Today I saw an excellent post on the site Unselfing.Social and it’s such a great idea…

As an experiment, for one continuous month, make the focus of one in every three things you share on social media — wherever you normally share, however regularly or irregularly you do, however many people you reach — something other than yourself or your own work: a friend’s art project, a stranger’s poem, a record by a musician you love, the tree shimmering with majesty and mystery in the low morning light, someone in your community you admire, a bygone pioneer of something you value, a book that spun you on your axis, the lost cat sign crayoned by a neighbor’s child, the new community garden a few blocks over, news of the dazzling galaxy discovered by the dazzling new space telescope a few million lightyears over.

I don’t think we do this enough online because we are so focussed on self.

I see this in myself at times. I should have been promoting others and their work a lot more on the social networks.

I should have BEEN the change and role modelled it, rather than be peeved at how others were using their social networks which then necessitated me getting off them permanently because I couldn’t compete.

Instead, when I was on social media, at times I felt compelled to always share what I was working and learning about all the time. I was “working out loud” but at times I feel I was simply giving away too many of my creative ideas.

In my head, I thought that maybe it was helping people in some way?

But there was also pressure to use my social media to sell my own services. I didn’t do it a lot because I felt icky doing it but I definitely did it when trying to sell our two books when we wrote them at the previous company I worked at Adopt & Embrace.

I did my best to promote who I could – people I knew, liked and trusted and shared their work as much as possible but at the back of my mind, yes, I admit it now, I worried at times that it meant that I would come across as putting myself and my skills down.

Was I being a sucker?

Was I being naive?

I didn’t see many people in my own network promoting OTHER’S peoples work, it just wasn’t the ‘done’ thing.

Maybe it should have been – and maybe MANY people should have been doing it?

However, I don’t deny that I gave work to a lot of people – and I mean A LOT of people.

I shake my head when I think about it now.

I did share the great work of some people. Their work, their projects, their courses, their programs, their business, their ideas, their communities, their books – and yes, to those who asked me to – some thanked me privately (or publicly) and sometimes returned the favour. For them, I am thankful.

A few however, did not. You usually know straight away when you’ve been taken advantage. It left a sour taste in my mouth. Who was the sucker now, I’d ask myself? Thankfully, there weren’t many of them. I’ve been lucky in that respect.

I believe that we do need the focus to get away from our ego – from ourselves. Social media is rife with it.

What I’m seeing and hearing is that people are desperate to be acknowledged and noticed by someone, anyone.

Where did this need for attention come from?

If no one else does this for them, they’ll do it themselves. The problem is that it’s exacerbated when they look at the metrics, the number of likes, retweets and follows and determine this as the base line for people to like themselves.

The other aspect of this is when your company wants to promote their business and services through your own social networks. The same social networks you took years to build and nurture. This doesn’t sit well with me at all. I’m more than happy to promote if I believe in the product and the service but on the whole, I don’t believe this is how any company should be using their employees as brand building.

I do wonder if we were a society that wasn’t so narcissistic and self-obsessed, where we promoted and shared the great work of others, if somehow we could become ‘more real’ again and in touch with ourselves.

I think we’re losing something of ourselves.

References:

The Unself Brand by Jon Mertz
Why the World Needs Iris Murdoch’s Philosophy of Unselfing

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