leaders create the beast
and we waste our impact trying to tame it
I had my first encounter with Mel Robbins recently (which I know as a female millennial entrepreneur, that’s kind of insane) listening to her on this podcast episode (as a child-free woman in her 30s, less surprising) and she said something that caused me to press pause, full-stop in the middle of the sidewalk, sorry to the person behind me! entirely tangled in my tiny dogs’ tandem leash and whipping my phone out of my puffer vest to feverishly jot down what I’d heard:
“Leaders bring the weather.”
READ IT AGAIN FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT.
She was referencing the idea that as the leader of whatever space we’re in (our family, our team, our online community) we’re responsible for the energy in the room.
Stormy, sunny, cloudy-with-a-chance-of-nervous-breakdown, we set the tone for the day.
We bring the weather.
I know this — I talk about it constantly and I teach a social media strategy program centred entirely around it because being a personality on the internet, especially, there is an energetic exchange that we don’t often account for.
(People post whatever comes to mind, because ~authenticity!!!~ but glaze past the fact that every single person watching is absorbing that weather on the other end of their screen.)
As an online business owner, it goes even deeper:
We don’t just influence the daily forecast in our own spaces…
With everything we, the way we sell, and the language we use, we’re dictating the climate of the industry.
We’re creating the beast.
(And then we have the audacity to complain about it.)
I’m exploring this from three angles, below:
+ The rapidly changing tides in terms of what sells, our role in it, and our responsibility to adapt for the sake of the collective
+ The problem with “online leaders” as a monolith in the creative space, forcing folks to feel like they’re doing something wrong when they don’t want it
+ The weird obsession with intellectual property and how we should maybe just chill with that and keep doing cool shit, instead
So, keep reading if you’re curious.
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I. WE MADE OUR BED, NOW WE HAVE TO SELL IN IT
The uprising of the second-era of online entrepreneurship came 3 years post-pandemic, once we’d all stopped looking to the Jenna Kutchers and Amy Porterfields as compasses for scaleability and started looking around, realizing the opportunity we’d been breaking our necks looking up to the pedestal for was sitting right next to us in the comments section, just a few months greener, looking for guidance from someone who had been in their shoes, like, recently.
People with expertise in their direct arena — fellow brand designers who had started offering intensives to bring in more predictable cashflow, photographer friends who had finally started teaching editing skills online — became the ones they wanted to learn from, a mentor still in touch with the landscape they were drowning in.
And so came the rise of peer leadership.
No PR team guiding our campaigns, no book deal bolstering our credibility, pretty much zero passive revenue (and the balls to actually admit that the promise of it is fake).
Kelsey kicked off this movement within the rooms I’m in, followed closely by myself and a handful of others who took her now-signature Launch Your Own Way course in it’s first iteration (can’t recommend it enough, btw).
I went all-in on the online leadership niche, social media strategy but-not-like-that, dedicated to creating offers that abolish the digital overwhelm that holds so many back from showing up at all, and within months I’d stepped into an actually really profitable business that I actually really loved.
We’re all two years into our respective pivots, the done-for-you design agencies that paid the bills but burnt us out now just anecdotes in our copy, and it’s a privilege to report that the above is still true: profitable, and I love it here.
But that’s pretty much the only thing that’s stayed the same.
The landscape of what sells, how it sells, why people buy, who they buy from, is a shifting tide in which we have to either swim alongside or drown in denial, month over month.
And we create that weather.
When we — especially those of us who have expertise within the sales + marketing arena — start teaching a certain method, the industry latches on, putting it into practice, watching it work… until it doesn’t.
The nature of this particular beast is that the audience grows savvy (half of whom took the course that taught the technique, too) and so right when we think we’ve landed in a strategy we can come back to time and again, the shoreline of the greater sales landscape rises, dampening the impact.
I’m not so vain as to believe that the methods we develop dictate a whole economy — the actual economy does pull some strings — but I’m not so naive as to pretend we don’t make our bed to some degree, too.
Personally, I live for this dynamic. Maybe it’s the Canadian in me, but I get a thrill out of the sudden chill in the air that tells me it’s time to innovate, again
Still, there’s immense responsibility in taking the temperature, and I wonder if more leaders need to be warned about that part of the job description. Looking out for when the morning dew turns frosty, predicting where the wind will blow.
