On fakes, introverts, and TAKING MY DOG ON STAGE
I had a chat recently on the What If I Fail podcast with Alex Coward, who is one of the longest-standing members of The HoLT and also someone who can talk absolute rubbish with me for hours. This is roughly what came out of it.
We started, as we often do when left unsupervised, talking about the people in the online business world who are brilliant at looking good and terrible at being good. The ones who invest heavily in copywriting and branding and showing up in the right rooms, and then do an absolutely catastrophic job of actually delivering what they promised. You know the ones. They have incredible sales pages and their onboarding makes you feel like the luckiest person alive, and then three weeks later you're in a Facebook group asking if anyone else feels completely ripped off.
What particularly gets me about this category of person is that they capitalise on the fact that most of us with strong values assume everyone else has them too. I spent years at the start of my LinkedIn training business doing exactly that, assuming that if someone said they were going to show up, they'd show up. If they said they were brilliant at something, they probably were. If they put their name to something publicly, it was because they genuinely stood behind it. I was wrong more times than I'd like to admit and the fallout from those wrong calls cost me money, stress, and on one occasion my reputation, when I recommended someone who absolutely did not deserve the recommendation.
I'm not naive about it anymore. These days my litmus test is simple: if you're as good as you say you are, point me at some clients. Not testimonials on your website that link through to blank profiles. Not a screenshot of someone love-bombing you in the first flush of signing up. Actual human beings with active profiles who have worked with you and come out the other side with good things to say, who are willing to put their name to that in a DM or a call. If your clients can't do that, I'm not spending a penny. And if they can, I'll happily go and have the conversation, because the best clients I've ever seen rave about the people they've paid for in a way that no marketing copy could replicate.
The proximity thing, and why I feel it immediately
Alex and I also talked about something slightly more uncomfortable, which is the people who don't want your service, they want your shine. The ones who work out that if they're seen around you, photographed with you, or visibly in your orbit, some of your credibility might rub off on them. It happens a lot when you have a following of any size and most of the time it's identifiable within about thirty seconds.
I've had people invite me to lunch where the only goal was a photo for the internet. I've had people run over at events, lean in for a selfie, post it before they've even put their phone back in their pocket, and vanish without us having exchanged a single actual sentence. I've had people try to get close to me in ways that felt warm on the surface but had a very transactional energy underneath, and that energy is something I feel acutely. I attribute it to being neurodivergent. I'm very sensitive to patterns of behaviour and very sensitive to inauthenticity. When someone's warmth is genuine I feel drawn towards them. When it's not, I take an internal step back and I don't really come forward again.
The annoying thing is that I'm not always right. Sometimes someone grabs a selfie because they were nervous and didn't want to bother me and the photo felt safer than a conversation. I try to hold that possibility too. But the ones where my gut says something is off, I've learned to trust that. Because the times I overrode it to give someone the benefit of the doubt are exactly the times I ended up regretting it.
The introvert on a stage problem
I spoke at a big event last week. Several hundred people in the room. I want to be completely transparent about what that experience was like, because I see a lot of people talk about public speaking as though it gets easier and more natural over time, and I am living proof that this is not universally true.
I was nervous beforehand. I was nervous all the way through. And afterwards I wanted to go and sit in a corner somewhere very quiet and not talk to another human being for approximately a week. I do not bound off stage feeling energised. I feel like I've survived something.
And yet. People came up to me afterwards and said it landed, that it felt real, that something I said connected with them. And that is the only reason I keep doing it. Not because I've conquered the fear, not because it's got easier, but because I've accepted that I can do it scared and it still has the impact. You don't have to be confident for what you're saying to be worth hearing.
What I've also learned is that I need to set the conditions that help me be my best rather than just enduring the conditions someone else has set. So last week I sat on a yellow sofa in the middle of the stage. My dog came up and sat in my lap and gazed at me for the entire talk. There was no podium, no clicker, no walking the stage. I wanted it to feel like we were just having a conversation in someone's living room, because that's when I'm actually good. That's when I'm at my best. The sofa wasn't a gimmick. It was me understanding myself well enough to know what I needed to do this thing properly.
The introvert and the 200,000 followers problem
Alex made a point that I found genuinely useful, which is that what people see of me online isn't a performance of a different version of me. It's an amplification of a facet of me that already exists. The sarcasm, the oversharing, the stream of consciousness threads about jazz hands on my to-do list, the cat stealing food off my plate, all of that is real. I'm not performing an extrovert. I'm just being the version of myself that comes out when I'm comfortable, and then broadcasting it.
The version of me that exists at a networking event full of strangers in suits is a completely different situation. That person is quiet and a bit awkward and wants to find the nearest dog to talk to instead of a human being. Both of them are me. The difference is environment, not character.
What's helped me is understanding that I don't have to be consistently extroverted to do this work. I have to be willing to push against my introversion in specific moments, for specific reasons, and then I get to go home and watch five episodes of something on Netflix under a blanket with my animals and fully recover. The discomfort is real and it doesn't go away, but it has a purpose I believe in, and that makes it worth doing scared.
Retention over acquisition, and why leaving with good things to say matters as much as arriving
We ended up talking about The HoLT, as we often do, and specifically about this idea of obsessing over keeping people rather than just getting them in the door. I think there's a version of running a membership community where you're constantly focused on new members, new numbers, new revenue, and the people already inside become an afterthought. I don't want to do it that way. The members inside The HoLT are my everything. They fund the business, they shape what we build, and they're the ones who tell other people whether it's worth joining.
What I care about is that when someone leaves, even when they leave, they leave saying good things. We do exit surveys and they almost never say anything bad. They say they don't have time to use it right now, or the budget has tightened, or they feel guilty that they're not getting the full value out of it and they want to come back when they can. And I find that as satisfying as a five-star review, because it means we did our job. They felt the quality. They just had life get in the way.
The goal with everything I make has always been to create that feeling of getting more than you expected. The surprise and delight of walking into something and going, oh, I didn't know it was going to be this good. It's the same feeling I get biting into a meal that turns out to be extraordinary when I was expecting something ordinary. There is genuinely no better feeling than that. And if I can create that feeling for the people inside The HoLT, for the people who hear me speak, for anyone who buys anything I've made, then I've done something worth doing.
That's the whole point, really. Not the following. Not the revenue. Not the stage. Just creating things that are genuinely, honestly, better than people were expecting. And then going home to the sofa and the dog and not speaking to anyone for a bit.
Listen to the full episode with Alex Coward on the What If I Fail? Podcast below.
