Episode 462:

Hello, and welcome to Unshakable with Human Design. I’m your host, Nicole Laino. And maybe you’re in this moment, a moment that happens for a lot of entrepreneurs, and it’s subtle, but once you feel it, you can’t go back. So you go to share something. It’s something nuanced, it’s something deep, it’s something that feels important, and you realize that doesn’t fit in the caption. This doesn’t really fit for a reel. It’s longer than seven seconds. And instead of expanding your message, you start to shrink it. This is something that happens a lot. Like, I’ll have an idea sometimes for social media, and I see this with my clients. They have these ideas, but it might not even be conscious to you. 

You might just be thinking like, this doesn’t fit on Instagram, or, this doesn’t fit on Facebook, or you put it up there and it just doesn’t get the attention that it felt like it deserved. Because you’re like, this is really great, but it’s not landing. People aren’t grabbing it. People aren’t paying attention. So this moment that you’re in, where either the fact that, like, the platform doesn’t fit the level and the size of the message that you have, if the platform feels too small for your message, what ends up happening a lot of times is people just don’t share it. Oh, I won’t put that up there. I won’t talk about that there. I won’t say that there. 

And I understand where that comes from, because there are times I go to go on Instagram, like, I don’t want to make it what it needs to be for Instagram. I want it to be. I want to have a deeper conversation. I’m not shallow. Why do I have to make myself shallow for this platform? This moment that I’m describing, this moment where you start to realize this moment where it happens, and if you haven’t realized it, you’re hopefully drawing out enough of the specifics where you go, oh, yeah, yeah, I get that. That’s the moment. You’ve outgrown social media as your primary platform. And it’s not that social media is bad and it’s not that you shouldn’t use it. I use it, but I use it very differently in my business and it’s the reason why I have one. 

If I had to rely solely on social media to grow my business, I wouldn’t have one. I would have quit a long time ago. I absolutely would have quit. And I mean that sincerely. Why? Because I think I would have just felt like that there was no place for me, that the fact that I get engagement now, but I have posts that get 2,000 likes and 50,000 views and I have those great ones and then I have ones that get 10 likes and I’m like, what’s happening here? Why is it that this resonated so deeply with people where it spread like wildfire and this one just like in the complete toilet. So I’m not down on social media, but it’s no longer the place where d people where your best work lives. 

It’s not a platform for depth because social media is optimized for different things. It’s optimized for speed, it’s optimized for quick hits, dopamine hits, simplicity and entertainment. Which is why we see it’s everything is about a hook on social media. It’s about like, what’s a snappy hook that’s going to get people to stop. That’s why we ended up with the coaching industry as it is. That’s why we ended up with people with revenue numbers outpacing people because they made money. This is how we got a pyramid scheme in a lot of areas. I’m not saying coaching is a pyramid scheme, but there are aspects of it. There were absolutely just these pods that were growing that were totally based on how much that individual coach made. 

And they marketed themselves as being a great coach or marketer because they made so much money and had nothing to do with what they had created for other people. But the fact that they could say that they had a million dollar month, everybody paid attention and everyone’s like, ooh, how’d they do that? Oh, they’re going to tell me in a masterclass, I’m going to attend that. Oh, what, it’s $4,000 to join their like four week program. Okay, I’m going to get into it because she’s going to share something magical and then that doesn’t happen. Social media though, is not built for depth. It’s not built for complexity and it’s quite frankly not built for original thinking. 

Think about the stuff that goes viral on Instagram, think about or on TikTok or any of these short form platforms, TikTok became TikTok by people doing the same dance. Like it wasn’t even. We don’t even have to like stretch the imagination of originality here. It was literally built on people copying each other. Exactly. I’m going to do a dance to the same song. I’m going to do the exact same dance. I might even wear the same clothes or set it in the same type of setting. Like how close I could make it to the original. Usually it would be more successful. So the artist in me, I say I’m a Virgo sun, Scorpio moon, Scorpio rising. I’m a 64th gate conscious sun. I’m a 5 one. I don’t do shallow. It’s not my lane. And social media is designed for shallow consumption. 

