How to "Interrogate your Intention"
Questioning my purpose in this industry of online influence with a tool I learned as a young lawyer.
7 minute read.
Yesterday, I had an intriguing chat with a friend and peer regarding our respective content creation businesses.
Our conversation turned to the topic of agents and managers for content creators, with her testing out that resource and myself sharing that I was contemplating contacting an individual with a regional network of brands to “put myself back on her radar” and “re-introduce myself.” I wanted this woman to be aware that, since we last crossed paths more regularly a few years ago before I prioritized stay at home mom land, I’ve become pretty apt at this whole “sharing my life in an influential way” business.
It’s arduous, intentional, constant work. But it works. For instance, I wake up to having made money in my sleep with affiliate links. Enough money that I satisfy my $80,000 SUV’s monthly payment a few times over, each month. I am asked to mentor women on how to do this, and provide that service and support to them for a fee. I love my clients. I am approached by brands to spread the good word for them. Sometimes this is a (relatively nominal) paid gig, and sometimes I am contacted by a small business asking for my support and I am glad to give it gratis, which is really gratifying to think that I have a platform a small business owner would want to stand on. Most importantly, I have a solid orbit of extraordinary women from all corners of the country following along and engaging with me on Instagram (~9,000 women) and LTK (~2,100 women) where I create high quality, unique, personalized, brave videos and photography. Here on Substack, 600 souls asked to receive my messages via email, with 60 paying their hard earned money for this more personal take each week. Wow!
I have a lot to share, and am proud of the way in which I do so.
And yet, yesterday, as I mentioned to this friend that it had been on my to do list to reach out to this industry professional and essentially make her aware of my achievements, I heard my own voice trail off… I had trouble finishing my own thought…
Because why, exactly, did I want to make this woman aware of my business? What purpose would that serve me? Why was this task on my to do list, again?
And today, as I sit here, I again find myself grasping to close the loop. I need to figure this out.
So I will rely on a very valuable lesson I learned while working as a first year litigation associate at K&L Gates, where the man whom many in the firm thought was the scariest, meanest old dinosaur of a partner with a corner office seemed to have adopted me as his go-to gal, to my glee and every other associate’s horror.
One day, he explained to me a trick he used to find the crux of an argument; a trick I use to this day when confronting problems professional and personal. In this instance, it got me to the bottom of my “influencer purpose” quagmire, and it’s something you can lean on, too.
It was 2015, and he had me working on a very complex litigation that involved a federal court case and a parallel international arbitration out of an oil dispute in Brazil. The facts had been unwinding and re-tangling for a decade, and getting up to speed was a bear of a task itself, let alone wrapping the facts around my little finger enough to make an argument.
This partner got out a legal pad and pen, and started to free hand write down a list of the basic facts and timeline: