Overcome Fears, Insecurity, Feeling Overwhelmed & Start Posting on Social Media

hey guys welcome back to another episode of the process and I'm hoping that you guys are loved in a series this is I think episode 3 and back with me again is Melinda and Melinda what are we going to be talking about today so today I want to know how do I approach social media when I'm feeling really insecure I'm overwhelmed with posting between business versus personal and then getting paralyzed with fear when I'm about to post and then I don't know what to say does it happen yeah well what do you feel paralyzed cuz I don't want to say I don't know what the post I don't have a plan so then I'm just randomly posting when I get the inspiration but I don't have a plan of attack or a direction then I just don't post okay so this episode is all about social media for all you creative types to get over your fear of judgment and everything else stick around [Music] our welcome back we're all about social media today let's kick it off let's dive right in so when I'm posting for social media for one I have a couple accounts I have a personal account and I have a business account and I'm not sure whether I should use it my personal and all for business should I only use my business for business well that I'm just asking answering that question when I asked it but the personal should I use my personal for business at all keep it completely sighs okay how many different social platforms are you on I'm on let's see Facebook I'm now on Twitter okay Instagram Pinterest okay so count all right and my Georgie method okay which one do you have your strongest following it currently Instagram okay and you have to account so let's open up those two accounts so the first one is your professional account yeah which is Marx and maker and right now you have 757 followers okay and how long is it how old is that account that is about a month old okay that's great by the way you guys if you have 757 followers and you've only been up for a month that's fantastic all right what else so then I have my personal that really has been just personal and it's 301 followers okay and how long is that account that up uh probably since Instagram her name is like three years probably yeah what is that telling you that I shouldn't use personal for business okay what else is it telling you that I don't have very many followers well without judgment take take the judging away let's just look at the numbers is it hard yeah why it's hard to look at something objectively especially when it's myself I'm very self judging okay so one of the things I want you to get into the habit of doing is there's things that you make and I want you to be really passionate about it and I want you to put all your heart soul and love who you are when you make it but as soon as it releases your hands as soon as you hit enter on the keyboard or hit command S on the Save button it's somebody else's work it's somebody else's thing and that bring that kind of level of detachment so that if people are throwing darts and arrows at you it doesn't impact you at all it's just another piece it's another image on the internet okay you're able to do that for other people's work let's start to train internally how to do that for ourselves okay and we have to be able to do that and that has really helped me out if if I had taken on a different approach when I was at school I would probably be a very different person today I knew very early on when I presented work from the first semester when I was at Art Center that that just work and I'm here and I want to take notes as if it's somebody else's work and I could see the differences between the way that I grew and learn as opposed to the other students the other students were being defensive they're putting their guard up they were like trying to figure out other they just weren't listening and you can see it and it's very evident because what would in it what would happen inevitably is that next week they were to repeat the same mistake now if you want to go one level up from that when the critique is going on you get your critiques you take all your notes and then the next person you take those notes it's your work so we I would often see that people would tune out as soon as their work was done they would relax and you could see their body language change you know their shoulders would sink down and there'd be all right cool I don't need to pay attention anymore what a tragic thing you have the opportunity to learn from 18 other human beings that are creative and you can grow that much faster now some of you guys are probably sitting there thinking well what's this got to do with me I'm not in school anymore I'm out in the real world can you apply that same kind of thinking to your social platforms yes you can what I do is I go and look at other people's work what are they posting how often are they posting what are they saying about their work how are they interacting with their fans and followers and I study as if I'm back in school again so I'm looking at my work as if somebody else did it and I'm looking at other people's work as if I did it why are we isolating ourselves that doesn't make any sense to me so I'm looking at this and I see okay on one hand you've had account for three years or so even longer and you have basically a hundred followers per year now without judgment that's not a gigantic number okay especially if you're early on or early in on the on the Instagram game switching over the other side you created something now that has resonated with people because within a month time you've gained seven hundred fifty-seven followers why do you think that's the case for one because it's very focused okay focus to a specific target and so people know what to expect and I remember what you had mentioned in the art of social webinar just about creating an account that's like a magazine so people know when they sign up they know what to expect because there's so much noise in the world but creating something that is consistent and people know what to expect they are more likely to follow and so I did take that approach when I started this okay so what else do you think it is so consistency is important having focus and curating what it is that you feed because if we look at it like this guys there are a lot of places where we get our information from and we'll go to different places to get it but when you're when you kind of take a buffet smorgasbord kind of approach I don't know what to get from you so I'll get what I want from somebody else so Marx and maker is all about deconstructing logo design based on golden ratio golden means and in doing grid work there's something else that you're doing that's really important here I hope you're able to tell me and we'll see if you can figure it out why do you think there are more followers on this account versus the other account besides being consistent and focused and curating and being intentional too about hashtags and okay so hashtag I also share this is sharing my discoveries in my process so to me it's sharing the behind-the-scenes of something that someone wouldn't normally see when they see logos on they don't always see the breakdown of how things are named or how did someone come to that conclusion or design they just see the end result okay and what do you think that people are following you what are they getting from watching they're looking at your feed they're getting educated for one they're learning with me so I'm describing up I'm not only showing my notes when I'm also describing the epiphanies that I've had or the things that I am learning and then how do I take that I showed in a couple posts how I took what I've learned and then I applied it to my own work and the things that I I used to make my work better okay now let's flip it over and now let's look at your personal account and what are the followers all 301 of them what are they getting from your feet on a personal account they're getting to know me personally it's probably this 300 people a good amount of those are my family and friends equivalents but there seem a day-to-day mostly my dog actually they're seeing a lot of my dog yeah now there are people who have gigantic social followings just because their dog is incredibly cute or that something very interesting no offense to your dog but he's not that kind of dog doesn't look like it's gonna be so sad well he doesn't read Instagram somewhere oh okay all right so if we boil it down can you figure out now what the secret is into gaining a social following what do you think that is if you took everything that you said and bold it down to one thing what's the most important thing okay so I'm preventing something of value providing something of value for going with one thing say that with less words value by value value give value ok give value if you teach somebody something they're likely to tune in because you're going to help them to grow when I'm looking at pictures of your family your dogs or husband the dirt yard the office I'm not getting a whole lot of value from that now if you're an interior designer great if you're a dog groomer great so you have to kind of be at the top of a certain category and it could be a super micro niche subject that you would love and that great so here I'm not getting a lot of value it's valuable for your family to kind of stay in touch with and that's why I typically do not do personal posts on any of my platforms I stay away from that because I want to have a real relationship with my family and I can post whatever I want maybe on one of those photo sharing sites that is walled off needing a username and a password right it's not really about pumping up my own ego celebrating how great and wonderful my life is because unless you're a celebrity unless you're a beautiful woman or just you're a hip-hop star or something like that people just don't care and once you achieve that status then they care about what you drank and where you went and who you talk to we're not in that stage where we're just not there so let's focus on giving value to people by teaching the way we do that and you said it very very well if you do it with intention you share your own discovery and process and in doing so people get on board with that look out that's how Melinda sees the world and maybe I need to go back and apply that same kind of thinking to my own work is that helping you out a little bit then yeah and the great thing about this and if you look at through the lens of I'm sharing my process and my journey through design and creativity and business then you really can't criticize me because it's just my journey and I use that lens like what did I learn today was there something important that was said between you and me or my wife and I and then I will share that because it's my own discovery like you said it was an epiphany and the Epiphany is a strong word but if you had a spark it could just be as little as a spark and it made you think about the day differently and if you saw an act of kindness somewhere and you're thinking wow that touched me talk about how it impacted you and that's it and you will get more people to follow you okay yep that helped all right so I noticed now that you haven't posted something new in a while even a week it's only been a week yeah you sure look cookin this sucker that's not though that's an old one no that's six days ago all right talk about this if you are able to if you're able to I know it's a lot of work to post one thing today that would be amazing now not everybody can do that but here's my take on this thing it's better that you post once a week then to post seven times a day of things that are no consequence to anybody okay so take the time to crap something to put some love into it but don't obsess over it so much so that you're overworking it this is a great platform of these social platforms because it's temporary if you don't like it you delete it and you just move on what's more important to me is when you post something look at how much engagement you get from it are people liking liking it are they commenting are they giving you are they adding questions are they engaged in what it is the conversation and then respond to them if you have the time okay and I say this and it's kind of a funny statement I will say something like I love having deep meaningful conversations with complete strangers that I would never meet and I really do because they asked some very profound questions and it's gotten to such a point now that I need a whole team to help me because I'm scattered all over different social platforms and so I have a remote team working on it I have some staff here working on it I've now enrolled my son he's working on it so they're all grabbing the questions and putting into database so that I can build up something and maybe this will turn into something greater I don't know yet okay all right did we take care of a lot of your questions yes we did very felt one well let's go I said where's going to be a deep dive let's dive so you hit on the one that I am getting a lot of fall over that which I feel like I have hit a roadblock as far as what to share next because I want to transfer into something new which I know I can share what I'm learning but but I feel like this was a very concentrated and focused an intentional share and switching gears is really difficult apparently are you getting tired of doing this now why would you switch gears I guess I feel like I want to give something new rival it if you notice maybe some of the most popular people to follow they just do one thing over and over and over again and then find variety in that and there's nothing wrong with that there are people who will take a picture of themselves a day there's one woman at forget her name but she stands there in a specific pose and she travels the world and she's always in the center of the frame in that pose and it's nice to see it's like oh there's something different and I enjoy that there are people who make a poster a day on an expression that they like a quote and that's all they do they just keep doing that and it's very interesting to see how that changes over time and I think one of the things that's really wonderful about team that is a lot of people think oh there must be only six ways to tell that story and there are six thousand deep into it that gets you to think wow maybe I've only been blocking myself from all the possibilities and I think that's what is neat about seeing some of these process that helps okay so I think you're doing this wonderful local grid thing and I think you can do more of this and I noticed that it was featured on a couple different sites with really big followers and so that's how you're going to get noticed right so if you create something that's valuable that some other editor curator is saying is valuable they share it with their community you know you're onto something do not ignore that okay whenever I get a spike in followers I try and backtrack like where's that coming from and so then we build relationships with those people and we are doing cross promotion with them and I will try to create more content and this is how I think I try and create more content that the editors of that channel will want to feature more okay we were featured on creative block and design taxi I reached out to and I didn't hear anything back but every once in a while we do something and it hits their radar again and then they feature us and it's a wonderful thing okay yeah so we've hit on the one account that I do have followers on now what about the ones like Twitter for example I just started that account and I don't I don't even bear late for what I don't want to say and then I do need to learn more of how to use it and not definitely not right I mean how to use it as opposed to how to post something on audience right yeah like it's different it's a different way of sharing information the character count but just just getting into it has been really difficult for me okay now I think and correct me if I'm wrong here I asked you to create that account so I can tag you on it and so it's largely dormant and this is a trick this is the trick guys because you need to have different strategies for the different platforms don't get really lazy about this don't take one Instagram post and shove it to Facebook and to Twitter and to jam it out to Pinterest because it's my opinion that you teach people not to follow you in other platforms because it's really repetitive and it seems lazy when I see it I'm like oh my god they're doing the same post so all those kind of automation software that does that for you I used to do that I was thinking this is lame I don't want to follow people that do just put out one piece of content and jam it out to four different channels why would I do that to people who want to follow me so it forces me to continue to think about content and package it differently for each platform okay Twitter has a character limitation of 144 characters I'm not good enough in English to be able to write in 144 character chunks so I had to create a hack and the hacker for me was hey I can type things in Photoshop in keynote and illustrator so I can cheat the whole system by creating a long text block I'll throw out on a brightly colored background and then I will try to give a person a reason as to why they want to share that image so I'm creating a text image and then writing about that text image with text and that sounds crazy but that's what I do okay where do I get ideals from for this well remember how I was talking about having these meaningful conversations with strangers every once in a while a relative in somebody and they're stuck and they're having some kind of creative block and I say something and I say sometimes in an angry tone and then they're like yes I totally get that and I was thinking Bing there's a tweet or my wife will say something funny to me and I'm like honey you know you can't be a warrior you have to be a warrior and then that turns into my tweet and then I create a graphic now the neat thing about Twitter and for all of the graphic designers that are out there use your design training your trade to help you if you're a comedian or if you're a writer like JK Rowling of course you can just use Twitter the way it was meant to be used but put an image in there use your skills and design typography layout if you're an illustrator put in an illustration together and then attach it to tweet I think it's going to be seen like when you're scrubbing through the timeline you can see like all that's interesting so the image draws you in and the text is very important because it allows it to be retweeted and favorited I've done experiments when I've just put in an image in just a few words it tends not to do that well so an image with a quote or saying or something along those lines what I yeah in a full sentence yes so when you talk about posting an image with text you're talking that text is normally a quote that you've said or that you've picked up correct yeah okay well let's be clear that maybe that wasn't super clear what I try to do is I try and think this is what I want to say and then I go into keynote or Adobe Illustrator and I type that in and make it look good and then I export it as an image I save it to my phone then I I treat that image but the image is mostly just text and then I try and write something that's not that exact paraphrase are the same thing okay so the image is almost like my headline it's salacious it's bombastic it's just big and it's confusing it's meant to throw you off like one one tweet I put out there was justify your price which I don't believe in at all and so if people saw that my timeline are whoa what's going on with Chris why do you think justify your price that's against his ethos right and it's true and then I say never justify your price why do you feel compelled to defend what you're worth if somebody isn't see your worth they thank you very much and move on and so that thing gets shared so I found my own way of doing this okay and each and every one of you guys will have to find what works for you what's natural to you and I'm not telling you to be the angry asian guy because you're not you can be whatever it is you want to be and you're in this place where I think you can identify with a lot of people and we're hearing about it from people are commenting on our show they're connecting to your story so just do a better job of telling your story yes tell my story tell your story right alright does it help you yes all right what else and if you want more we can dive deeper into that I think that covered specifically Twitter because that was my biggest thing I don't even know where to start but that does give me a lot you kind of work with I'm gonna give you one more tip for Twitter or Instagram or Facebook find somebody you like in terms of the way that they speak the way that they make imagery and just copy them try to do it like them I don't mean literally copy them like take the same image and retweet it but try to deconstruct their formula and do it just like them and say Utah fatica you so fatica if you use bright colors use bright colors and then over time you'll start to get a feel for it okay yeah all right next okay so next I get afraid of what people are going to say especially when I share my design of the judge or called out that I'm not good enough and so sometimes I don't share especially my work because I want to avoid those comments okay I'm pretty sure a lot of our audience feels this that you don't want to be judged what are people going to say what are the comments that you hear in your head that people are going to say that I shouldn't be posting that because it's not helping the design community okay you're not helping the design cooking yeah okay maybe calling out a specific thing in my design but you messed up on something okay they said they're critiquing it for chicken yeah okay maybe even saying that it looks exactly like something else they've seen out there before oh yeah yeah designers one of their ultimate fears is oh no I designed this awesome thing and then realized that some other company or someone else has already done it and been using it for years so that really one yeah another one or that it no that's it all right has anybody ever said any of these things to you yet no so this is all fear-based indirect critique maybe okay that's fine besides that all right I'm gonna help you guys out I think what you're asking right now is going to hit a lot of people so let's spend a little bit of time doing that one you're not helping the design community is that a factors an opinion well in a different tweet I said you know my mama taught me not to put too much attention to on the opinions of others I really just don't care it's an opinion so let's let's create a column whether it's real or not to put everything that you can think that somebody's