Ep. 62: Social Slowdown Challenge Pre-work: Notice Your Behavior

Meg Casebolt  0:01  
You’re listening to social slowdown a podcast for entrepreneurs and micro businesses looking for sustainable marketing strategies without being dependent on social media. Social media is a double edged sword. It’s a wonderful way to stay connected. But it also can feel like an addictive obligation. And it’s even more complex for businesses, your audience might be right there, but you’ve got to fight with algorithms to maybe be seen by them. So whether you want to abandon social media altogether, or you just want to take a month off, it’s possible to have a thriving business without being dependent on social media. This podcast is all about finding creative, sustainable ways to engage with your audience without needing to lipsync send a cold DMS, run ads or be available 24/7. Let’s get started. Hello, there friends, we are here for the kickoff of the social slowdown challenge. I have this as my notes as day zero because technically the challenge doesn’t start until next Monday. We’re releasing this on Friday. But I wanted to give you a bit of time before the live conversations begin to do a little bit of digging and sleuthing. I want you to just take some time over the next couple of days or over this weekend to notice your behavior. Now this is where you’re gonna notice the dichotomy of my brain, which is that half of my brain is incredibly data driven and wants to use that information to make decisions. And then the other half is like a yoga teacher who firmly believes in like meditation and self compassion and introspection, right. So when I asked you to notice the behavior that you have around your marketing in general, but specifically in this week, we’re going to be talking about social media, I want you to notice this from a place of detachment from a place of self compassion, I’m going to have you go look at some numbers on your devices. But there is no right or wrong number, there is no threshold that I want you to hit or drop below. This is not meant to be shaming or to induce guilt, in the ways that you’re looking at this, this is just gathering data and data in itself is neutral. In the same way that your money in your bank account is neutral, your weight is neutral, like this is just a number. So don’t let going and looking at this information, impact your self worth. Right, if you want to share this information in our community, if you are part of that you can go to social slowdown.com/challenge, you can be a part of our forums, you can join our live conversations, or if this is something you just want to explore on your own path. That’s okay, too. Right. Um, but do not let this become something that you beat yourself up over. Because we all have to start from somewhere. And the first step in making change is acknowledging the current behavior, right. So this is just noticing from a place of detachment, okay, yoga, teacher hat off and analytic behavior hat on, I want you to go into your phone, pick it up. If you’re on an Apple device, you’re going to open up your screen time, if you’re on an Android device, I’m sorry, I’m just an iPhone gal. But I know that they also have a very similar way of tracking the apps that you’re using. And I know some of us are more active on our phones, some of us are more active on our computers. So I’ll talk about both of those. But let’s start with your phone. Because for many of us, that is sort of the device that that gives us the biggest dopamine kick, to be honest, that makes our brains light up that when we pick up the phone, we’re looking for some sort of, of kick of energy. And for many of us, that’s what social media does. So go into your screen time app, or whatever the droid equivalent is, if you want to know what it is go into our community and someone will tell you and open up your screen timeout. And I want you to just notice this information neutrally. How much time did you spend on your phone last week? Or this past week if you’re doing with on Friday, right? Like how much time again, this is just a number it is not a criticism. What percentage of the time that you spend on your phone was spent on a social media app. If you’re anything like me, you have set yourself a limit that’s like I’m going to spend no more than an hour on my social media every day. I’m going to spend no more than 30 minutes on games on my phone every day I’m going to do you know like I have set these limits and I regularly blow right through them. So recognize if that’s your behavior to if you did sort of put one of these caps in place and then guilt trips you when you hit your cap and you just completely ignore the prompts. That’s okay, that’s totally human behavior and it’s fine. It’s in that same screen meantime report, you can keep scrolling down, you can see the number of times that you picked up your phone, the first app that you selected when you picked up your phone, and the number of notifications that you got over the course of whatever time period we’re looking at. If you are not a phone, person, if you’re a desktop person, then I would recommend installing tool like RescueTime, which is a Chrome extension. And it will track for you, where you’re spending your time, when you are opening up these different apps versus when you’re working in, you know, actual, you know, client work or something along those lines, I don’t want to say actual work as if social media is not actual work, it absolutely can be actual work. But if you’re working on your computer, a lot of times, you may want to install one of these chrome extensions, we’ll put a link to RescueTime in the notes for this episode. So that way, you have that one, which I’ve used previously, but there are plenty of them out there. So this might just be something where you want to start gathering that data. So you can start to assess, you know, what are what are your behaviors around the time and energy that you’re spending on marketing and on social media. And now I want to share a couple prompts with you. If you’re doing this solo, maybe you want to just you know, get out a sheet of paper and write it down. If you want to join our free community to have this conversation. You can you know, take a screenshot of your of your screen time app and share it in the community and then answer these prompts below it. Again, do what feels good to you. I’m not trying to publicly shame anyone, I’ll be sharing mine if you’re curious. It’s surprised. It’s mostly the Kindle app Hello. Because I’ve spent the last two years working on this. And that’s the space that I’m coming from as it used to be all Instagram and Facebook. This was like pre tictac. For me, it was a lot of times found on Instagram. And I recognize that now I’ll share a quote with you that sort of kicked my my journey off in just a minute. But here are some things to think about. either on your own or in our community or in the live discussions that we’re having every day at noon Eastern January 20. To I’m sorry, 23rd to 27th. Here are some things to think about. Number one, did this number or did these numbers plural surprise you? The amount of time you’re spending on the phone, the percentage of your time spent in different ways. I was recently visiting my mother in law, and she made a joke like that her obituary might say, Here lies Julie, she played a lot of Candy Crush, right? Sometimes you don’t even realize that you’re doing it that you’re picking up this this device in order to numb your brain in some way. And the first step towards it is just saying, Hmm, that’s more than I expected? Or oh, that’s actually not as much as I expected. The next prompt is, how much of that time do you think is creation? How much is interaction and how much of it is scrolling and sort of entertainment. You know, I know that sometimes we actually do need to be on these platforms, we want to post about our lives, we want to engage with people in the US. For many of us, this is actually where it sales conversations are happening. And we don’t want to give up on that. But if you’re spending, I’m gonna pull a number out of the air if you’re spending 10 hours a week on Instagram, and two of them are creation and one of them is DMS. And seven of them is just you know, you’re eating popcorn and watching shits Creek while you’re Mindlessly scrolling. That’s something to be aware of. I mean, shits Creek is awesome. Don’t get me wrong. But social media is both a tool for engagement and also a tool for distraction. So just something to think about. I know you won’t have an exact number here. But if you can come up with the percentage, you know, it’s 5050 on work versus play, just think about it. Third percent. In a perfect world, in an ideal situation, how much time would you want to spend on all of these different tools and apps? Maybe you have set these, these boundaries for yourself in the screen times apps and you’re like me, and you just blow right through them. As soon as you get there. Maybe we want to reassess how much time we expect to spend on it, how much time we want to spend on these tools, give ourselves a little bit more flexibility, give ourselves a little more compassion, a little more grace. And then the final question is, if you choose if one of your intentions over the course of this exploration is to spend less time on social media or less time on any of these, you know, addictive apps in these devices that we carry around with us all the time. What would you maybe want to do with that extra time?

