How to be authentic on social media… without exhausting yourself?

Over the years, many soulpreneurs have written to me with this kind of concern:

“I’m not sure I can sustain a presence on social media, even if it’s good for business… it feels exhausting to have to keep up an image of who I am. Or maybe I will run out of things to say…”

I’m with you. If I had to pretend to be someone I’m not, it would exhaust me too.

It’s the feeling of having to keep up an image — knowing you “should” be present online, but dreading the regularity of having to show up and perform for others…

I hope to inspire you into a different way — a way to keep showing up that is a lot more authentic, and empowering.

I’ve been active on social media since 2009 — about 17 years now. Most of the colleagues I started with back then? They are no longer posting. I’m one of the few still showing up, and still finding it meaningful to this day.

Over time, I figured out a practice that I could sustain. I hope to teach that to you in this post.

Before we talk about the how, let’s be clear what authentic social media is — and what it isn’t.

What I see as authentic social media:

So much of what people call “authentic” social media is actually performance dressed up as vulnerability…

Instead, truly authentic social media is public journaling — documenting our evolving professional journey, in a way that intends to benefit (or connect to) others. It’s to embody a friendship-like presence, where we share what’s true for us today, in the hopes that it resonates with them too.

In other words, it’s a practice of presence over perfection.

It’s also service-oriented posture — we post what we sense might be genuinely helpful, even if to only one caring person.

It’s not image upkeep. And it’s not chasing virality, or follower counts. (We do pay attention to the patterns of engagement over time, as a way to sense into how we can be more helpful, but the priority is still authentic presence-and-service.) It’s not tactical manipulation for attention or sales. It’s certainly not pretending to be someone you’re not. And it’s not “personal brand” as a constructed alter ego.

Why social media feels exhausting:

In my experience, most soulpreneurs are caught in at least one of two traps.

The first trap is image upkeep, or perfectionism. You feel each post must be polished, eloquent, and on-message.

Where does that come from?

Often, past conditioning… your parents, teachers, the authority figures who said you had to perform, to get straight A’s, to never look foolish. The voice that whispers “this isn’t ready yet!” before every post? It’s usually their voice, not yours…

Perfectionism often echoes a rigid inner critic, leading us into a cycle of relentless self-judgment.

The result: dread before you publish a post. Over time, fear of running out of “smart” things to say. And the feeling that authentic expression is a luxury you can’t afford.

The second trap is validation-seeking. It’s the (often subconscious) habit of tying engagement metrics — likes, comments, shares — to your sense of worth. A commenter of an earlier version of this post wrote: “Facebook stokes our early attachment wounds.” — Carissa Lane.

You publish a post, then you reflexively check notifications. The whiplash that follows — disappointment when it’s flat, brief high when it lands — is its own kind of exhaustion.

The common root of both traps is the same: outsourcing your sense of worth. You hand it to imagined critics (in the first trap) or to engagement metrics (in the second). Either way, your wellbeing ends up in another’s hands, and you exhaust yourself trying to manage what they do with it.

So how do we get free? Three reframes — and the first one is about who you’re actually showing up for.

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Reframe 1 — Showing up for a true friend

Here’s the scene I keep imagining in my mind and heart: When you’re with a true friend — a soulmate — what does it feel like?

You’re not planning what to say. You don’t worry about your “image”. You can say something dumb and walk it back, do something that you later correct — and the friend stays. Sometimes you’re funny, sometimes boring, sometimes you don’t look so good. That soulmate friend sees past the surface, to your deeper self, and accepts all of it.

That’s the energy I hope we can bring to social media, especially when you’re trying to become more consistent.

What it looks like in practice: do less planning for now. Simply share what’s on your mind today. Don’t require your posts to be polished, brilliant or “viral”. Maybe take a minute to reboot your energy before showing up — but expect nothing of the content itself.

A reader once wrote this to me, and it’s stuck:

“Recently, I found that it’s a lot easier to write something authentic if at the beginning, I pretend I’m just writing a text to my best friend. Super low stakes, no judgment. I think the fear of judgment is ultimately what causes people to feel like they have to maintain some ‘image,’ which then creates the perfectionism trap.”

There’s a principle from Gary Vaynerchuk I like to point soulpreneurs toward: document, don’t create.

The “create” mindset says: this must be a work of art. That mindset can create anxiety too…

The “document” mindset says: share your current thoughts, feelings, observations, and what your work is teaching you right now. Come as you are. I call it public journaling — reflecting in a way that might resonate with others too.

