I did the thing you’re not supposed to do.

I did it.

I did the thing you’re not supposed to do.

I deleted every post in the instagram account that I had been building for 5 years and scrubbed out 700 followers (pause for dramatic effect). 

Here’s what I learned,

1). No one noticed.
People are inherently selfish. Which is fine, that’s how we’re built and trained to think but here I was expecting a flood of DM’s asking me what was going on. I had my speech all prepared AND…… nothing. They didn’t notice. 

2). I can do hard things.

Maybe pushing the delete button on your Instagram account is easy, but for me I was deleting hundreds of hours worth of work and part of who I was, memories I had. Poof. Gone. It was hard, but I did it.

3). I trust myself. 

I built it once, I can do it again. I said I would start over and I did, which helped build trust with myself.

4). I am not my work.
By hitting that delete button I was in all intensive purposes deleting a part of who I was. I was a fashion designer, that was part of my identity. Letting that go was like saying goodbye to a part of myself. I realized that I am more than that and was really able to focus on my true driver - to help women love themselves when they look in the mirror. Which, was always the goal.

5). I opened my mindset to abundance. 

I know this gets a little woo but in yoga and in life, look where you want to go. Which is a fancy yoga way of saying that if you’re walking forward and looking back you fall on your face.

I’m not saying it was a good or bad idea to blow up my life and start a new career just as one was taking off, this will be an ongoing conversation, but I’m happy that I did it. 

The reason I chose not to simply delete my entire account is because of the community of people I’ve built on there. Could I have tried to pull my audience from one page to another? For sure. But why make it harder for them when my goal is the same? I’m changing my offer but they’re looking to me for the same advice.

This is for my social media peeps, if that’s not you, that’s fine but you’re going to find this next section boring.

Here’s what I’m doing to reset my instagram.

1. Check my G*DD^#*D ego at the door. My existing audience is not getting what they expect from me and it may not resonate with them. You will naturally lose followers. 

2. I’m using a 30-60-90 day strategy to rebuild. 

The first 30 days I am THROWING content at Instagram to reset the algorithm, letting it know who I am, what I do and who I’m for. 

The 30 days after that (into the 60 day strategy) I’ll start reducing the posts made on Instagram and introduce a new discovery platform (Pinterest) as well as some more personal content about me as a human.

The 30 days after that (into the 90 days) I’ll be running a course and into a sales strategy, collaborations and lives.

3. My current posts have all been designed as high quality content with saves and sharability in mind. We know that Instagram likes those metrics and it’s a great indicator that I’m on the right track with my client.

4. Using a hashtag strategy that my Ideal client would use as well as alt text for my existing posts. 

5. Setting realistic goal posts and setting checkins with myself every week to analyze what went well and what flopped.