Learning from your successes
Programming note: I am dealing with some health stuff that will be fine, but is affecting my fatigue levels while I’m going through the tests and everything that comes with it. I’m trying to get ahead on the newsletter while waiting for results to come through, but if I miss a week, I apologise in advance <3
Let’s talk about learning from our successes. I’ve realised that learning why things work for us and why things came together is a really important way to learn our patterns and what support we need to continue to succeed.
We often talk about learning from our failures and facing them, which is absolutely true and correct, however, less attention is given to learning from our successes.
Even during retrospectives back when I was in tech, we celebrated the successes, maybe talked about what was working, but not why or how we could apply these wins to other areas.
It was only when doing my own affirmations and planning that I asked myself what had made changes difficult in the past, and what could I try differently that I started to look at my successes and see what of my habits worked for me, and why.
It’s how I got to my mantra of reducing the first hurdle as much as possible. I’m more likely to do things if the first thing is small and manageable, to build up focus, achievement, and momentum (I just need to find something that works for my accounts 😅).
I’ve seen this in other places. In an upcoming episode of The Mental Workload a guest describes stars aligning, but she also talks about sending emails, networking, being in the room where conversations happen. She did the work, she put herself out there. There is some luck there, of course, but if she hadn’t done that work, those opportunities would never have found her (see my last paid newsletter on Manifestation as planning where I talk about really envisioning your future to make it happen: https://buttondown.com/SelfCareBackpack/archive/manifestation-as-planning/).
If you don’t know what’s working for you (as well as what’s not), you’re going to miss out on ways you can apply the things that work to the things you find difficult.
For example: I find social media posting really difficult, especially when it comes to advertising. So I have a buffer account to help manage this by scheduling things. However, I still find this difficult! I still find actually sitting down and scheduling a bunch of stuff tedious and fake. So, let’s talk about what works:
Sharing newsletters and podcast episodes:
I enjoy making these, and I want to share them, so scheduling these is fun and relatively easy. I know what I want to say, what I want to link to, and have the imagery ready to go.
Other posts I find more difficult. I have to find the idea, make the imagery, write the post, and schedule it. Often I get to write the post part and lose focus as something else takes my attention.
So, let’s break it down:
Make a list of ideas
What have I been doing this week?
What have I seen this week?
What content have I not re-purposed in the last few months?
Reflect on old posts to see what has changed in my thoughts, feelings, life
Have I noted down any ideas since the last time I topped up social media?
New thing to add: review analytics to see what works for people wrt engagement
LinkedIn vs Insta
Make social posts
Reuse ones where I can
New: experiment with video slide shows for reels
Write posts - take from existing posts where possible (maybe I should export linkedin posts for ease of searching?)
Schedule posts
Suddenly I can see why this takes me a while to do! I hadn’t properly sat down and wrote down the breakdown, so I was feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where to start, jumping around instead.
I know breaking things down works for me, and writing things out helps me find things that are blocking me, or can help, so this is a little 2for1 deal.
What works for me creatively: polling for ideas once a month, talking to people, going on walks, so let’s schedule idea sessions for when I’m doing that. Have an easy way to put notes down to turn into more fully fleshed ideas (then remember to actually check them)
What works for me in terms of putting social media imagery together: this is actually pretty easy, I have excellent branding (thanks to Eden MW: https://edenmw.com/), and Adobe Express templates so it’s a case of dropping text in, downloading, then uploading to buffer.
Annoyingly I have to do Insta separately, as I don’t have a facebook account, and you can’t schedule instagram through apps like buffer unless you have a facebook business page, but: I can do that in one batch so it’s a faff but only once a month or so.
Other things that will help here: accountability. I can ask people to check in with me, or say I’ll message them when I’m done, which gives me that push through to get it done.
Tea. I don’t need to add anything here.
This is a small thing, but even in just writing this post I feel more equipped to work on my social media, because I’lve looked at what works for me from other areas in my life, and applied it to social media.
I’ve not covered the general weirdness of selling my services and myself, but this is tackling one hurdle, the hurdle of sharing content.
The next hurdle is selling my services more effectively. Once I have a bit of a rhythm for social media posting in general, I can tackle selling my services more effectively.
Next time you’re reflecting, reflect on success, celebrate it, and see what you can learn about your own working patterns and needs.