Your content looks polished… but something about it still feels off. Flat. Disconnected. Maybe even a little lifeless. You’ve followed the rules. Taken the courses. Done the checklist. But when you post, something’s missing.
Pullin’ back the curtain here on a very real moment I had while listening to my podcast the other week, and realizing I had over-edited it so much, it didn’t even feel like me anymore. And what that might look like for you, too.
We talk about:
🪄 The myth that your value is in your deliverables (vibe = value!)
😌 Why simplicity and imperfection actually connect deeper than polish
🎬 Overediting, oversharing, and the fear of not being “enough”
🤍 Why people love the journey, not the perfection
🦋 How being vulnerable online can lead to deeper, more aligned clients
🦢 Subscribe for more cozy, truthful conversations about branding, content creation, and building a business that feels like you. And hey, if you’re ready to build a content and brand kit for you to fall back in love with the work you do, book a 15-minute fit call! I can’t wait to meet you, friend.
So your content looks good on paper. You have taken the courses, you have learned what you need to do to make it shine, to do all the right things, but for some reason it feels flat. When you post it, you look back on it and something just doesn't feel right. And this is a very common thing. This is something I was actually dealing with yesterday.
I was, I was listening to. The podcast I released last week, I was listening to it in the car and just thinking, man, something about this just doesn't feel right. I realized I was overly editing so much of it because I thought I needed to have a fast pace and people would get bored and people wouldn't wanna hear me breathe or think or pause.
And as a listener, I realized that isn't what I wanted at all. And it really made me want to make this podcast all about why social media and content creation can feel flat for you and what to do to help reignite its magic so you can love creating. I'm Kira Violet, welcome back to the podcast. Feel free to hit subscribe wherever you are listening, whether that's on YouTube.
Substack, Spotify, apple Podcasts. Happy to see you around and would love to. Put some little fairy dust in your feed all about content creation, the magic of branding and truly romanticizing your business and your life. Welcome.
I was being a listener of my podcast and I was just like, I don't like this.
I don't like how many edits I'm putting in this podcast. I use some, some. Automated AI tools to help cut the pauses and to cut the filler words. And I thought that that was making it so much better. I was saving myself so much time, 'cause then I would have to go through and edit all of those. But what I realized was I wanted to hear myself think and pause and reflect and make mistakes.
And it was. Such a bummer to me that I released so many that I overly edited, but I said, this is exactly what I need to be talking about because so many women I talk with think this way. They have the shoulds on what they should be doing on social media, not just that they should be posting on social media.
That's what I hear a lot like, I know I should be on Instagram. I know I should. Have a newsletter. I know I should have this, but I hate it. But then when they actually create the content, it has to be packed with all this information. That was one of the first things I learned when I started doing design was that the really good designers know when to just hold back, when to restrain.
And the same goes for any sort of artist or musician. I'm working on a song right now and. We're both static. My partner and I are both like, this is done. There's not much else we need to add to it. We could sit around for six months and think it could have this instrument. It could have this instrument.
But as a business owner, you know that there's only so many things that you can do, and the beauty comes when you decide this is a service I wanna offer. And I'm gonna make this really good and I'm not going to overexplain what it is. Now, I know this sounds very high level in Ethereal because it is, and it could be seen on multiple levels.
It could be seen in the social media realm, it could be seen as a service provider where you feel like you need to offer so many different deliverables. Because I wanna prove that these people have paid me money and I'm going to show them that it was worth it. When in reality the biggest value I've gotten is when people have given me the most simple right version of something.
So I can see it for all of the magic that it is without all of over explaining and putting in all these extra bonuses and cutting all these things, like in my podcast and adding all this extra text on a graphic, like on social media. The magic comes from the simplicity. Social media feels flat for you for a lot of reasons.
Content creation as a whole or even your brand when you go on your website and you say something isn't right, but I just can't tell what it is. Or if you've DIYed your, your branding, your logo, your symbols, and you know it isn't on, but you just don't quite know how to get it to that place. Let's talk about it.
