Success is Scaling Back

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve gone very quiet on this blog for the last 3 years. Some of that was the transition into motherhood, starting another business, and just being burned out on social media and cancel culture, if I’m being honest. I had run hard towards building my blog and my brand for the better part of 7 years, and I couldn’t handle the pace I had set for myself. Monthly photoshoots, curating my Instagram feed, tending to my email list, and optimizing my Pinterest strategy were a part of my business, and it’s something that you don’t understand the demand of, unless you’ve done the social media influencer thing as a real job. I needed to step back and focus on what needed me the most, which has been my family and my other businesses. I needed a break from being a personal brand and stepped into just being myself in a really beautiful and hard season.

But there has been another cool lesson that has come from the past few years, and that is the truth that success in this arena, meaning blogging and social media, has looked like scaling back. My season of hustle and constant content creation is long gone, and there is so much freedom in that. I recently decided to start offering business consulting again, and it’s been so much fun to go back to that sphere. I no longer feel guilty turning down inquiries and partnerships that don’t serve my current goals, and I’m able to dedicate my energy to the jobs that produce the highest ROI, both financially and emotionally.

I used to believe that success was always doing more. Growing my following, growing my gross sales, growing the amount of topics I was an “expert” in. While I love the energy that comes alongside learning and doing, my boundaries are much more clear. I love blogging and writing long form posts far more than I love social media. Meeting with aspiring entrepreneurs one-on-one is something I have done for free for a long time because it’s energizing. Broadcasting every detail of your life gets old, but leaning into the things that light you up will always resurface. I’m grateful to have stepped back and dropped so many things from my plate, so that I can see what I want to pick up again.