Social Media & Its Effect On Me.

Hey guys ! So here we are.. another year😊, 2019 you will be the best yet 🙊💁🏼‍♀️. I thought for my first blog of 2019 I would share the struggles I faced in 2017 -2018 regarding social media and what I have learned. In 2017 I started up Active Silhouettes Health and Well-being Instagram page ( which is now @thesoul_ofme💗🙋‍♀️). I went all guns blazing, learning so much about social media and how to be able to connect with people around the world to help motivate and encourage people. I would put so much heart into what I wrote on my post. I didn’t want to just post a picture without having meaning behind that photo. Day after day I would sit in my little writing space and start thinking about how it was that I could encourage people today💁🏼‍♀️. Before I started my encouragement page, I would just post photos on my personal Instagram to share with my friends and family! I wasn’t concerned with growing my Instagram, so reaching people wasn’t really an issue for me. I started @thesoul_ofme in 2017 and I went into this thinking 💭 Yes I am going to be able to inspire all these people and make a dent of change in this world 🌍. Little did I know just how much this would play with my emotions and effect me more than I thought it would. Like I said I would put so much thought into my post to encourage people and when I wasn’t getting the response I thought I “should” be getting , it made me doubt whether I should continue with my Instagram page 🤦‍♀️🙊. I would see girls put up a picture of themselves with a little “💗” or like some little one word “life” comment and get 1000’s of people respond to their post. By Feb 2018 I was posting every single day and still trying really hard to put all my heart into my posts but finding it hard to keep up with content that I thought people wanted to see and I was still focusing on the response I “should” be having🤦‍♀️.

By this stage social media and me were a very bad mix and I was ready to shut down my page and call it a day but then I was also getting messages from followers that made me snap out of it and made me remember why I started this in the first place. Beautiful women telling me just how much they need this post today or they look forward to my post of encouragement 💗. It wasn’t about how many people I could reach, it was about the people it did reach and how it could impact their day, their frame of mind and the way they saw themselves and their own life 💗. From that point on I stopped putting up post every single day and just posted when I really had something to say that was completely from the heart. I stopped worrying about how many people it was reaching and purely focused on how it would encourage the people who did see it . I stopped comparing myself to other women on Instagram and focused on encouraging and inspiring the people who did read my post 💁🏼‍♀️🙋‍♀️💗. Since then my passion for writing and photography is going strong. Without passion for what you do, your journey will be unable to flourish.The reason I wanted to write this as my first blog for the year was to tell those of you reading this blog to kick start this year with the right frame of mind. Social media is great for promoting business, connecting with one another, inspiring people etc. But it also can have some down sides. There are so many behind the scene aspects that go into growing your Instagram, taking the right photos, advertising and Insta stories for Influencers that many of us don’t know about. I certainly did not know about any of these little behind the scenes things before I started my encouragement page. I did do a lot of research on how to get my name out there (some was a load of crap) and I took on all the advice given in all the information. After how all of this had affected my mental health I decided that I would do my Instagram the way I wanted to, keep writing about what I am passionate about , take photos for my Instagram when ever I felt like it (I just love photography so why not 💁🏼‍♀️💁🏼‍♀️). I started doing things my way and stopped worrying about how I “should” grow it. This year, if you are someone who has compared their lives to an Influencer’s life, just remember all the back ground work that goes into it. Most Influencer’s work really hard behind the scenes to make that Instagram look appealing to you. So just remember don’t look at an Instagram thinking you should have a life like that with all the bells and whistles . Just watch and enjoy the content provided to you by your Influencer❤️. Focus on yourself and the life your live. Leave the down falls of social media in 2018 and make 2019 the start of using social media for the way it was intended 💗 . Get connected, inspire and be inspired . Here is to a great 2019 ladies and gents 🥂✌🏻💗.