So the first thing that you're likely thinking is that you need to constantly edit yourself. And this is exactly what I was thinking yesterday and throughout so much of my content creation journey. I have to edit so much of what I do, even when I write blog posts or newsletters. I can't just have it one and done.
That's too easy, right? That's not fair. That's too easy. We've learned that we have. There's so many courses that we can take to learn how to properly edit something that we feel like if we are not following that, then we are lazy. But the truth is people love the journey. People love seeing the journey, whether it's the journey from you starting your YouTube channel, and it's messy and awful.
Awful. And I'm saying that in quotes for anyone listening. They can see it three years now and three years later, and it's like completely different and you've grown so much. People love seeing that journey. I call it the Chapel Rone Effect because if you know Chapel Rone, you know that five years ago, five years from recording this, she was just another.
Musician trying to find her sound, trying to put herself out there. And if you find her old music videos and her old songs and her old performances, she's nothing like she was now because she was still trying to find her brand. And now, now obviously she has. A insanely cool brand where she does something totally different.
Every time she performs or goes on a red carpet, she leans mostly into a drag, kind of get up. But she's a young girl and so that's really cool and interesting. But I can't tell you how many comments I see on her old. Videos and songs when before she found this kind of like eighties Madonna vibe of her music, where people were like, wow, look at how different she was.
I'm so happy to see this version of her and see how much she's grown. People love it. People love it. I also found in the context of content creation. As a, as a service-based business owner myself, I realized that the more I started posting about my own journey and my process and my struggles, the more deep connections I had.
So for you, finding the vulnerability of sharing how you're feeling and what your process is with an audience is the first step to feeling a lot more truthful and excited about content creation. So, for example, I am, I'm sharing this right now. I'm, I'm releasing a podcast episode about how I don't like how I've been editing my podcasts.
I'm being very open and honest right now. I also share a lot. I started seeing a lot of growth and movement on. Just like the engagement of my Instagram when I started posting on stories and telling people what my goals were for the day, and then if those got knocked off, I'd be like, whoa, this got knocked off.
Here's how I feel about it. Really digging into that truth. People love it, people. Love it. I also started releasing more vlogs of me being in the process of something and my initial thought is, well, I haven't mastered this, so I don't wanna share it. But again, I keep going back to people love the journey, people love the journey.
They love seeing me realize this is harder than I thought, or, wow, I need to spend more time doing this. That's the fascinating part. So in your business, what are parts of the work that you do that you're still figuring it out? Likely it's the things that you're most afraid of posting about because you're thinking to yourself, well, it's unfinished.
Well, it's not fully. Realized yet the thought isn't fully formed. That is when it's the best time to create and post something that, because people love to see the thought process. They love to see how you've been pondering over something. And I have given myself this challenge, and maybe you can give this to yourself too, because I've been posting.
Podcasts and I edit so much of it and I'm looking back on it and saying, I really don't like that. I told myself, Kira, you can edit 10 things in this podcast. Other than that. You'll release it. And that's given me a lot of freedom because I'm not saying I'm not allowed to edit anything, but I'm giving myself a cap.
So if giving yourself a cap is helpful, that's also something you can do as you absorb this idea of, people love the journey, people love my journey, people wanna know what my experience is. The scariest things that I don't wanna share with people are actually the things that people are going to eat up and love.
So when it comes to your content creation, I want you to think about what those things are when you think about what would be like the scariest thing to post. And it doesn't have to be like something in your personal life, like something that you wouldn't wanna, but something about your work that you are like, oh, I don't wanna post that.
Because maybe there's something about that that others would really find resonant. And then. You start becoming more visible to them, and then whenever they think about the work you do, they'll think about you because they'll think about that really truthful time that you were talking about it. They'll remember how you made them feel, not what you said.
We all know that people remember the way you made them feel, not necessarily what they said people feel when you're feeling something deeply. When you're being truthful. That's the most impression. That you're going to give them. That's the biggest impression you're gonna give someone else is when you are being truthful.