Where do you You want to be spending your time and your energy and your brainpower? If it’s on social media and you’re happy with it cool, go for it, you know, but sometimes the best way to, to decrease an addiction is to replace it with something else. So what is something that you could replace that time with? We’ll talk about that a lot more in a day or two. But I wanted to share this quote with you from Trevor Noah’s autobiography. I read this a couple of years ago, and this is what really, again, this is the quote that kind of kicked my ass into gear in terms of this exploration. This is what like, made my gut go. Right. So I want to share it with you. I wish I had the audiobook version of it so that we could hear his voice. But sadly, I don’t. So I’m just gonna read it to you. So this is from his autobiography Born a Crime stories from a South African childhood. He says, hustling is to work with surfing the internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the internet tweets, Facebook posts lists, you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact, you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was, its maximum effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I put all that energy into studying, I’d have earned an MBA. Instead, I was majoring in hustling something no university would give me a degree for. So hopefully, that resonated with you without giving you that like gut punch feeling that I had several years ago, of that feeling of if you were spending this time on something else, what would that look like? What could that get you I want you to just sort of think about that over the course of this week of explorations. If you would like to continue working through this, stay tuned into these podcast episodes coming up. If you want to have a larger conversation with a group either, you know, in our community or in our conversations every day, next week, you can head over to social celadon.com/challenge Sign up, come chat with us. We can explore this all together. And hopefully you know, I will see you in the group or you can shoot us an email and let us know if any of this is resonating with you. We would absolutely love to hear how this is going for you. And we’ll see you in the next episode. Have a great day. Thank you so much for listening to the social slowdown podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe or come on over to social slowdown.com and sign up for our email list so you never miss an episode. We’d also love if you could write a review to help other small business owners find the show you can head over to social slowdown.com/review Or grab that link in our show notes for easy access. We’ll be back soon with more tips to help you market your business without being beholden to social media Talk to you then

Please forgive any typos, as this transcript was automatically generated by Otter.ai.