You Never Know Who’s Actually Watching You

The people paying the closest attention are often the ones saying nothing at all.

The Grocery Store Truth Nobody Talks About

Do you have any idea how many people are paying attention to you but pretend they’re not?

It happens to me all the time. I’ll be at the mall or the grocery store and run into someone I know, and they’ll stop me to tell me how much they loved something I posted last week. Five minutes of genuine praise, right there in the cereal aisle. They remembered details. They connected with it.

Then the truth sinks in. They never liked it or commented. Nothing publicly, not a thing.

I think about that every single time one of my clients tell me they feel like nobody is watching, because the reality is, you are inspiring more people who pretend not to follow you than you will ever know.

You just don’t get to see it. You don’t get the notification or the like. You get the grocery store conversation weeks or months later, if you’re lucky.

Which means consistency matters more than you think it does. You don’t know when someone is going to finally reach out. You don’t know what post is going to be the one that makes them pick up the phone. You just have to keep going and trust that the work is landing somewhere, even when the numbers say otherwise. This is one of the biggest reasons I never focus on teaching social media insights. They’re only reliable when you layer them with your website analytics

Listen, Here’s What Happened to Me

I want to tell you something that genuinely caught me off guard, because it’s the perfect example of exactly this.

In the last few weeks, no fewer than five women have reached out to me out of nowhere. Women I had no idea were still in my world. Some of them have been on my list since 2009. They’ve been with me through the pivots. They’re still opening my emails. They’ve been watching what I’ve been building, quietly, from a distance, and they reached out to tell me that watching my trajectory has been, and I’m going to use the word one of them used, f#*king amazing.

They’re not reaching out just to say nice things, either. They want to hire me. They’re at the same place I was years ago and they want help doing what I’ve done.

I had absolutely no idea any of them were still around.

So let me back up, because the context matters here.

When I first started my business, I thought I was going to be coaching full time and for a while that made sense. I had limited hours. I was happily married. My husband was a successful entrepreneur and I didn’t need to bring in significant income. My coaching business was then a passion project. I was helping people and I was in a position where that was genuinely enough.

Then I left my 25-year marriage. I also left the bank account that came with it. My mom had been diagnosed with dementia. My dad had significant physical health issues that were getting harder to manage. I was their primary caregiver. I left with nothing, and when you leave with nothing and you are completely on your own and people are depending on you, your whole relationship with your business changes.

It was basically sh*t or get off the pot time. I needed to figure this out for real.

The business I’d been building quietly for years had to actually work now.

Not as a passion project but as a retirement plan. It needed to be the thing that was going to let me take care of my daughter and my parents if I needed to.

Sixteen years later, what I do looks nothing like what I thought I was going to be doing. I went from coaching, to building my own website because I needed clients, to other women seeing it and asking me to build theirs, to spending years as a web designer and developer, to pivoting into personal brand and marketing strategy, to eventually building the Academy. It didn’t happen in a straight line, and for a lot of that time I genuinely wasn’t sure anyone was paying attention.

Turns out they were. They just never said anything.

Now they’re coming and knocking on my door, asking if I can help.

The Part I Need You to Really Hear

I think about this a lot when I hear from women who feel like they’re posting into a void. Like nothing is landing. Like nobody sees what they’re building.

People don’t follow you on Monday and invest in your program by Friday.

Someone finds you, watches for a while, files you away, then when they’re finally ready, they remember you.

The runway is so much longer than it feels when you’re in it. Despite the fact there are 20 and 30-something’s over on Instagram making you believe the opposite.

Some of the seeds you’re planting right now won’t come up for months or years. That is not a sign that it isn’t working. That’s just how marketing works.

So don’t you dare stop. Take this as your sign to finally get consistent with your marketing.

The right people are watching, they’re just not ready yet. When they are, they’re going to want exactly what you’ve built. Keep building it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​