So we can say, we can post Instagram posts about 10 tips on how to hire a business coach, but if that's not something that's really. Deep for you, then it's probably not gonna be deep for others. It's not going to help them find their truth. And the dream for all of us, I think, is to have clients that are really open and excited to work with you and willing to share their deep truths with you.
The work you are doing is vulnerable. It requires a deep connection, and if we're not leading by example, then they're not going to know that they have permission to do that in your space. In your world. Second thing you might be thinking is your value is in what you are producing. I think about this all the time.
It goes back to that concept of feeling like, well, someone paid for something, so I need to deliver the deliverables and the checklist and bullet point list of all the things they paid for so they know how valuable it was. But what people are really paying for is your personality and your vibe as the product.
That's the product. And I know me saying this once isn't going to totally shift your perspective on it. It's going to take many times for people to say this. It's going to take action on your end for you to really be able to absorb this concept. But as I have been told this by coaches. In the programs I'm in and witnessing it from creators I love, it's been able to absorb more and more.
So maybe this is the first time you're hearing this, maybe this is just something else to further emphasize that point. I think of it like a therapist. Obviously we're going to a therapist because they're trained and they know what to say in certain scenarios. Probably more than half of the time when you're in therapy, they are giving you space to speak.
You are speaking and their vibe and their personality is what is going to determine whether you are going to feel open enough to share what you wanna share about. The same thing goes for whatever service you are offering. I'm not saying we're therapists. I'm saying we're all service providers and our ability to listen and just be a vibe in who we are is going to be so much of what that monetary exchange is.
I'm saying this out loud, knowing I'm still fully learning that I'm not saying this as someone who's standing on top of a hill saying. Hey, here's where I am and I know that you're down here. I'm down there with you, or up wherever we wanna be. I'm in there with you because I feel this every day. I feel like I have to overdeliver products.
The fact that we really feel like we have, you know, we've mo, we have to monetize what we. What we put out. It's like a product like we have paid, someone's paid for something bread and we have to give them that. But when it comes to a service, it's hard for us to realize that our presence and our experience and our energy and vibe is like half of that.
Just our ability to communicate and be a container. Is half of that, and I can say confidently, maybe you can too, that you've paid service providers because of their vibe, because of the energy they brought, not because their deliverables were not much different than what the next person had, but because you got on a call with them and you said, oh my gosh, something about this person.
I feel it. I feel it. It's a combination. I think about two. I have a, uh, a vlogger who I love. Her name's Exo McKenna. And I was talking to my friend Kat about her because I just love, I love her vlog so much. She doesn't do overly edited vlogs. She works on home projects, but she also shares so much of her life going to classes and taking care of her baby now and.
But she's always working on different projects, but she shares so much of her life as well. And I was trying, I was talking to my friend Kat. I'm like, I need to know, like she gets so many views on her videos. She gets like dream comments from people who say they look forward to these videos every week.
They. Get so overwhelmed by long, by short form reels and tiktoks and everything that they love her long form, slow, relaxed, friendly videos. And I'm like, what is she doing? What is she doing? And Kat said, well, is she a nice person? I said, oh my gosh, she seems like the sweetest person ever. And she goes, there it is.
And I was like, yeah, it's because the energy she brings. She could just set up the camera. And I've seen vlogs where she set up the camera, maybe there's three different locations she goes to. She's talking in her kitchen to the camera for half of the video. But I love it because she's such a vibrant.
Source of life and the sheer fact that she's just standing on the other side of this camera and I'm there is enough for me to be engaged. And that's a really hard concept for me to get my brain around. And maybe you as well, to be like, just the fact that I'm showing up is so much of the battle. That's really weird because we were taught that we need to really overdeliver.
We need to prove ourselves, especially if you've come from a corporate environment, you need to show KPIs and how much improvement you've made in all of the things that you've done outside of your work so you can get the raise, so you can get the promotion so you can prove to someone else, Hey, look, I've done so much work now I deserve the raise in reality.
Our energy is so much of what we bring as service providers. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about the fact that your personality and your vibe is so much of the product, so much more that we don't have to feel like we need to overexplain deliverables because we personality is going to be so much of the reason why people sign on.
