Do I Have to Share My Personal Life in My Content?

Episode 66: Do I Have to Share My Personal Life in My Content?

In this episode, Holly Hibbard - Social Media Consultant & emotional intelligence nerd - shares with you...

• why each content creator must decide for themselves how much of their personal life to share, and this can change as they grow and evolve
• how to tell if your personal experiences equate to professional expertise, warranting posting about it
• if it’s possible to be successful without sharing every detail of one's personal life

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WORK WITH HOLLY IN NOVEMBER, 2024 //

• Ready to launch your social media brand quickly and finish your 2024 with elevated impact? Hire Holly as your social media strategist and coach! Book a quick call with me here: https://tidycal.com/thehollyhibbard/quick

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Transcript

Hey, everyone.
Welcome back to The Holly Hibbard Show.
I am your host, Holly.
I appreciate you so much being here today, and I felt inspired just a little bit ago to record an episode answering the question of how public do I need to be with my life as a content creator.
And for those of you who have been following me on social or through email or as a friend or family or acquaintance for many years now, I have been semi open about certain things that happen in my life and other things that happen in my life I've been more reserved about.
And I was thinking today, wow, what advice would I give to a person that I'm doing social media consultancy for in regards to how public or private you should be with your life when it has to do with your content?
And this is inspired by just a general thinking back on how many different seasons of my life I have been through while simultaneously shifting my role as an entrepreneur while, shifting around the type of audience that I'm speaking to, the types of clients that I'm working on, and then life in general just happening.
Because when I went into content creation, as I've said in previous episodes, it was completely by accident.
And I didn't go into it thinking I was going to generate such a large following and have this be something that I did on a consistent basis.
I really thought that going live on a social media platform once a week or a couple times a month would be completely fine.
But, of course, as social media's ability to put different types of content out there has shifted from just live streams or just long videos or just photographs.
And now we have access to things like carousels, and we have access to short form video and reels and, you know, Twitch streaming.
And people are participating in social media in a variety of different ways.
Of course, the way that I've liked to create content and put content out there has evolved also.
But from day 1, I didn't anticipate that I would learn all these different ways to do it.
Another thing I I wanna point out is, if I were starting today and I thought to myself, okay.
I'm a coach.
I'm a consultant.
I'm a service provider, and I want to have a presence on social media.
One where I am more forward facing.
I wanna be the face of my brand or I want to use my voice as a voice over or I wanna be the one writing my posts, my question to myself would be, alright.
I'm gonna share about my public, like, my professional side about my clients, about who I help, about tips that I give, advice that I give.
But do I have to talk about my private life?
Do I have to share about my home?
Do I have to show pictures of my family?
Do I have to do mini vlogs while I'm at the grocery store?
And the reason I would even be thinking about that is because if you are a consumer of short form or long form content on social media, then you probably know by now that a big portion of what a lot of people share, particularly on Instagram, is the ins and outs of their everyday life.
And it's entertaining to watch.
I watch a lot of that stuff.
I think it's really interesting to I like watching people's vlogs and see what they do in their day to day, whether it's personally or professionally.
But does that mean that I have to do the same thing in order to be successful in my own social media content creation?
Now going back to my beginning, I was specifically coaching in relationships and in leadership, when I first got started with coaching.
And it just depended on the client and what I was doing at that time.
But I think it's safe to say that the first 10 years of coaching, I specifically focused on relationships and then what I did with leadership training and goal setting.
And relationship coaching was intimidating for me for a while, especially going public on social media, looking for, like, looking for clients or announcing I was going to take clients because I was single.
Like, I was very, very single.
I had been through a divorce many years ago.
I was in my mid thirties at the time or early thirties.
And all I could fixate on was, oh, yeah.
Like, people are gonna take relationship advice from somebody who's divorced and still single and hasn't implemented this into her own life just yet.
And that was very difficult to overcome.
And I would put the challenge on myself to put content out there.
And when I would make content about leadership things and personal responsibility and setting goals, that was easier for me than it was for the time that I decided to start making content about relationships.
