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Welcome to Make More Money Without Selling Your Soul. The podcast for bold entrepreneurs ready to simplify scale and reclaim their time. I’m Polly Lavarello, Evergreen scaling strategist and cushy business pioneer. Join me and my occasional guests as we explore the themes of wealth, selling and well-being, because building a business that works for you changes everything. Let’s dive in.

00:36

Hello, and welcome to the show. Today, we’re talking about personal branding, when you are introverted, af, not swearing, because I know some of you messaged me to let me know that you listened to this on the school drive, so I would not want to do that, at least not this early on in the show, but I will let you know, the occasional bleeper does occasionally come out my mouth. Now, before we get into this, you might even be thinking, Who’s Polly to talk about this? How does she know what it’s like to be introverted? Well, I mean, for those of you who probably really picked up on the nuance of my personality by now, you might not be thinking that, because you probably picked up on the fact that I am a kind of introverted extrovert, but for those of you who kind of hear my confidence and how I speak on this podcast, or the fact that I’m doing videos and reels might assume that that means I have confidence, no, but you know what, before we get into what is more of a personal story around my journey with being introverted, having resistance to visibility, and how I broke through that, so that if you’re in a similar boat, you understand how to do that, I want to quickly touch on the relevancy as to why this really matters, and why this is a conversation I feel is worth talking about in this moment, right now. 

So, I’m not gonna lie, I woke up this morning, I knew I had this podcast to record, and I was actually being entirely transparent, just feeling very disillusioned, and I’m sharing this because I imagine I’m not the only one who feels that way, you know, with everything that’s going on in the world right now, particularly, you know, we had a thing that happened in Brighton recently, a rally and a big protest against the far-right rally, and, and I was looking at the post, you know, Norman Cook, bless him, Fat Boy Slim, you know, did a gig to support those who were protesting, and below that post that I felt was so full of love and optimism and hope, and just everything that I love about Brighton, there was so much hatred, and what I could see when I looked closer at the accounts, is that they were mostly bots, and this is, you know, what we’re seeing, and we’re going to be seeing more of that. Let’s be honest, so for us sensitive souls who give a damn about the world, who are also marketing in a platform that’s increasingly filled with false information, hatred, division, it can be a really heavy space to be, and increasingly, of course, you know, I love wildlife, so, and this is all connected. I see the odd wildlife video, and a lot of the time something looks amazing. Now, the first thing I do is head to the comments to see, was that real or was that AI generated, because it loses the magic right if it’s AI generated, but you know there’s a real fatigue around that. There’s a real fatigue around, you know, constantly. You know, again, if I see a strong claim or a strong fact, I mean, we probably should have always done this, but increasingly I’m really aware of the fact that that might be entirely untrue.

03:36

So I then go to Google and I look it up, and even then sometimes I’m having to like search for like 510 minutes to really get to the bottom of what the validity is behind, you know, said statement, and so I think, you know, I know this is my experience of the internet, and therefore others must be feeling it too, and what’s ultra challenging is that because AI is encouraging us to churn out, well, it’s not encouraging us, but it’s making it possible to churn out a lot of content, you know, people are churning out those trial reels using AI and all that kind of stuff, churning out content with AI, and you know, like it means there’s a lot of dross, you know, that can be on your grid, but interestingly, what I have noticed on my own grid is that the people whose accounts I go back to the most regularly are because I get a particular feeling, in my case, joy. You know me right now, you know my brand. I am a joy seeker, and particularly because there is so much misery and doom and gloom in this space. Well, online in the world right now, I particularly love seeing, I like to see aspirational accounts, you know, people who are a bit better than me at their sober curiosity, for example, maybe entirely sober to inspire me to be a little bit more sober, or that person who’s being a bit better with movement than I am, but has a really great attitude around. You know, whose lives I can compare myself to, whose values I, you know, like all of that kind of stuff. I’m looking for joy, I’m looking for, you know, things that interest me. I mean, obviously undiagnosed autistic ADHD, so when I see content around any of those themes, particularly if it jumps out as something that really speaks to me, then obviously I’m going to spend time with that, and I’m kind of, as a 40 year old who has no zero sense of fashion, or at least not really sure of what you’re meant to wear at 40, and there’s a lot of skincare, and anyway, you don’t need to know all the details, but needless to say, I follow accounts with personality, like the people who like make me smile, the people who I think, oh, if you were in the streets, I’d want to have a chat with you, or I’d want to invite you around for dinner, I’d want to be your mate, you know, that’s the kind of energy, because that’s a nice distraction from my day, you know, that’s an enjoyable thing to be doing. Now, why am I sharing with you my Instagram habits? Because I feel that we are all increasingly leaning that way, information has become something that we can pretty easily get access to now. Is that information always entirely correct? No. However, the main thing a lot of us are trying to avoid is overwhelm. So, if AI says to you, yeah, here’s a running plan for the week, here’s what you should do at the gym, and here’s what you can do to eat healthy, and if it sounds convincing and confident enough, a lot of people would choose that over paying, you know, a lot of money to learn it from someone who’s truly qualified, and that’s a really uncomfortable fact to be with, right? That does not feel great. Previously, it wouldn’t matter so much. We could be our little introverted selves, we could hide away, we can know what we do. What we do is brilliant, and people would find us, and you know, to a certain extent, that is still true.

