Social media strife, self worth, and finding the right pronoun: Or, how I went from being the "hot wife" to THE HOT SPOT
/It’s difficult to market your business if you don’t feel good about who you are as a person.
My marketing strategy when I first started my business 2 years ago came from the mindset of not wanting to bother people with what i’m doing and most certainly not to shove it down their throats. It was a steady, few times a week post that almost always went unnoticed. I convinced myself that I was still growing and the numbers will pick up once I really get rolling.
What I hadn’t realized was even though I was doing this incredible thing that should beckon me out of my shell, I felt completely worthless. And it projected into how I treated my business.
I grew up harnessing a lot of talents and a mother who nourished them all. Throughout my childhood I’ve learned that if you have great skills, people will either hate you for it or exploit you for it. I kept a lot of that good stuff to myself…and to good friends who I thought cared. I was constantly snagged up for any creative project. Not because I was cool, but because I could draw. Don’t get me wrong, I loved any chance to be artistic…but I also saw past a lot of the facade. There was also the nursing I felt I had to do when people compared their work to mine. Even at that age I knew everyone had the potential to be creative in their own way. Geeze, if only they had more confidence.
Yes. That was a hypocritical slam.
I’d also encounter the darker, more jealous side of having skills from flat out theft of my art supplies to more snide comments of how artists don’t make money and i’ll be poor. A hard burn for anyone growing up in a predominantly white, middle to upper class environment.
So, what I turned myself into was a kid with a lot of great and worthy skills but downplayed it all to blend in. Honestly, it’s not an unusual story. I feel a lot of kids go through this.
Enter my 20’s. Still full of self-esteem but lacking confidence. It took me a while to admit to myself that I was an artist and could be happy as an artist. But I got there and have a degree in the wonderful field of Art & Design with an emphasis in Metalsmithing.
As I roll into my 30’s my self worth plummets and any shred of confidence I had was leeched out in a male dominated job I felt trapped in. Having a narcissist for a boss was also incredibly draining. There was a lot of punishment/reward going on. It was sick and fucked up and having an unsupportive husband that dealt with these issues so apathetically also drove me to feelings of absolute worthlessness. If that wasn’t bad enough, having a handful of men in positions of power acknowledge and admit to what my boss was doing was wrong. But nothing was ever done. That was the final blow to self worth. I knew I had to get out.
And I did.
As I weave back into self marketing and self worth, they go hand in hand. It was one thing to know what I was doing was pretty awesome, and another thing to actually project that into the world. Putting a post on social media a couple times a week wasn’t going to do shit. Casually putting postcards in businesses wasn’t going to do shit either.
Not only did I have to change my approach, I also had to change my vocabulary. There are a plethora of articles out there that all say the same thing. Our emotions are connected to the words we speak and when I was internally beating myself up while trying to market myself, I came across as apathetic, timid, and insecure.
It was a slow process of completely unraveling the knots that had bound me up so tightly for the past 30+ years. I’ve had 2 therapists. One to help me get through getting out of Founders and another one later on down the road to deal with depression. Both helped get me through really rough patches with helping me find some kind of internal light. One helped me identify physical traits of emotions and the other helped with vocalizing them.
It was also the complete restructuring of my life. I dropped a lot of those friendships. Not because they still are friends with my ex-husband, but because all I ever was to them was a Tour de Force to help with home renovation: ripping up piss stained carpet, scraping up tile, painting, and the list goes on. I was a personal chef. The HOT wife. Entertainment to be exploited. Something to be coveted. I was supposed to heal wounds and make sure I could keep everything the same forever and ever. The good ol’ days.
The friends I associate with now have completely opened my eyes to how relationships should be. They speak to me in ways I should be speaking to myself: with grace, love, and enthusiasm. It’s an environment that says we ALL have talents and we all work to build each other up in the way that works for the individual. There is no tearing someone down for wanting to follow dreams. No one is made to feel guilty for being poor. We don’t brag about what we have or be cynical about the things we don’t have.
This environment of empathy instead of apathy changed my attitude and how I thought of myself. I was able to see their success as something to follow and learn from. They beautifully homogenized who they are into their business. Their business is them…not what they do. People sought them out because of their personality, not because they have a camera, a gym, or know how to plan a totally bitchin’ retreat.
I need to sell who I am.
First off…I allowed myself to be excited about what I was doing, even if I was completely exhausted and unsure of everything business related. This allowed me to get my words out and be EXPRESSIVE of all the cool shit at the studio.
Next, I realized that social media has a strange algorithm but it’s not obscene to have a few posts A DAY. Every single day. I granted myself permission to bombard people with my awesomeness even if it was just reminding people of our open studio hours. Because a public space with access to tools is pretty incredible.
I also realized that I HAVE to be the face of this studio whether I want to or not. 2 years ago I was constantly asking other people to come with me for a TV appearance, be on a magazine, or tag along for a radio session. It was that uncomfortable for me. But I realized it was incredibly confusing for other people to figure out what The Hot Spot is all about if they kept associating it with other people. Focusing inward I asked myself what I really wanted to see in Grand Rapids and how my studio could help.
I wanted more women to get into welding.
I want to be done with safe jewelry. Nothing wrong with stacking rings, but I want color and I want strange.
I want to be a place where I don’t have to wave the pride flag to let people know i’m cool. I want to project that into every facet I can manage.
So, I am getting a little personal with my business and how i’m connected to it. Since quitting my full time job in July I’ve also had the space to become more of my studio. Talking about it isn’t a chore but an energy I can generate to tap into later. Sitting down every other week to create content allows me to analyze not only what i’m feeling about the studio but the needs of both of us.
It’s odd to think of a business as an us, we, our, but I like to think of it as a pronoun for those who are so entwined in what we do that generating a paycheck just happens to be a bonus. It’s going beyond the me, I, he, she, they, and into an entity that becomes the our. An act of giving ourselves so fully to what we do for others.
This is a much longer post than what I usually do and loaded in more self reflective nutrition that what you bargained for on a Thursday morning. But to summarize a tidbit of digestible wisdom:
Our words we speak reflect who we are and when we change our environment of who we surround ourselves with, our outlook on life changes; and sometimes we become so much more than we ever could have imagined that our pronouns start to change to reflect the us, we, and our of our own creation that impacts the community around us.