What’s worth documenting? Things like:

• Aspects of your professional journey

• Your current insights, however they’re evolving

• Your mistakes, and how you recover from them

• Powerful experiences and what you learned from them

• What’s surprising you in your field right now

• What’s energizing you right now

• What you sense isn’t being said enough out there

• What your intuition is telling you to share with others

…and so on. The point isn’t to perform thoughtfulness — it’s to share what’s truly happening, in a way that others might learn from.

That “true friend” you’re showing up for, by the way, isn’t most of your audience at first. At the beginning of your creator journey, your true audience is a tiny slice. Let’s look at who they actually are.

Reframe 2 — Your 2% audience, and your energy signature

Here’s what I remind myself of whenever I record a video or write a post: most viewers will drop off. Statistically, by this point in this very blog post, most readers are gone.

That’s fine. That’s the reality of authentic public expression.

The ones who stay? Those are the souls I’m showing up to connect with.

Not the 80% who clicked away. The 20% who didn’t. And within that 20%, an even smaller slice — what I think of as the 2% audience — are the ones who keep coming back. Who somehow get value even from the boring or unattractive aspects of my content. Who message me out of the blue six months later to say something I wrote helped them. That kind of resonance is rare, and it’s the whole point.

I’m at best an average writer. English is actually my second language. And on video, sometimes I pause where I don’t know what to say. I don’t mind if some/many people think I’m unattractive on camera.

And yet — over a decade into consistently showing up in writing and on video, I still have some who keep getting value from what I put out there, as myself.

I wish for you to feel the principle in your bones: when you show up comfortable as you are, the comfort itself transmits. That comfort is part of what I call your energy signature — the thing your 2% audience is actually resonating with. It’s not your polish. Maybe not even your eloquence or visual style. It’s something underneath all of that, which only emerges when you stop trying to perform.

But even when you’ve found your true audience, the trap can still pull you back. Even their approval can become the new measuring stick. So the third reframe goes deeper — into the question of worth itself.

Reframe 3 — Appreciate praise as their generosity not your greatness

Because you were already born great.

You are worth infinity.

Social media “likes” don’t add to that. Lack of likes doesn’t subtract from it.

Within you is a deep and unlimited well of creativity, an infinite source of greatness — and the engagement metrics on your posts tell you nothing about that source.

If you don’t reconnect to this before posting, the algorithm becomes your judge of self-worth.

One reader summed up the heart of it: “Your worth as a human being is unlimited.”

A warning, though, especially for those of us whose work is beginning to be appreciated more publicly: when generous praise comes in, the move is not to absorb it as “I’m awesome.” The move is to think “what a generous person they are.” It’s a small reframe, but it protects against the slow inflation of ego — which is what eventually corrupts a lot of soulpreneurs who do find their audience.

What the algorithm is actually doing:

When you scroll your feed, here’s what’s happening behind the scenes — and it’s worth understanding, because once you see it, the demoralizing feeling shifts.

You’re seeing the top 2% of posts at most. The ones that already got engagement. You are not seeing the 98% — including most of your friends’ posts — that got near-zero engagement. So if you use your feed as your measuring stick, you’re guaranteed to feel discouraged.

Here’s how the algorithm actually works: in waves. When you post, your content is shown to maybe 10% of your network — say, 10 of your 100 connections who are online currently. If those 10 engage, the algorithm widens the next wave. If they don’t, your post stops there.

The algorithm isn’t trying to suppress you. It’s testing each post for resonance.

Which is why I want to say something a little contrarian here: please stop demonizing social media. It’s actually a brilliant tool to allow for your authentic expression. It tests your content with different slices of people, sifting for the ones who resonate. Without it, you’d have no way to find your true fans — they’d be lost in the massive crowd.

Now, the realistic timeline. For my first year and a half posting consistently on social media, I had barely any likes. The algorithm kept testing… and eventually it found one person who really resonated with what I was saying… then showed my content to that person again… and a true fan emerged. Then another. Then a few more.

This is years of steady practice, not weeks, not even months. Anyone telling you otherwise is probably selling you something.

With the inner game settled and the algorithm reframed, here’s the ongoing practice…

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The Social Media Sanity practice — 7 steps

None of these steps are complicated. Doing them consistently is the challenge:

1. Before posting, reconnect with your source of worth. Prayer, meditation, breath, the energy reboot practice — whatever grounds you in your true worth before you write or record. Even 30 seconds is helpful.

2. Document, don’t create. Write or record from your present moment — what you’re noticing, learning, working through — not from a strategic content plan, if you’re not already consistent in publishing.