going to say into fact or an opinion okay then we'll make another column like let's say now it's a fact let's just assume it's a fact is it helpful or is there not helpful and throw everything that's an opinion and not helpful out what you're going to be left with is a positive constructive critique meaning you mentioned that it was done by this designer is actually done by that designer so that's a fact and that's a critique to help you you're great thank you very much that actually contributes to my body of knowledge I don't look at that as an attack on me that's totally okay so we have to reframe this okay if I'm giving you advice today which I am giving you advice right I'm telling you things that you're doing incorrectly and I'm providing options to do it a different way do you feel like that an attack on you now well how the heck are you going to grow if you don't be if you're not open to that kind of stuff so in the like if we were looking at a hundred comments I would say 78% of them I don't know why I came on 78 it's like mathematically not proven are going to be opinion that pain isn't leather people on geez where they don't care of the remaining 22% how many of those things would be factual critiques that can help you maybe five and then you act upon those I would say thank you thanks for pointing that out you're right we messed up that's not the name of the song we do that all the time okay then there's this last little part which we're going to dive in a little bit deeper which is oh you ripped out XYZ designer and you're a cog whoa you're right oh well there's all these really smart people on the Internet the internet is so freakin smart they're so smart that they're like these walking historians and Wikipedia's right they seem to know everything about anything but they're not busy making anything and not contributing to the conversation at all so let me just change the dialogue a little bit okay here's my belief and I just did a talk on this recently about the concept of being original okay because you don't know where something comes from does not make your work original so you're shocked and horrified that this thing that you thought was a breakthrough was actually a concept that had been circulated and if you dig into a deep enough you will see now it's been recirculated five times so my whole thing is guys let's just be honest with ourselves I think it's super arrogant to think that you're doing original work everything that you're doing is a reflection of all your life experiences now if you grew up in a white room devoid of visual stimulation by yourself you could develop your own language your own art form you can make your own media but realistically that doesn't happen I think it's stupid I think it's asinine I think it's arrogant I think it's foolish to sit there and think this work is original well I don't give a flying F about being original at all and in this space to learn I just want to learn and so I did a little illustration and I'm not even shy about where I stole it from I don't care I just wanted to see if I can draw it how hard is it to draw this thing that's my challenge to myself I don't really care so of course people are like coming oh you ripped off this Argentinian or there's an Indian artist like I don't care okay why don't you go make something you have something better to do with your time to sit there and point things out I accept 100% everything I'm doing is a ripoff of something else now now you're saying they're not internets on fire right now there I go oh my god he just did it again well I didn't let me just say this when you take from one source and you try to take credit that that's an original piece of work that's a forgery to me all right it's like as if you duplicated a stamp that's very valuable and you said that's the original that's problematic but I'm just saying right now you guys on the Internet nothing we do is original all the business concepts and all the design things that I'm talking about today are regurgitated information from what I learned from our professors from school from watching other youtubers from reading a book and that person got it from another person if you backtrack all this stuff a lot of it starts at this person it doesn't really matter we're still thinking about the things that Socrates said or Plato or Buddha and we're sitting around - dating about whether those thoughts are original or not and these are things that are hundreds thousands of years old why are we here you know we're sitting on this table I don't know how this table is made I don't even know and I don't really care and we're borrowing and using ideas technologies process methods from people before us otherwise we would be reinventing everything all the time what progress would we make so all those people out there if it's bringing if it brings you joy to point out to other people that that's not original please continue to do it I'm just going to keep moving on and some people who would say something like that to me they'll get a firebomb back for me a war will be started but that's fine okay so let's just give up on 90th at anything we're going to do is original if you're directly lifting some I just credit that person the key to making this feel a little bit like your own is when your hands touch it and inevitably changes try to bring in more sources so it's like a little bit of Jim Rohn a little bit of casing ice a door it's a little bit of this Oh smash them together it becomes your own thing okay all right yes one question based off of that yeah copyright so sure we can say oh I made it my own and we did and it's you know new but that doesn't always hold up if there was an issue with copyright infringement we talking about social media are