And it doesn’t mean that there can’t be great things shared over there. I’m not pooing it, but thought leadership is built through contemplation. Most people that I work with, most of my clients, they don’t desire to be like a quick fix content creator. They don’t desire to dance on camera. They. It’s what turns them off to those platforms and the whether it’s a conscious or unconscious conversation that they’re having with themselves, they’re looking at that platform, they’re seeing what it takes to succeed. They’re looking at those things and they’re saying, that’s not me. So. So I guess I can’t be successful. Because you have to be successful on social media in order to have a successful business. And that’s not the truth. But you do have to market yourself. 

You do have to let people know who you are, what you do, how you think, what you sell. It’s necessary. So we don’t want to force deep work into a shallow container because when we do that, suddenly you’re diluting your ideas, your message is becoming surface level and you’re starting to sound like everybody else. Then you start second guessing yourself because it doesn’t even sound like you anymore. What you’re sharing doesn’t feel like an extension of you. And then when we try to add like a human design angle to this and we’re like pulling in the human design aspect, it really starts to feel fragmented because it’s like this really isn’t me, this isn’t right. So you actually become end up feeling disconnected from the actual work that you do. Your content doesn’t feel like it represents the work that you do. 

I’ll tell you right now without this podcast, I don’t have a business. I don’t have one because every single person who has joined my programs has had some interaction with this show. I think it’s very interesting. What I am known for, what you probably listen to this show for, is that I have a very particular, specific point of view and way of describing and explaining and messaging human design. The way that I talk about it is why people come to me. Now, they might like an Instagram post that I put up. Some of them are good. I know how to do it. I trained as a copywriter. I know how to do that stuff and I know how to link it to the things that I sell. So that’s why people who listen to this show buy things from me. 

That is a skill that I think all entrepreneurs need to have. You need to create an offer that links to the message that you have or the things you’re talking about. Don’t end up moving people to buy anything from you. They just stay fans, but they never become clients. And then we don’t want that because then you’re not making money. And then you’ve got to quit eventually because you got to eat. We have to put food on the table. So. But my show, doing these connection calls for the expanded leader masterclass, I’ve been doing them leading up to the masterclass. If you’re listening to this, when this episode drops, the masterclass is underway. But you can still join us. There’s still time. Just DM me the word masterclass on Instagram. I’m @nicolelainoofficial. Or go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass and you can register there. 

To register for Nicole’s brand new FREE Masterclass – The Expanded Leader: How spiritually intelligent entrepreneurs become trusted voices, build platforms, and monetize their wisdom in the Authority Economy, go tonicolelaino.com/masterclass or DM Nicole “Masterclass” on Instagram

We’re going to send you the replay links and all of that right away so you can jump in, catch up, ask questions, get involved. It’s not too late. So that’s just my little PSA there. But I’m having these connection calls. I have them with people. I’m not doing them now, but if people joined early to the masterclass, we send out a little email that says like, hey, want to do a 15 minute call with me? I’d love to hear what you know, where you’re at, hear more about your business and hear what inspired you to come to the masterclass. What is it that you hope to learn here? What is it that you’re really hoping for? What are you looking for? So it’s market research for me, sure. 

But I also get to connect with people, but I get to hear what are they looking for? Because I like to think about those people when I am creating the masterclass. So I have an idea, of course I have a plan. I’m like, I know what I’m going to talk about. But how I talk about that stuff is absolutely influenced by those people who are generous enough to sit down with me for 15 minutes and tell me their story. I have each one of those people I am thinking about as I finalize the content that this is a brand new masterclass expanded leader. I’ve never taught. So I’ve started from total scratch. Every single thing that we’re doing in this is new, but even when we used to do the Authority accelerator, I rewrote that every time. 