06:47

Word of mouth is still valid, referrals are still valid, but ultimately, if we want to get to a stage where our business is super successful, we need to have a strong personal brand, a brand that makes somebody feel something when they engage with you, ideally a brand that people find so enjoyable to be engaged and connected with, that they go out their way to look at your stories each day, or they go out their way to look at your content, because they know it’s going to land with them in a way that feels really worthwhile, like I know, and no, this is interesting, because I follow, I mean, I’ve got a lot of accounts that I technically follow, but there’s probably only two or three that I actually got my way every day to look at their stories, because it just makes my heart happy. So, having a personal brand that you can truly feel connected to really matters, because ultimately, what you know, what encourages somebody to buy from you familiarity and trust, and you know, obviously, with the way the algorithm is currently, it’s much harder to get that familiarity and trust, because the regular touchpoint piece won’t necessarily be there unless you’re advertising, so being able to distill your personal brand into a nutshell, into a post is increasingly important. 

So, let’s get into, if you’re hearing all of this, and you’re like, “God, I just want to have a lie down. That sounds exhausting. I just don’t know if I want to do this at all. Let me share with you. Well, let me share with you that I’ve spent years teaching visibility, while secretly finding visibility incredibly uncomfortable. You know, I tell people to show up line, and I think a lot of people look at me and assume the confidence came first, that I was confident, and then I showed up online, but it really didn’t, visibility came first, and the confidence followed, and that’s that’s the main thing I really want you to take away from this episode, because it’s true for everything, whether you’re standing on a stage, launching a new podcast, launching a new group program. You know, a lot of people think, I will do this when I feel ready, I will do this when I feel confident, I will do this when it feels failproof, and honestly, those who are succeeding are the ones who are taking the action before the feeling comes about afterwards. Okay, so let’s give my visibility story some context. I will admit that I had an unfair advantage in that back in 2020 when I launched my Polly Laverello account. I think it’s called Polly Lavera Laverello Digital back then, which feels so dated now to think that I felt the need to add digital on the edges, in case people weren’t sure what I did, but I had the unfair advantage in that back then a pretty image, and I was a good photographer, alongside some pretty words, not even pretty words, but words with meaning did really well, and I have a background as a journalist, I have a background as a marketer and I wouldn’t say I necessarily have no, I’ve always been told I have a distinctive voice. I was about to say I don’t, but that would be obviously I don’t feel like I do, because this is my voice, but people have shared that I have a distinctive voice in how I communicate things, and of course I had the advantage of at the time not knowing. And you know the Audie HD-ness of myself in that I don’t really have very strong personal boundaries around what I share, I am an overshare galore, and that works really well in social media, because people like to hear the true unfiltered rawness of what somebody is experiencing, and I guess the other advantage of that back then is that I was very transparent that you know it was a new account that I was building things, I took people on the journey with me, and that worked brilliantly. So, you know, the rules have changed since then, and nowadays it’s not so well. I mean, copy matters, of course. Copy matters, because that’s the hook you use in your video, so like that’s not gone anywhere.

