Happy New Year
✯ 2023 ✯

It’s with great joy I welcome the new year and I can’t wait to see what it holds!

It’s easy to feel that we have no power over our own time, life and business though, when the world is unstable, and we feel steered by other strong forces. We’ve gone through some really cloudy years, and we’ve all had to navigate our own ships through the darkness, sometimes guided by guesswork rather than the stars.

But it’s important to remember that you always have the power of your own decisions, your choices and how you react to things. You can always choose the route of truth and less drama.

We’ve now been drilled by the instancy of social media and never-ending news flows for many years, which can push us to react without thinking, without feeling, sometimes without judgement. Everyone is competing for attention; it doesn’t matter by what means. The press exaggerates everything, there’s no substance, we need to constantly be on our guard and bypass the headlines to find the truth behind them.

Social media, Podcasts and YouTube can be even worse – and the reason the social media elite is able to cut through all sense and responsibility, is because everyone has a voice – which is great – but we’ve removed the editors and safeguarding protocols almost completely. The global ether has become a whirlpool of corrupt profiteers.

And we can find that we’re copying into the bad habits of this fast-paced mannerism. We throw out random unqualified statements in haste, we comment with brief, sometimes hurtful words without emotion, we like, we dislike and we point fingers with a swift tap of a very small button.

As business owners we sometimes think that social media is life. This is not the way it should be. Social media is a marketing place for business, it’s not your life. So we need to drop the highly emotionally charged value we place on social media, and stop seeing it as proof of who we are.

Before social media, you had printed marketing material and you picked up the phone and talked to people. Marketing was contained, it was planned, it had clear goals and these products very rarely had anything to do with you as a person, your looks, the way you talked or how you dressed.

This doesn’t mean we should go back to cold selling without empathy at all, it just means that you, as a person, need to take charge of your social media connection, instead of the other way round. You make the choices, you choose what you post, how you react to other posts, what you engage with. If you don’t like something, you have the choice of stepping away from the drama and not fuel it even more.

So this year, I wish for all of us to take control of our social media. Be seen, be heard, be you – but choose to stay calm and move away when it doesn’t resonate with you or your brand.

Let’s make it a Happy New Year!

Mi