The core content was there, but I rewrote it every time because I have to be connected to it. Hello, manifesting generator. I have to do that. But the whole point of me telling this story about these connection calls that I do with people is that every single one of them said in some way, shape or form, that the reason that they follow me, the reason they’re coming to the masterclass, is because I explain human design different than everybody else, that they resonated with the way that I talk about it, my philosophy behind it, the way that I explain things, seems to make sense to them in a way that other people’s don’t. 

Some of them are in human design programs with other people who are quote, unquote, competitors with me or, you know, in the same industry, you know, and they’re coming to my masterclass because they found me and they’re like, you have something different that could not have come through on Instagram. It had to come through here. It had to come through because I have the freedom to actually speak the way I want to speak here and on Instagram. I don’t even feel that freedom. I talk about stuff, but I know that when I talk about something and I still put it up there because if 10 people liked it and 10 people heard it, then those 10 people might be my people. And so it’s still worth doing for me. But that’s not my only channel. 

My ego, I think, would have quit a long time ago on Instagram if it weren’t for this podcast. Because my ego would have been like, nobody likes you, Nicole. Which is one of my core wounds, which is one of my deep shadows that I have to work through, is the fact that I’ve felt my whole life like people don’t like me, that there’s this, like, little tinge of it. People don’t like you, Nicole. They’re never gonna really like you, they’re never gonna really accept you, they’re never really gonna see you. It’s a bit of a five line wound there, amongst other things of my lived experience. But that wound I think would have taken over if I didn’t have a place to feel powerful, if I didn’t have a place to say like, you know what, I get to say what I wanna say. 

And I like myself for it and I got to discover myself for it. So all of this to say my content and your content needs to feel connected to the actual work that you do. It needs to be connected to your soul, it needs to be connected to the you want to put out in the world. And if your business feels like it’s becoming shallower, even though you’re working at it, and your work is anything but shallow, then that’s a problem. And this is where human design becomes incredibly relevant. Because not everybody is designed to communicate in short, rapid, high volume dopamine hitting bursts. That’s not how most people that I work with, most of my clients are deep, they are nuanced, they are soulful, they’re like, let’s have a conversation, let’s get into it. Not just like, boom, boom, here’s my snappy hook. 

And of course we can teach you how to do that. It’s a good skill to have, but your business shouldn’t rest on a hook bank. Some people are designed for depth. Some people are designed to synthesize and explain really complex ideas. Some people are here to offer a perspective that sits with people for a while. I think mine is one of those. And platforms that reward quick fixes and pure entertainment or sensationalism aren’t really hospitable to people who have a message like that. Your message isn’t meant to be there, so it’s not rewarded. So then you are more likely to give up. I’ve talked about this in the context of like people who do energetic work, spiritual work, transformation, that work. You know, there’s a whole other layer to this about building trust with people. Because you know, I consider myself in that category. 

I’m talking about something that’s a bit more esoteric. Human design, gene keys, nervous system regulation and expansion, all of these topics require a little bit more trust. People might not necessarily feel like they understand it. They might need to spend some more time with that type of content. They might need to swim in it a little bit and they might need to try you out a little bit to see if your the person that they feel has the integrity that isn’t going to be one of those people that I was talking about in the beginning where they just talked about you making a million dollars a month or whatever it is. And then you get behind the curtain and you realize that there’s nothing really there. There’s no substance there. There’s nothing for me to learn here. 

This isn’t a place that’s actually going to expand me. It’s just going to drain my bank account. People need to have a little bit more of. If you’re learning something, say you were thinking about bringing astrology into your business. If you were, you might hear people talk about it. You might see the things on Instagram where they’re speaking in witchy language about what’s coming and what you can expect and when you should be launching and all of this stuff. You might need to be skeptical. Five years ago, you probably would have bought the program. Now you’re like, I kind of need to check that out a little bit more. Who is this person? What do they sound like? Because especially with AI now AI can write anything. 