10:40

However, now the relevancy of showing one’s face, and you know, even in B roll, like I’m not gonna lie to you, B roll is something I overthink so much, because I’m like, I’m a bit middle-aged, I’m a bit frumpy, my house isn’t very cool, you know, I live in a rental, like, yeah, you know, the things we’ve done to make it more us, but you know, it’s not as me as it would be if we owned the place, but you know we live in a really nice part of Brighton, and we don’t want to go from it, so the stuff in, and you know we live in a terrace house, which doesn’t get a huge amount of like great sunlight, like it’s not a good place to shoot, so there’s various reasons why living where I live is just not ideal for B roll, and like I say, I overthink every element of it, and I’m sure I’m sharing that, because I suspect you know people, even know my social media manager, for example, when I share my B roll with her, she’s like, “This is great, like, this is good, like, why, why don’t overthink it? So I think we all feel that way about our space not being quite cool or tidy or inspirational enough, and you know, are like what our outfits are, if they’re quite good enough, and of course it’s important to say there are things we can do about nearly all of that. You know, you could hire a stylist, or you could go to John Lewis and get a personal stylist. He’s entirely free, by the way. I did that once, brilliant. You know, there’s various things that we can do, but also I think, you know, a lot of the accounts I follow, they’re not perfectly styled, and they’re not perfectly aspirational, and actually it’s the relatability of those accounts, which is why I stay. 

So, again, we can overthink things, you know, like if it’s really meaningful to you, there’s a solution. If you want it to not matter, it can also not matter, and you get to pick your path, you know. If you want to have a highly aspirational brand, then perhaps you know, go the route of investing if you want to be a brand that people can relate to, then let it go, as Elsa would say in Frozen. So this journey hasn’t been a journey without mistakes. Some of mine were, I was so keen to avoid visibility, I mean, in some ways I said it’s a mistake, otherwise it’s been an advantage in that I have gotten really good funnels, strategy, copy systems, anything outside of visibility, so that the leverage is there when someone does come into my world, and so that has actually been a huge advantage for me, and at the same time, I have to admit I had to recognize that if I were mentoring myself, I’m at a stage in my business where the sales pages, the funnels, the offers, they are all there, and the only thing that remains to be done is eyeballs, and eyeballs, you can get to a certain extent with advertising, but ultimately that next level of visibility comes from collaborations, comes from talking on stages, comes from getting more me on social media, which I’ve kind of been hiding away from, because I have a social media manager who does, you know, we collaborate on my posts, of course, and they are my ideas, but ultimately, you know, they’re kind of tidied up by her, which is brilliant, because I don’t have to do it, but there is an element of myself that gets lost in the mix, and those are done, and so that is something that she and I are working on, in that I’m doing more yaps now, and they’re very much, they come from me rather than from her, which is definitely, definitely making a difference. My reach has gone up by about, I need to double check, but like when I checked last time, it got up by 50% this month.

13:56

So, yes, fact, that’s coming to a really valuable lesson that I’m going to talk about in just a moment, so yeah, ultimately there is no work around, and particularly in this day and age of AI, I have recognized that it’s not wise to hide away anymore, and it’s something I’m increasingly encouraging my clients to do too, which is, you know, don’t hide away, bring your full self to the table, because ultimately, what’s the cost of not doing that? Do you want to walk away from all of this? I don’t think so. And you know you are, you are perfect just the way you are. In fact, when you really bring yourself to the table, you’re bringing clients who are the perfect match for you, because they’ll see who you are, and they’ll either resonate with you and your values and how you show up, or they won’t. And it’s better you learn that now than once they’ve bought something from you, and they decide to instead ghost a payment plan, which you know that rarely happens. In fact, that hasn’t happened to me for a long time now. Touch wood, because I believe that when by the time someone comes to work with me, they’re very clear on what they’re signing up for, who they’re working with, and therefore they show up to the process. So that’s been a really nice advantage. To being more visible, what has worked. Lesson number one, the content I wanted to post least usually performed the best, so the thing that I felt was too much, or I should hide away, or maybe it wasn’t aspirational enough, or maybe it was too raw, or any of those things are often the things that have performed the best. The thing I’ve hesitated to hit post on is the thing that has performed best, even things like repeating my story about the fact that I know it feels like a lifetime ago already, but the fact that I started as a single parent on benefits with two small kids on a balance board at the windowsill, I felt like the story’s been repeated so many times, and ultimately every time I repeat it, there’s a swathe of engagement, a swathe of likes, and often follows, and everything else, and in terms of my best performing posts, is that so, even sometimes down to, oh God, do we have to share this story again? It does well, you know. 