you selling this stuff like why we have you been sued before for copywriting for Nana what are we worried about for too many stories they're just stories you know what I heard a story about is that there are a lot of what we would consider accepted beliefs as being true and sometimes these beliefs are totally unfounded okay like for example they were talking about I think was on invisibility and they were talking about the black bear how everybody's afraid of the black bear and there's a lot of bears in Canada and I think they're going to come out they're aggressive stay away from them and this one person started to study like black bears and learn that they're actually really friendly and shy and all these kinds of things and he had workshops where people would put food in their mouths and a black bear would come up and eat out of their mouths and not even scratch them so there's all these beliefs these tales that we tell ourselves about why we shouldn't do something and we're just living in a life of fear let's live in a life of abundance and positivity see what it does okay so in the world if there are a hundred possible solutions and 99 of them are no let's for the one yes stop focusing on the nose because the nose will get you nowhere okay now I don't mean to be telling you to do things that are malicious like deliberately copy something and pretend like it's yours that's a forgery people will call you out on that and then you will be stuck in design purgatory and you might get into some legal trouble as well but that's all I'm talking about here you're in a process of learning you're tracing logos we're not saying that you design those we're not even saying you got permission to do it all we're saying is you deconstructed its logos to help you understand a little bit more about proportion and scale if that helps you great if not don't follow you follow somebody else it's just as simple as that that gives a lot of freedom to me like it's just in posting and sharing my work and going out without fear like everything you just said yeah well I'd just like for you to change one part of that statement sharing my work just share work putting my attaches an idea of ownership and if I say nothing's original I didn't I don't own that idea and you can use it too okay all I want to do is be credited for it that's it so people say kind of translate one of your shows into this other language was it of course please because the only reason why I'm putting this material out there is for it to be shared so please do share it and I really appreciate you asking you in a very courteous manner and saying you'll backlink it and I appreciate that but I just wanted to be shared and I'll end it on this because I did say this the other day but it was to a close group of people if there's a lot of value placed on the ownership like I own this these are material things and I just think you know when settlers came to America and it took the land from the native people who lived here I think it was an idea that was offensive to them that you can own land like who said this land was here before you it'll be here after you and it will be here in when there's no humans left and the idea of owning land was offensive to them but today we buy and sell land we buy and sell water what else are we to do are we gonna buy and sell air - maybe that's already happening I don't know so let's give up this idea of ownership I think what we're doing is we're on this earth for a very short period of time what we need to do is be good custodians and we're borrowing we're borrowing it for a very temporary period of time and the the best way I know how to honor that that privilege is to share it with somebody else and that's it so whether it's an idea a concept of design some raw materials just try and share okay that's it anything else on this one no that's it all right why don't you wrap up the show let's do some action items what do you do differently from here on out so I'm not going to use my personal Instagram for business I'm either going to keep that completely separate and private somewhere else where the public does not see and yeah so keep that separate focus on being intentional sharing still going forward with my marks and makers and just showing the logo studies and keeping with that and going deep into that and explore everything I can within that subject so those are my two big ones and Twitter approaching it finding someone that I can emulate or copy across all platforms but also with Twitter in particular to maybe pull out some quotes that I've either said or that I found and share them and make them shareable through images yeah the number one thing that you guys need to do this is if you're going to put something out there it's not really about you and your life and how beautiful you are it's really about trying to help somebody and the way that you can help them is just to share your process to document your process and your journey throughout your life in your career it could be about something that you learned in a personal like for personal relationship dynamic it could be about how you're able to overcome a client conflict or maybe have a breakthrough moment on a piece of design that you're working on share that process if you make it valuable for someone else chances are they'll see the value in it as well if you make it about yourself and doing a ton of selfies that's really about you and frankly you're just not that hot not you I'm just saying you guys you just not alright that's it thanks for tuning in you guys please if you enjoyed this episode give it a big thumbs up and we'll be reading your comments below thanks for tuning in see you guys next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh [Music]