People kind of want to hear your voice, they want to see your face, they want to feel a little bit more connected to you, so they know that it’s actually you that has these thoughts. So if you are designed to be somebody who has a deep message, who delivers something like transformation, forcing yourself into this speed dopamine hit thing is always going to feel, you’re always going to have resistance. It’s always going to feel like friction. It’s always going to feel like something is not working. Part of you is holding yourself back because there’s something inside of you that’s saying, this really isn’t us. And then if you’re using a system like human design and you’re trying to be more your design is actually going to put up even more of a fight for this stuff. 

Because it’s like now we want to spread our wings. We’re really tired of having this shallow conversation. So this is all very intentional. This is all part of your design. You know what you’re here to share, how you’re here to share it. And the way that we do this, the way that we need a long form area to put this, you need a long form platform. A platform that rewards depth, not rewarding speed or entertainment. And I always say, like short form content gets short term result. You know, you have a post that goes viral and then it’s gone the next day. What’s your next one? You have long form content you have longer term results, episodes and blogs and things that you create that are compounding over time where they’re working for you for years. So more and more entrepreneurs are getting this. 

They are moving toward long form, personally owned platforms where you aren’t at the mercy of the algorithm to the extent that you are on what are now pay to play platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. But now they’re going to podcasts, which is obviously what you’re listening to this on YouTube, which for me I have this show on YouTube which has grown tremendously without me having to do extra work and drives revenue to my business every single month. And now we have Substack. So this new platform I think is very interesting. These are all spaces where your ideas have space to breathe, where depth is rewarded, where people can come back over and over again, and where you can build trust over time with a depth and body of work. 

Now what makes this so interesting, and I want to talk about Substack for a moment, by itself is you have podcasting and YouTube which are very similar. You run them both. You grow on podcasts and you grow on YouTube in specific ways, usually through SEO. Substack. What’s so interesting about it is this. It’s kind of this new platform where ideas are really the currency there. What’s your idea? Show me how deep you are. Show me what interesting things you have to say. And it is very social. So I love this for my four lines because there really is. For the deep four line, it’s magic because it’s sort of like LinkedIn if it wasn’t so stuffy, it’s funner. LinkedIn in a lot of ways. You don’t just have business people on Substack, you have people of all walks of life. 

So there’s so much to connect with and there are so many cool things being shared over there. But this is actually where people can still binge over there and not just scroll right past. You can write a full article and people can actually go through it and they can share it. And this is what’s really cool about it, is Substack. And I’m going to talk about Substack in greater depth inside the masterclass in expanded leader master class. We’re talking about these authority platforms and I’m specifically talking about Substack and what makes it different and why I think every deep entrepreneur should be on it and why it’s a great place to start if podcasting doesn’t feel like the easiest start for you. And personally, I Think it’s beneficial to have both. 

And there are ways to do that without burning yourself out or feeling like you’re just creating all the time. You can leverage the work that you create for one platform and use it on the other, and you can do that in a way where it feels very different and feels really fresh. So this is how my business has been built. It’s been built through depth. It has been built through conscious thought and development of my thought leadership. We just hit 10,000 downloads in a month on this podcast in February. And that didn’t happen because went viral or something like that. It happened because went deep. This is not something that happened overnight. I had a thousand episodes a month just a couple of years ago, and Now I have 10,000 downloads in a month. 

And the reason is not because we’ve chased a trend, but we’ve built. I’ve built a body of work here that people can enter and stay in and keep coming back, and they can share it with their friends. And it is a very easy resource to move people over to. When I meet people at events, I tell them I have my podcast. When I meet people at. On networking calls or things like that, I talk about my podcast. And it’s the thing that I can promote even when I feel lazy and I just want to throw something up, like Instagram, I use to turn heads to my podcast. That’s the whole goal. Okay, I got your attention. Cool. Let’s go deep now. Come. Come this way. Come over to the show. 

