Well, I’m on Day #4 of my 30-Day Twitter Experiment, and it’s been quite enlightening and surprising so far – and tiring! More than I imagined.
Here’s what I’m learning:
1) It’s all about the connection. What do people want more than anything in life? To be valued, liked, appreciated, understood, recognized for who they really are, and to not feel alone. Welcome to Twitter. It’s all about real connection – conversing, supporting, laughing – being real.
2) Drop the façade – there’s no time to keep it up. On Twitter, if you want to build community and create true connection, there’s no time to keep up your well-crafted façade that hides who you really are. No time to “protect your reputation.” If you’re conversing continually, you just can’t be watching every word that comes out, and filtering it for how you want to sound. You’ve just got to be yourself and use the authentic voice you have. (BTW, I’ve got to write a post on this issue– the public vs. the private persona, your reputation vs. who you really are…more on that soon).
3) If you’re a narcissist, you won’t like Twitter. If all you want to do is talk about yourself and your business and services, you won’t have much fun because no one will follow you or care about connecting with you, in the long-run. (Also another post – and book – needs to be written about the intensely negative impact of working or living with those who suffer from the narcissistic personality disorder, and how to manage it)!
4) People are awesome – or at least, many thousands are. So many of us have been burned in our lives by snarky, jealous, dishonest, back-stabbing, insecure, angry people who’ve hurt us. But through social media, you expand your horizons beyond your imagination and beyond your tight world, which allows you get out of your circle (which can sometimes disappoint), and meet amazing new folks around the world who want to help and share.
5) It’s addictive, learning new things. This experiment is teaching me so many new things that I’m slightly addicted to the whole experience. The new ideas are flowing in the middle of the night, while I’m in a client meeting, driving my kids to soccer and band, while I’m watching “Glee,” eating dinner… Clearly, it’s fun to step up to a new challenge.
6) Life takes time. Nothing is created overnight – there’s no magic bullet for moving forward. It’s all in the doing, doing, doing, then learning from the doing. Have you noticed that moving something from the metaphysical realm – the realm of pure, light energy, the realm of ideas – to the realm of the physical, is HARD? Well, it is. The energy is dense here on the physical plane. The more you’re prepared for that, the better.
I hope you’ll be inspired to do your own 30-Day Twitter experiment, and follow mine at @kathycaprino.com. Let me know if you do, and I’ll follow you and do my best to connect/comment along the way.
I promise you – in the process, you’ll peel back some layers about yourself and be deeply surprised at what you find.