By the way, if you're driving with this, feel free to hit subscribe. I would love to see you around. I release new content every week, and I want you to be able to romanticize your business and your life. That's what I'm doing as designer and artist, and I know it's what you are doing as a business owner, as someone who wants more time to love their lives and love their business.
So feel free to hit subscribe. I'd love to see you around. The third thing you might be thinking is, I need to fit into a niche so people know what I do. Going back to like, well, I can't post vlogs because vlogs are lifestyle and lifestyle, that there's no niche to that. And I say this a lot and I'll say it again, that you are the niche.
You are the niche. You are the niche. You are the genre, you are the brand, you are the vibe, whatever you need to think. Whatever words help you are the niche. And what you're doing is you are just carving out what is not needed in a certain element. So on your website. Your website is you, maybe you're not talking about your love for hockey or cats.
You're just carving out the things that aren't necessarily relevant on that part of the website. But what's uncovered is you. I think about this, like when it comes to, again, starting my vlog channel. I, I have two YouTube channels. I have this right here, and then I have Violet Gaze, which I started for performing in visual artists for fellow performing in visual artists.
And I always had such a separation and I wanted to make two channels because I have two different audiences, and I think that's fine. But I have this vlog channel that I, I used to occasionally add more content to, but I wanna add more, but. I was always really hesitant to, because I'm like, well, no one really cares about what I'm doing.
But what's funny is that I released a video last week and I have never gotten so much good. Feedback, I don't know if feedback's the right word. Like good, like fun, sweet messages from people saying that that inspired them to document what they're doing or that inspired them to start designing more, or that made them really curious about this thing.
And even though right now that channel has like nine subscribers. I am feeling like that is a really, really good direction to go because I am the niche of it and people wanna see that. People wanna see your personality, so going back to showing up on whatever content platforms you're on, this feeling of should, this feeling of like, I need to constantly edit myself.
Those little mistakes, those little ums and blips and even the trip ups that I'm thinking of right now that I'm like. Oh my gosh, I should edit that out, that I'm not going to edit. That is why people will pay me money. That's why people will pay you money for the cute little isms that you have. It's like when you're married or you, you're in a relationship and your partner mentions things like, I love this cute little thing you do that you are like, oh wow, you don't like this huge part of me or this part of me.
They're like, no, I love how you like. Chuckle like this, or I love when you do this. It's, it's always a little thing that you never think about. That's what sparks people's love for you, and that requires you to really be vulnerable. And I know that that's not necessarily gonna happen overnight. That's not gonna happen with just listening to this podcast.
But it's just something that you can think about as you venture through your business, through content creation, through your brand, your life, being deep, being vulnerable, being truthful online within the barriers of what you feel comfortable with is actually going to be what can make you financially abundant.
Yeah. I have to sit with that because it sounds really wild to me. It sounds fluffy and it sounds untrue, but I know that I have personally gotten the most beautiful, sweet messages from people. I mean, I've had, I've had like childhood friends who I haven't spoken to in years reach out because they were listening to.
My podcast or they were watching something else. And I don't have that many followers or subscribers at all at this point of recording this. But the depth of which I know I can be vulnerable is the depth that's gonna give other people permission. And I wanna work with people like that. And I know for you, you wanna work with people who are deep and who trust you, and.
Who see the value that you bring and who have a really beautiful perspective on the world, who are collaborative, who don't want to over control parts of their business, who want to pay you to give your expertise on what they should be doing should, I'm trying not to say that word as much, what they can be doing.
That's the dream. That's how you can start romanticizing your business and thus romanticizing your life. Spending more time following your dreams and doing the beautiful things that you dreamt of when you first started this business is by bringing in those clients who feel like kindred spirits, who feel like they completely understand you, and I want that for you.
If you wanna know why. Consistent posting isn't working for you. Go ahead and watch the next episode.
As always, I'm so glad that you're listening. Thank you for following along. Stay inspired and stay creative, and I will see you next time. Bye!
thestudioviolet.com | @thestudioviolet | Book a fit call ♡