And now substack is going to be added to that as well, because there’s so much opportunity there. This is like kind of like Instagram 10 years ago, when you could still grow over there organically. And that’s what makes it very exciting. And I think it makes it a perfect complement to those other two platforms. We intend to have all three going, which is giving us the 3D platforms all working synergistically together so that we’re growing our audience of people who will buy. So we don’t want just a platform where someone can find you. We want people to get to know you. We want people to get to trust you. We want people to be making decisions, buying decisions. They make from a deep place, not from the shallow place. That’s the old way. That’s how they used to make decisions. 

They used to make decisions based on how many followers people had on Instagram, how cool they look, that cool kids club. And now they’ve been burned by that. They’re like, yeah, that wasn’t the best way. Now, some of those people will exit the market because they’ll say, this is just not for me, period. But many others, the vast majority are saying, I just need to start looking someplace else. Sort of like anything with a. A money trauma, right? We work through our money stuff by getting better at it. Okay, I’ve overspent. Now I’m more discerning about where I spend my money. I ask myself questions before I just buy something. That’s what people are doing now. So they’re moving to these places where they can test the depth of other people to see if you’re different, to see if you really have something. 

And this is building an authority platform. Building and letting go of social media for your main distribution, for your thought leadership, I think is essential at this point because the entrepreneurs rising right now, the ones who are really gaining traction are not the ones posting the most. Those people stagnate. Those people have seen things really slow down because posting all the time, I have seen people, they have audiences on Instagram, but they drop an offer nobody’s buying. That comes from two things. One, they don’t really know they’ve skated by on popularity on social circles. People aren’t going to pay thousands of dollars for something because just because they like you, now it’s different. Now they want to know, can you help me? And how does what you do translate into what I need? 

And if so, okay, well, what are we actually going to do together? People are more discerning. So the people who are succeeding right now are the ones building platforms where their ideas can fully expand, where people can connect with them, where their voice can actually be heard, where it is rewarded for its depth. Not shadow banned because of it, although I don’t believe in shadow banning, but where their voice can be heard, not suppressed, because it wasn’t put into a perfect format or the video went over three minutes. So we’re not going to show it to anybody. It’s. They’re expanding and they’re growing on platforms where their perspective actually has place to take root and connect. That is what it means to become an expanded leader. Becoming an expanded leader is both. There’s something that it does to you. 

When you start to share your depth, you start to really grow into it. You start to expand. A shallow platform will cause you to stay small. An expanded platform where you really get to share the breadth and depth of your work and who you are, your design will show through, your work will show through, people will connect with it and people will buy you don’t need to have. This is the same reason when I had a thousand listeners on this show, when I would do a thousand downloads a month, people bought. People were still buying because they were the right people who stuck around and who used this show to binge test me out and then buy. That is where we’re going now, and that’s exactly what we’re doing inside the masterclass, the Expanded Leader Masterclass. 

I’m taking you through the inner work and the outer work of truly becoming a thought leader in your space. Not just the thought leadership that you have, but one that gets shared, experienced by others and drives people to the offers that you have. So you are monetizing it. This is what we’re talking about. If you want to join us, all you have to do go to Instagram DM me the word masterclass on Instagram. I’m @nicolelainoofficial and we will register you in the DMs or go to nicolelaino.com/masterclass and you can register there. You’ll get the links to all the replays and everything right away. You can catch up with us and you can finish it out with us. All right, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you. 

To register for Nicole’s brand new FREE Masterclass – The Expanded Leader: How spiritually intelligent entrepreneurs become trusted voices, build platforms, and monetize their wisdom in the Authority Economy, go tonicolelaino.com/masterclass or DM Nicole “Masterclass” on Instagram

And remember, in order to have an unshakable business, you must first become an unshakable human. So thanks for letting us help you become unshakable with human design. We will see you next time.