here - if you think I can support you too, let’s chat!
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