The Night Only My Mom Was Watching
I hit “go live” and the little number in the corner said 1.
One viewer.
It was my mom.
That was the whole audience. My mother, sitting somewhere with her phone, being nice to me the way mothers are.
I talked anyway. I talked about paint parties and what I was working on and I am sure I said “um” about four hundred times.
Then I got off, and I did it again the next week. And the next one.
Nobody was watching. There was no reason to think anyone ever would.
I want you to hear that part clearly, because I think it is the part that gets skipped when people tell their business story. There was a long stretch where the room was EMPTY.
I kept going live into a room with exactly one person in it.
Then something slow started happening. Two viewers. Nine. Thirty.
And then one day it is hundreds of people, and I am sitting there staring at the numbers on my phone like somebody is playing a joke on me.
Hundreds.
Same woman. Same messy house.
So What Changed?
Now I want to be honest about something, because I think people get this part wrong.
I did get better.
All those Lives with nobody watching were practice. I got more comfortable on camera. Stopped freezing up. I learned which words landed and which ones made people’s eyes glaze over. And, I got clearer, I said “um” a whole lot less.
So no, I did not stay exactly the same. I improved.
But I did not become someone ELSE.
I didn’t build a shinier version of myself and send her out there in my place. I just got better at being me.
That is the difference, and it is a big one. Practice made me clearer. It never made me somebody different.
I kept showing up as the actual me, over and over, until enough people found her.
That is really the whole point of this post. But let me back up and explain what I mean, because “just be yourself online” is useless advice if nobody tells you what that actually looks like.
What Unfiltered Actually Means
Let’s get clear, because this phrase gets thrown around and it makes people think they have to be a mess on purpose.
Unfiltered does not mean sloppy.
It does not mean you stop caring. It does not mean you post crying videos. And it doesn’t mean you air out your marriage on the internet.
Here is what it means, plain:
The version of you in the video is the same version that shows up in real life.
That’s it.
Same voice, same room, same opinions, same nervous laugh. You are not performing a cleaner, calmer, richer, more organized woman who does not exist.
Polished is fine. Polished is not the problem. A pretty photo of a finished canvas is still a good post.
What does not work is FAKE. And people can smell fake through a screen now in a way they could not a few years ago.
Why This Is Working Right Now
I want to be careful here. I am not going to hand you a theory dressed up as a fact.
But here is what I have watched with my own eyes, on my own accounts.
Everybody knows about the social media version of life.
I wrote about this in my book. We all have things we hide. And we pick what we share online. We act one way with one group of friends and another way with a different group. And we are somebody else entirely when we are alone.
There is the social media version of a life. Then there is the version happening on the normal days, the tired days, and the days nobody would think to post about.
Your audience knows this now. She KNOWS. So when she sees a perfect feed, she does not think “wow.” She thinks “sure.”
Pretty is not rare anymore.
Anybody can make something look nice now. The tools are cheap and everyone has them.
You know what is still rare? A real woman saying a real thing that most people are too embarrassed to say out loud.
Your person is tired and she is lonely.
She is on the couch at 9:40 at night with her phone. Her job is fine and also slowly eating her. She has a folder of ideas she has never shown anyone.
She doesn’t need one more stranger to admire.
All she needs is one person who sounds like her.
I do want to flag something honestly. The way these platforms decide what to show people changes constantly, and I am not going to pretend I know exactly how it works this month. Nobody outside those companies really does. What I can tell you is what people RESPOND to, because I read the comments.
The $15,000 I Spent On Looking Good
I need to tell on myself for a minute.
Early in my online business, I hired a firm to build me some cool stuff. It cost fifteen thousand dollars.
They said everything I wanted to hear. And they looked like a very sweet boy band, so my judgment may have been a little cloudy.
They delivered the thing. I could not get it to work.
I sent one email asking for help with what was probably a twenty minute fix. What I got back was a long email and a set of VIDEOS explaining that their job was done and anything else would cost more money.
They spent more time making a video about their contract than they would have spent fixing my problem.
I could not get it out of my head. I carried that around for a while.
Then one day I was driving and telling my daughter Pixie the whole story, and she asked me, “Can you do anything about it?”
I said, “Not really.”
She said, “Then just let it go.”
High school wisdom. Fifteen thousand dollars.
Here is why I am telling you this in a post about unfiltered content.
I thought the thing standing between me and a real business was that I did not look professional enough yet. So I went and bought professional.
It did not work. Not because those guys were the worst people alive, but because polish was never the missing piece.
The Facebook Lives were the missing piece. The ones with my mom watching. The free ones. The ones where I looked like myself.
