Are you looking for ways to refresh your perspective as an influencer? Here are 5 mindfulness practices for content creators and influencers.
In 2017, I started my mindfulness journey. I started listening to Jess Lively’s podcast: The Lively Show and I learned about her story about selling everything she had to travel the world and live life more intentionally. I learned about the law of attraction, your intuition, and her recommendation to explore Esther & Jerry Hicks YouTube channel and books. I also learned that you could directly apply mindfulness practices as a content creator.
In 2020, the pandemic broke out and I took my mindfulness journey to the next level. I dove into Esther & Jerry Hick’s books, I made journaling a part of my morning routine, and I got crystal clear about what I wanted to do with my creative career. Mindfulness helped me take content creation full-time after being laid off from the aerospace industry.
If you’re looking to refresh your perspective as an influencer, I recommend looking at mindfulness practices to apply to your creative career. Learning how to tell the story you want to experience, tune into your emotions, and understand how to shift your perspective can help you make your creative career more fun, joyful, and fulfilling. I hope these mindfulness practices for content creators helps you as much as it’s helped me along my journey!
5 Mindfulness Practices for Content Creators & Influencers:
Practice #1: Tell the story you want to experience – specifically to your creative career or business
Let’s talk about what it means to deliberately live your life, vs. living your life by default.
You always have the choice in life to take life as it comes and respond to what’s happening to you, OR, you start to tell your life story or creative career as how you want it to be.
You can acknowledge your past and discontinue of how your life has been so you can focus on telling the story of how you want your life and career to be.
A lot of influencers and content creators get stuck. An example of this: “I can’t get passed 10,000 followers on Instagram”. You might be repeating to yourself:
- “I’ve been at 9,000 followers for over a year.”
- “I keep losing followers”
- “I don’t know how to get passed 10K”
- “How did that person over there pass 10K in less than a year?”
One of the biggest things I’ve learned about applying mindfulness to content creation is that your current situation doesn’t have to be your future experience. But to breakout of your normal cycle, or “staying under 10K on Instagram”, you must be deliberate about which thoughts you’re going to focus on and pour your energy to.
Telling the story, you want to experience goes against the norm of “telling it like it is”.
But this is a part of personal, societal, and cultural change. If we didn’t focus on the stories or the dreams of the life we want to experience, women wouldn’t be allowed to vote or wear pants.
In the early 1800s, staple pieces in women’s clothing in America were dresses, long skirts, corsets, petticoats, steel hoops, and cages. In the 1850s, bloomers emerged. American women’s rights activists like Amelia Bloomer and Susan B. Anthony embraced bloomers. But women who were this new style of dress were arrested and shamed by society. Source: Huff Post – Women and Pants article.
Practice #2: Determine where your focus is
Every subject is really two subjects: what you want and the LACK of what you want. It’s important to figure out where your awareness or your focus is about that subject.
Abundance vs. Poverty
- Abundance: There are many opportunities to work with brands on paid opportunities.
- Poverty: I can’t make any money being an influencer.
- Abundance: There are many ways to decide how to make money as a creator.
- Poverty: Brands don’t want to work with me because of x,y, or z.
Knowledge vs. Doubt
- Knowledge: I am capable of learning new skills, like filming and editing videos for TikToks and reels.
- Doubt: I’ll never learn how to make videos.
- Knowledge: I’m getting better each month at learning how to use Pinterest. Today, I know how to do x, y, and z.
- Doubt: I’m overwhelmed at trying to learn how to use a new platform like Pinterest.
Clarity vs. Confusion
- Clarity: I want to learn who my audience is and what type of content they want to see from me.
- Confusion: I can’t figure out who my audience is.
- Clarity: I want to feel good about my mission statement and content pillars.
- Confusion: I don’t know how people are building audiences on Instagram or TikTok.
Why is it important to figure out where your focus is on what you want?
To start telling the story you want to experience; you must know where you’re starting at. You must figure out if you’re in a positive headspace or a negative headspace.
If you’re consistently thinking negative thoughts around your creative career or side-hustle, where you’re focused on:
- “I can’t do that”
- “I can’t afford that”
- “That person is getting more money and opportunities than me”
You aren’t focused on joy, connecting with others, expressing yourself, and all the fun things that come with being a content creator.