Because I felt like the people who knew I was single and making content about relationships, we're gonna have something to say about it.
Or we're going to outright say to me, well, then I'm not hiring you because you don't have what I want.
And I get that, and that's okay.
When peep when you're hiring a coach, it's great if the person has what you want to have and they can work you through that.
But that doesn't always qualify the person as the best person to coach you or to consult you in what it is that you want.
So there's other factors, you know.
Do you see eye to eye with this person?
Do you share similar values?
Do you communicate similarly?
Because those are other relationship factors that a good coaching client match need to have in the first place.
But anyhow, I noticed way back when that I was more fixated on not the question of do I share my private life or my personal life because I wanna keep it private, but more so because I felt that people were going to say, oh, you're single and you're coaching relationships?
Well, now you're a fraud.
You can't possibly know what you're talking about.
So I really had to train my brain to move through that and say, I am qualified and remind myself of why I was qualified and reminding myself that relationships are not just the romantic kind.
In fact, a lot of my relationship coaching practices and knowledge over the years came from the fact that I remedied so many personal friendships, remedied relationships with my close family members.
I served as a mediator with people that I knew who had fallout.
I had a way of seeing different dynamics amongst people.
In fact, I think I even talked about that in one of my episodes where I was talking about being a high school teacher and that I wasn't there to teach them science, the mostly.
I mean, I did.
But what I loved the most was seeing how they interacted with one another.
I have a knack for noticing how people in general interact with one another, which is relationship.
But people saw that as, well, you say relationship coach, so you must be a dating coach.
Or you must only focus on romantic.
Or you must only, like, mediate with, couples or folks who are really upset with one another.
And that that's just not the case.
Relationship is also your your own relationship with yourself, how you see yourself, how you perceive yourself.
So all that to say that today, you may think of it as, do I share my personal life or not?
Because I wanna protect it.
And if you don't have that inkling, maybe it's more like what I was going through at the time.
Are you not wanting to put yourself out there with your content or your ideas because you don't think people will think that you know what you're, what you're talking about or your life doesn't match what you teach.
The other thing that just came up recently is, someone had mentioned me on, it's like a it's a podcast of sorts, a video podcast of sorts.
And these 4 women were chatting, and my name came up about a piece of content that I had created.
And one of them said, you know, she gives advice about content creation.
And and then someone said, yeah.
And she's a coach.
And another person said, yes.
And she's a life coach.
And, yeah, it just made me laugh because I'm all those things.
I am all of those things.
I'm a professional coach, and I talk about content creation.
And at first, I heard them say all that, and I thought, gosh.
I sound muddy.
Like, if they can't even say in a sentence what I'm doing, does that mean that I'm muddy?
Does that mean that my knowledge is too all over the place?
But then again, I have to remind myself that not everybody sits on social media and has a clear picture all the time, and that's okay.
And that's also part of pivoting who it is that you work with, pivoting your messaging.
I've had seasons of my life where my values have shifted tremendously, and I lost a lot of followers when I started talking about my walk with Christ.
And that was very difficult to to talk about because I knew that was a risk because not all of my followers or clients are, Christian.
It's so tough, like, really tough.
I also know there's been seasons of my life where things have been very stressful.
And here I am trying to teach people about emotional intelligence.
And in the background, I'm coping with some of the most high stress situations of my life.
So I'm highlighting these examples so that, I guess, out out loud, I'm sharing this with you so that you can know that you personally, you're going to evolve, not just in your business, not just in your client base, not not you're just gonna evolve as a person.
And, sure, there might be a season where you do wanna be more public with your personal life.
You might wanna vlog something and show yourself in the grocery store or and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that if you feel good about that.
And there might be seasons where it's gonna take everything you have to get a piece of content out there about your core topic, let alone to put something out there about your personal life.
Because there's gonna be seasons where you absolutely don't wanna put anything out there about your personal life.
No photos and for a variety of reasons.