The Trunk Of My Car
Let me show you what real looks like in this business.
One afternoon I taught a paint party in the middle of the day. Back to back parties, no breaks. I cleaned up, loaded out, and then remembered I had to pick up Pixie from school.
She was in third grade.
I got there five minutes late and realized my whole car was packed with paint party supplies. Not for one party. For SEVERAL.
There was no seat. There was no room. Just me and a car full of canvases and paint and a kid standing on the sidewalk.
So I had her squeeze in behind my seat and stand up for the ride home. We lived a block away, thank goodness.
She thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened to her. She held on and laughed the whole way.
I was mortified.
Now here is the thing. For years, that was a story I would have NEVER posted. That was the story I would hide, because it made me look like a woman who could not keep it together.
That is exactly the story your audience needs.
Because the woman on the couch at 9:40 at night does not need proof that you are impressive. She needs proof that this is doable by a normal person who forgets to unload her car.
What This Looks Like For Your Business
Okay. Let’s get practical, because I do not want to leave you with a feeling and no plan.
Show the setup, not just the finished canvas. Everyone posts the pretty painting at the end. Post the folding tables, post the trunk, post the moment you realize you brought the wrong brushes.
Show the empty room before people arrive. That room is nerve wracking every single time. Every host on earth knows the feeling.
Film the kit table. Boxing up art kits at your kitchen counter at night is not glamorous. It is exactly what she wants to see, because it looks like something she could do.
Let a party be imperfect. Somebody spills. Or Somebody hates their tree. Somebody paints over the whole thing and starts again. That IS the party. That is the fun part.
Use your own words. If you would not say it to your neighbor in the driveway, do not put it in a caption.
The Fear Underneath All Of This
You are not avoiding this because you do not understand it. You are avoiding it because somebody might say something.
And they will. I want to be honest with you about that.
When my work started getting noticed, the trolls showed up. People commented on how I looked. People criticized me for no reason I could figure out. It felt like standing on a big screen with a room full of critics.
It happened in person too. I remember a family reunion where a relative asked me, in THAT tone, whether quitting my job was really wise. Whether the business was really going to work.
I said, “We will soon find out,” and I walked off.
Here is what I learned from that, and I think about it constantly.
Their approval is not their permission.
I do not need a distant relative’s opinion about what I am allowed to build. And I do not need to hand out permission slips either.
The trolls did not show up when I was hiding. They showed up when the work started working. That is why I actually think of them as a decent sign.
When A Post Lands Quiet
Some of your posts are going to do nothing. I want to say that plainly so you do not think something is broken.
A quiet post is not a verdict. It is one day of information.
Sometimes the timing was just off. Sometimes people saw it and were not ready to say anything yet. And sometimes you misread the room completely, which happens to everybody and you live through it.
I once hired a Britney Spears look-alike for my big annual event. She was fantastic. She sounded exactly like Britney and her dancers were on point.
Some of my people left the dance floor. A few left the room entirely.
I stayed out there and danced anyway, because when I am 88 I would rather laugh about that than wish I had done it. Did I misread the room? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely.
Start Here This Week
Small. Please make it small. Do not blow up your whole content plan over a blog post.
Answer a real question you actually got. From a text, a DM, a woman at a party. Say what she asked. Say what you told her.
Post the photo you would normally skip. The cluttered table. The packed trunk. The half finished canvas.
Read your caption out loud before posting. If it sounds like a brochure, rewrite it like a text to a friend.
What I Figured Out
I should tell you that I am not naturally an organized, polished person. My brain works in about a hundred journals scattered around the house and Post-it notes by the bed for the ideas that hit at 2 a.m. And my organizational skills are roughly those of a raccoon.
My husband bought me an Apple Watch once. It lasted twelve minutes. The notifications nearly took me out, and then the thing had the nerve to tell me when to breathe.
For years I thought I had to hide all of that to be taken seriously.
That was the mistake. And it took me a long time to see it.
The polish was not professionalism. The polish was HIDING. It was a very productive looking way to stay safe.
And here is the part that actually bothers me. The whole time I was hiding, I was quietly telling every woman watching me that she had to hide too. That she had to wait until she was cleaned up and impressive before she was allowed to start.
I do not want to be the reason one single woman waits.
So now I show the trunk of the car. I say my profit out loud. I tell the fifteen thousand dollar story. And I tell people I went live to an audience of one and that one was my mom.
It is not really a strategy. It is closer to a decision.
The rooms I am in now are full. But they got full because I kept talking to an empty one.
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