3. Publish, then walk away. Once you post, don’t keep checking! Go do something else. The act of ignoring engagement strengthens your internal locus of motivation.

4. Turn off notifications for likes, comments, and shares — both phone and desktop. If you haven’t done this already, do it today! This one move alone has freed a lot of soulpreneurs from a daily drip of low-grade suffering.

5. Check engagement once in a while. A day later, a week later, a month later. The purpose: to see what topics and approaches resonate. Not to validate your worth. There’s a real difference. It’s to practice the 3 stages of content creation.

6. Boost what genuinely resonates. If a piece seems to be helping people, consider amplifying it — through Facebook or Instagram ads, sharing it in your newsletter, repurposing into another format. Let the response guide where you put your energy, to make a positive impact on more people.

7. See it all as long-game testing. Not as judgment of your worth or your skill. As Baz Luhrmann once wrote: “The race is long, but in the end, it’s only with yourself.”

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“But what about…?” — a few common concerns

“But I’m trying to build my professional presence. I can’t just use it as my personal diary.”

You’re right — and I want to be careful here, because I’ve said “document your journey” and that can be misheard. I don’t mean document your personal life. I mean your professional journey of learning from mistakes and successes. The term “personal brand” can actually be misleading — it really should be called something like authentic professional presence.

For us soulpreneurs especially: our ideal clients aren’t drawn to a curated alter ego. They’re drawn to the authenticity of our professional journey, and they respect the growth they see along the way. They’re looking for someone whose practice they can trust — not someone whose persona impresses them.

“But I’m not a good writer or speaker. My posts won’t be as polished as others’.”

Welcome to the club! As I admitted earlier, I’m at best an average writer. English is my second language. I pause and stumble on video. The polish is not the point — your 2% audience is here for the energy signature, which polish can actually obscure.

A reader, Mary Barringer, once left me this generous note: “You’re a true gem, George… I 100% agree about showing up ‘as is’ & letting the chips fall where they may. That’s a powerful practice unto itself.”

That practice is available to you the moment you stop waiting to be ready.

“But I’m just starting out and I’m not ready to post publicly.”

There’s an on-ramp for this. Create a small, private Facebook group. Invite supportive friends or colleagues — ask first! — to witness your experimentations. Once you feel comfortable posting consistently there (maybe after a few weeks), expand the circle a bit. Then a bit more. This gradual widening often leads, almost without you noticing, to public posting when you’re genuinely ready for it.

“But what about AI? Is it inauthentic if I use it to write my posts?”

This is the new question for 2026, and it deserves a careful answer.

The short version: AI can be a wonderful thinking partner and editing assistant — I use it daily. But the energy signature has to remain yours. If you outsource the expression itself, the 1% who would have resonated with you won’t find you. They’ll find a generic AI voice that doesn’t carry your soul.

For the longer answer, I’ve written two pieces:

• How I recommend working with AI without losing your soul (the IDEA framework) — for the broader “how” of soulful AI use.

• How to write without sounding like AI — for the practical editor-process that keeps your voice intact.

Behind every one of these objections is the same underlying question: can I really keep this up? The answer turns out to be a matter of scale — not strategy.

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Today is enough.

Here’s the principle that makes all of this sustainable, and it’s almost embarrassingly simple.

Don’t try to think about all the future posts you’ll ever make. That thought right there — the imagined infinite scroll of content you’ll need to produce for the rest of your career — is what exhausts people before they’ve even begun.

Today is about all I can handle.

The strength and support arrive for each day’s challenges. We don’t need to summon energy for posts we haven’t written yet, for conversations we haven’t had yet, for an audience that doesn’t exist yet. Show up today (or on whichever days you’ve committed to) and share what’s true for you that day.

Consistency over intensity. Daily, weekly, or a few set times a month — but reliably. Not heroically.

The 17-year proof of this, for me: most of the soulpreneurs I started alongside on social media in 2009 are gone from the platforms now. I’m still here because the practice doesn’t drain me — it expresses me. The difference between those two things is everything.

Your turn…

Show up today with one post that’s true for you, right now. Not perfect. Not viral. Just true.

The algorithm will start testing it for you. Your 2% audience is out there — and your energy signature is the only thing that will reach them. Borrowed style, polished image, performed authenticity… those will reach a different audience, who won’t stay.

Give yourself today what you always deserve: unconditional love, authentic expression.

If this resonates, I’d love to hear from you in the comments — especially what you’re working through right now in your own social media practice. Allow yourself to be seen by other soulpreneurs who get it. 🙏🧡

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Originally written in March 2019, fully updated in May 2026.