Don't Tell Everyone What You're Doing: Here's Why

Brand Strategy

Dec 13

*Disclosure: I only recommend products I would use myself and all opinions expressed here are our own. This post may contain affiliate links that at no additional cost to you, I may earn a small commission.

Learn to pause before you speak and let me tell you it is not easy..

As someone who’s natural instinct is to interrupt, it almost feels like I’m doing something wrong when I’m not sharing all my secrets with people. But here’s the thing, the second I stopped telling people what I was planning on doing, what I would love to do, what I wanted in life, how I felt my should be going - was when I started catching myself doing what I was planning, doing what I loved, getting what I wanted in life, and overall feeling better about where my life was.

How to Get the Results You Want In Business

The simple answer is to STOP sharing what you PLAN on doing, until it’s already in action, or it’s built into your marketing plan. Why though - why will you see results when you stop telling people prematurely? Basically, when the idea is still in the idea phase, talking to people about it can create the opposite affect you’re looking for. Here’s why:

Tone Shifting:
I started realizing that when I talked about what I wanted with people who knew nothing about my business or the topic at hand - my tone of voice would change because I’d either be annoyed I had to explain or re-explain it and it wasn’t an instant “Fuck Ya!” or I’d find myself defending why I wanted it.
People are inherently selfish:
Whether this is a taught behavior or their human design - people think you want their opinion, not their support. So be careful of who’s opinion you’re opening up to.
Different energetic levels:
Humans are energy, so regardless of if you believe in raising your frequency or manifesting what you want, sharing your ideas and your positive thoughts with people who don’t match your energy is leaving your idea or though vulnerable to their energy. So if someone is jealous of you, or constantly makes you feel negatively energetically different after you’re together, most likely they are doing the same thing to your ideas and thoughts.

In the book Big Magic, they talk about ideas being living entities and how when an idea comes to you, it’s because it believes you can help them exist or stay alive. So when you tarnish that idea, the likelihood of you following through with it will significantly decrease. Eventually that idea will detach itself from you and find someone else who’s willing and able to follow through.
The pressure:
Have you ever noticed that when you tell someone that you like something, they constantly talk to you or buy you something around that topic? Have you ever felt that way when you told someone what you wanted to do? For instance if you tell someone you want to start painting, people in you lives might start asking you “how’s painting going?” or “paint anything new lately” every time they see you. This can feel like pressure to paint, and we all know pressure for a creative is only good when it’s a deadline or a weighted blanket.

If you’re new here than you may not know this but a few years ago I was diagnosed with ADHD and my hyper fixations growing up were intense. I would passionately talk about a new thing as if I was going to do it forever, and my family would start buying gifts based off those fixations, even if it wasn’t my birthday or Christmas. Which was great, until the hyper fixation ended and I was still getting gifts around those topics. I would feel so guilt or pressure to keep it going, and then never follow through. The same goes with telling someone my ideas.
Idea theft:
We have to talk about it, because sadly it’s real and still happens today. The more I talk about my ideas to people the more I noticed they would start it before I could. This always left me feeling shitty and even though it was my original idea, I felt like I couldn’t follow through with it now that it was “already done”. Which honestly makes no sense at all because as Mark Twain once said “there is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

This is why I stopped oversharing what I was hoping to happen in my life and waited to share what happened in my life.

For example outside of business, “I want to go on a vacation” started sounding like “ugh I really want to go on a vacation” which made this amazing vacation I wanted to go on sound like a burden, an annoyance, something that was never going to happen. Especially when I would share it with people who didn’t value spending money on a vacation, or would get jealous I was even thinking of going on a vacation. Which would prolong me ever going.

Now I actively wait, I pause before I speak and ask myself, is there anyway sharing this will alter the outcome? And if the answer is even slightly yes, I continue to wait.

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