This mindfulness practice for content creators can help you recognize where you’re actually focused on and give you the power to chance your focus.
Practice #3: Understanding the law of attraction and how to apply it to your creative career
The Law of Attraction is simple: the essence of that which is like unto itself, is drawn.
Or – you get the essence of what you think about. You attract or experience what you feel and think.
What you give your attention to, invites that subject into your experience. For example, if you’re feeling poor, only things that feel like poverty: “I don’t have enough money, I can’t make more money, I’m stuck at a low paying job”, can come into your experience.
It’s not possible to feel poor and invite abundance or financial well-being into your experience. When you feel prosperous, you invite prosperity into your experience. For example, “I sold my first 10 pair of earrings on my Etsy shop. I’m excited my audience is purchasing and sharing photos of them wearing my earrings.”
That’s why it’s so important to figure out whether you’re focused on the positive or negative end of the subject you’re thinking about. You might think or set a goal, “I want to hit 10,000 followers on Instagram”, but you might be focused on the negative side of that subject. Instead of telling your story how you want it to be, “I’m excited to build my community and connect with others who are passionate about what I do.”, you might be focused on “I keep on losing followers”.
Practice #4: Learn how to listen and use your emotions and intuition
There are only two main emotions: positive (feels good) and negative (feels bad), but we have many words to describe how we feel on the scale of those two emotions.
Positive emotions look like:
- Joy, freedom, love, or appreciation
- Passion or enthusiasm
- Optimism or hopefulness
- Contentment
Negative emotions look like:
- Frustration or irritation
- Overwhelmed
- Doubt, worry, or blame
- Anger or hate
- Guilt or unworthiness
It’s not possible to jump from anger to joy and freedom. Remember, you get the essence of what you think about. It’s important to know that you can start climbing your way up this emotional scale.
Start to reach for the best feeling thought you have access to. And then reach for the next one, and the next one. Here is an example of that:
- Anger: “I’m so mad that no matter what I do, I can’t grow my podcast downloads or my website traffic”
- Discouragement: “Maybe I’m not supposed to be podcasting or blogging”
- Frustration: “But I’ve put so much time and effort in learning how record and edit podcasts and blog posts.”
- Pessimistic: “Maybe there are too many podcasts and blogs out there.”
- Contentment: “I guess this is just where my blog and podcast are at today.”
- Hopefulness: “One day, I’ll figure out how to grow my two platforms.”
Practice #5: How to shift your perspective if you don’t feel like you’re thriving
When you recognize a negative emotion, it’s the perfect opportunity to stop and realize that it’s your intuition’s warning sign. Instead of feeding into the negative emotions and thinking more negative thought, STOP and ask yourself: “What is it that I want?”
It’s okay to experience negative emotions because we figure out what we want when we know what we don’t want. For example, if you’ve ever been in a job that you hated, you probably quickly figured out that you needed to find a new job or change teams.
I learned the Process of Pivoting from Abraham Hicks. Pivoting encourages us to:
- Experience the negative emotion
- Ask what is that we do want/Identify what we want
- And turn our attention to the thing that we want
You might not jump from feeling angry to feeling joyful, but you’ll start feeling a little bit better. More importantly, you start to practice to deliberately choose your own thoughts and tune into your emotions and intuition.
Here is a content creator example:
- Experiencing negative emotion (absence of clarity or confusion): “I don’t know if I should start a podcast or not.”
- Asking what it is you do want (clarity): “I want to diversify my platforms and podcasting makes sense for my communication style.”
- Turning your attention to what you want (clarity): “I know I have the ability to learn how to record, edit, and produce a podcast. I know interviewing others in my industry would be fun and helpful to others.”
Recognizing that you can pivot your perspective and your focus can help you in periods of frustration, stagnation, and confusion.
I hope you enjoyed these mindfulness practices for content creators and influencers. What mindfulness practices for content creators did you most resonate with?
What other mindfulness practices do you recommend to creators?
For more tips for content creators and influencers, I recommend checking out:
- How to Balance a Full-Time Job and Continue to Create Content for Your Passions (podcast episode)
- How to Find Balance in Your Life – When You Blog, Work Full-Time, and Attend Grad School
- 5 Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder (podcast episode)
- 6 Business Concepts to Apply to Your Blog
Thank you for reading!
Love,
Emma