Everything from insecurities about appearance to you are actively grieving a loss, going through a breakup, going through a divorce, job issues, arguments in your household, kid trouble.
There's so many reasons you're gonna wanna step back.
So if the ultimate question is, do I put my personal life out with my content or not?
The choice is really up to you and also understand that like every season of your life is going to change.
Your you can change your mind also.
You can have some moments where you highlight and feature or send to your email list an email about something cool that happened over the weekend with your family and your kids, but maybe that means that you don't have photos of your kids or video of your kids in your content.
Some people are going to put everything out there because they enjoy it.
They enjoy that type of content, but there's no right or wrong answer.
This is really one where you can go with the the feeling of it, I guess.
Do you feel like putting your personal life out there?
And sometimes, like those moments I I talked about where I felt incongruent, where here I am a relationship coach at the time and not in a romantic relationship yet at the time, I had to face that and I had to make the choice.
And that was a block that I had that when I finally did start putting content out there about relationships as a single person, it was very empowering.
It was very empowering.
And it made my abilities to hone my message and be consistent with it that much better.
But if I had just sat back and said, you know, I'm insecure and I don't wanna do it, then I can sit and stew in that for a while too.
There's no right or wrong answer.
So there's a lot of reasons why people may think that they have to put their entire personal life out there in order for their coaching or their consulting or their service to do really well, and that's just simply not the case.
People are going to be interested in you and bar none at the end of the day, they really wanna know what's in it for them.
So if your content, you don't feel compelled to share you personally, share about what's in it for them by working with you.
Share your content about what they're going to receive as a result of hiring you and working with you.
And to insert yourself into it, add to that what makes you unique in what you do.
So for example, I said on a previous episode, as a content creator, there's a lot of people who do content creation strategy a lot.
And I'm certainly not the best of the best of the best of the best in the world.
Okay?
However, what I do have that's very unique is my experience as a relationship coach, my experience as a coach in general, and my ability to read people and audiences really well because of my emotional intelligence practices and the fact that I've been teaching communication and emotional intelligence for many years now in different formats.
And so that means that when I'm creating a strategy, I'm not only thinking about the audience, I'm also thinking about what the creator can handle, what the content creator can handle, what they're gonna be able to do that's gonna feel doable, that's going to feel easy.
I'm not going to say that everything is a one size fits all approach and that it's only about the strategy.
The strategy is important, but the people we're talking to are important and the person making the content is important.
And so that's something that I can share about in my content.
And sometimes I'll use examples from my personal life when I'm teaching this stuff, and that's okay.
And sometimes I'm gonna post a lot of stuff to my stories because we have a cool family weekend or whatever.
But you don't always have to just because other people do.
There are plenty of people out there who only make content about their services, about their clients, who educate their audience, and they do super well and live a very private life and have a great business as well.
So I hope this answered any questions or concerns or doubts or thoughts that you may have been having about, how do I put content out there, but then still, like, not totally put my whole life out there?
Because I feel like that's all I have to do.
It's not the case.
I get where it can seem like that and it's not.
You have just enough to share with just the right people so that you can grow your audience and attract clients and do it in a way that frees up your time for what you want to do more.
And, just keep working it out.
Just keep trying, trying new things.
If you need some social media content ideas, in the show notes below, I have a free download for you.
It is 30 done for you social media content ideas.
So I give you a question.
It's plug and play.
Answer the question in writing or answer the question in a video.
I even have a search engine optimized title for the piece of content ready to go for you.
So you don't even have to write the title for the video or the blog or the the post.
It's all there.
You just need to plug and play, put your words in, put your face to it if you want to, tag on a photo and hit post, and there you go.
And I covered you for at least a month.
It says 30 days, and it really is 30, but you can absolutely squeeze more out of it.
So I hope that's supportive to you.
The link to that, again, is below in the show notes, And that's all I have for you today.
So thank you so much for listening.
I love you.
I mean it.
And until next time, I'll talk to you next time.