So it is important, both to kind of allow yourself to be you, but also similarly to not be afraid to repeat the things that people really resonate with, because there’s always somebody new who hasn’t heard it yet, and somebody who needs to hear it. I know some of my best clients came in because they were inspired by that story. It helped them recognize that, yes, they can be a mum, and they can be successful too. So it really matters. Lesson number two is that authenticity isn’t oversharing, it’s removing the gap between who you are online and offline. You know, I am a goofy person, I make silly jokes, I like, I say, have very little filter, and the more I bring that to my content, the better it does, because, say, the more people relate to me. You know, the fact that I’m not perfectly polished and a bit kind of clunky, actually. You know, maybe because I am a bit middle-aged and not so, you know, not like a skinny mini that kind of prances across the screen in hot pants, like you know, people copy which has said that people relate to that, and you know, they find it refreshing to see somebody taking up space that looks like them, so you know, all of these things, there’s always a flip side to whatever our fear is, that actually is the ultimate permission set for somebody else. And lesson number three is that your vulnerabilities are often your positioning. Lesson number three, your vulnerabilities are often your positioning. So, my ADHD brain, my awkward humor, my experience as a mum, these aren’t distractions for my brand, they’re actually my brand, and you know, people who are succeeding the best are truly leading with that. You know, I saw someone talking about introverted leadership the other day, and I was like, that’s brilliant. She’s having events for introverts. I was like, love that.

17:32

There’s other people who really own the fact that, you know, there are a parent with a small child. So I’m going to go all in on talking about what it is to grow a business as a parent with a small child, and again, love her for that. The easier you make it for somebody to connect to you, your story, and what it is that you’re doing, the easier it is they feel connected with you and ready to work with you. So, yeah, the important thing to understand that is that as more content becomes automated, the more valuable human connection becomes in a world where there’s increasing, you know, binary antagonism online. People are seeking joy, people are seeking connection, and why I mentioned earlier on that people will go to AI to avoid overwhelm. The reason why they’ll choose you is because ultimately people want people, humans want humans. We want connection with one another. It’s how we thrive. I genuinely spent one week spending more time talking to Claude than a human, and I genuinely spiraled out by the end of the week. It just wasn’t good for my mental health. When I talk about making more money without selling your soul, I do feel that a lot of the things that I do in my business connected to AI are pretty soul sapping, to be honest with you, and I think there will be a massive kind of pushback, and I think there already is in many ways where I say increasingly the brands that are succeeding are the ones that people can truly connect to relate to feel invested in, and feel, feel, you know, supported, because ultimately, whether you are looking to become sober, whether you are looking to lose weight, or manage your hormones, or be supported in business, all of those endeavors can feel pretty lonely, all of those endeavors can have moments where you can question yourself, and AI is not well equipped to support any of those pieces, and ultimately having a human in your corner who you’ve invested in, who’s invested back in you, that’s really where all the difference is, but if you sound like another Claude, of course, they’re not going to invest in you. 

So, my invitation to you is to sound like yourself as much as possible, and to really importantly understand that you will not one morning wake up confident enough to get visible. The truth is that you will become confident. Confident through being increasingly visible, so my simple invitation to you is this week, in the week ahead, think about an area of visibility that you have been holding yourself back from, whether it’s not showing up very much in your stories, whether it’s not showing up on your grid, whether it’s not having started, you know, we’re doing talking heads slash yap videos, whatever the piece is, whether it might be that you’re doing all of those things, and actually what you’ve avoided is pitching to get on a stage or collaborating with another big peer. Think about where you’ve been holding back, and I challenge you to start taking steps towards doing it, whether it’s pitching to get on that stage, whether it’s sending some DMs out there to find people who you can do collaborates, collaborate with, or do lives with, or whether it’s recording those Yap videos. I challenge you to do it, because these tiny little changes in how we approach our business are genuinely where the growth lies. It’s not one big funnel, one big moment that changes your business. It is a small shift in your behavior towards your business that will make all the difference in what you get on the other side. So, I encourage you to up it up your visibility by 10 to 30% this week, and come back and tell me how it went. Biggest love to you all are Be In Your Ears next week.

21:18

And, as I’ve mentioned already, we are approaching 200 episodes, and to celebrate, I’ve already got two out of 10 brilliant guests coming on who are going to talk about how they have made their crazy sums of money and crazy levels of success in their business in the wellness space, and I’m still looking for eight more. If you believe yourself to be a perfect candidate, if there’s somebody you liked here on this podcast, please DM me or email me hello at Polly Lever alone.com so we can get you either on the podcast or get your guests lined up, you know, we’ll get my guests lined up through your connection. All right, I’ll be in your ears next week.