Second-era entrepreneurship isn’t as polished and packaged as the one that came before it because we no longer have the privilege of getting too comfortable. The speed within which something takes off online forces us to bring new ideas forward, an adaptability that determines not just the success of our our own businesses but the success of the ones we shape through what we share.
It doesn’t serve us to aim for “evergreen,” anymore.
We need to be ready to shed with the seasons, or none of us will survive.
II. NOISY AND “RIGHT” ARE NOT THE SAME THING
Recently I had someone confess to me that she felt ashamed for wanting to grow her team.
She was overwhelmed with her workload, wanting to expand her capacity for internal projects that are lighting her up, and she actually felt guilty for thinking that outsourcing was the answer…
Because, “we’re not supposed to want that model anymore.”
I wish she was wrong.
I wish it wasn’t true that the far-and-wide energy on the internet around creative agencies is negative.
I wish there were more leaders speaking LOUDLY about how much they love their teams, clients, and service-based work.
I know they’re out there, because I work with them.
I have clients who adore their agencies, lead teams with ease, take pride in their process, wake up stoked to tackle another done-for-you design project and have no plans to change that…
But they’re not the ones bringing the weather.
They’re fucking insanely rad geniuses who I learn from every single day, their business model just isn’t set up for them to be leading en masse. They’d rather be elbows deep in their design work than spend 3 hours a day yapping on the internet.
The loudest voices we hear are the ones who have the time, and desire, to be loud.
Noisy and “right” are not the same thing.
The majority of courses are led by leaders who chose to move away from a done-for-you model because how else would they have time to teach it? The problem is that comes alongside a bias (sometimes on purpose, sometimes perceived) and people start to assume that’s better than the alternative because it’s the only thing they see.
There’s a level of discernment that I’d like to invite BACK into this arena, a reminder that our role is not to project our choices onto our communities but to guide them in making their own.
Yes, my education business is profitable and I fucking love it… But if those are the only criteria our clients care about (which IMHO, it should be) making them believe that they’re not supposed to want what they want just because it’s not what you have? Not gonna help ‘em get there.
I can’t speak for everyone, but my agency failed because I failed it — not the other way around.
III. COPYING IS A CYCLE WE SIGNED UP FOR
What we often miss about “everyone is saying the same thing!” and various other complaints about unoriginality within the creative space is that it started with something that had never been said, or designed, or done before.
It started with a leader.
There’s a lot of whininess around protecting intellectual property, calling out copycats, pressure to trademark everything that comes out of our mouths just in case, that has never sat right with me.
Is that not the cycle we signed up for?
People are SUPPOSED to adopt our ideas. That’s what makes us leaders, in the first place.
We bring the weather so we can give it away.
I’ve created, at this point, hundreds of “proprietary” workshops and modules and presentations and resources and offer names and taglines and I’ve never copyrighted a single one of them.
For a while I wondered if it was bad business, but I think it’s just my nature of being drawn to novelty, trained by a decade of leaving big things behind, trusting that once something is ready to belong to someone else there is no benefit to holding on tighter.
The inherent innovation that lives within every leader is a gift, and when we strangle our first iteration just so no one else can take it, it holds us back from cutting through the noise of “same things” with something new.
If another social media strategist started calling their signature program “Life of the Party” I would roll my eyes for a minute and then accept that it’s time let it go.
Our commitment isn’t to immortalizing our ideas in amber and leaving them on a shelf.
Our commitment is to starting conversations until the rest of the world is chatting away with us, and then, once it sounds too same-y, start another.
I don’t want to be saying the same shit for the rest of my life.
Why spend a few thousand on a lawyer to make it so I have to?
I never quite know how to wrap up these longer pieces and had a thought the other day that I should probably dust off one of my college papers just to jog my memory on proper essay format. According to Google, “the best conclusion will include a synthesis, not just a summary” but that would require me to have also had a thesis which… I’m not sure I did.
The point I’m trying to make, or I guess, the conversation I’m trying to start (see what I did there) is that leadership IS the process of catalyzing change.
The weather is our life’s work.
We waste our energy trying to control it.
The beast is, too.
We waste our impact trying to tame it.
𐄂𐄂
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ICYMI:
Ok loved this. I've been having a lot of these thoughts in my own head and just haven't been sure where I sit, but some of this landed on my heart, and ultimately that IS where I prefer to lead from. Thanks, Xanthe!
"I don’t want to be saying the same shit for the rest of my life." 👈 is this why I'm tempted to burn shit down (again)? Thanks for starting this conversation.