The Hayley Lloyd Show

Social Media Isn't Real... Time For Some Real Talk

• Hayley Lloyd

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Ever found yourself struggling with the hidden challenges of running a business while maintaining a facade of perfection on social media? Join me as I candidly share my personal journey through these emotional complexities, especially during times when my partner is away. 

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone, welcome back to the podcast. Today is gonna be a little bit of a vulnerable share. I'm literally sat here batch recording podcast because my partner is away in Melbourne at the moment. So I have this free, lots of free evenings at the moment, so I'm using them to navigate through my own feelings, I guess, and there's a couple of things that I really want to talk to you guys and share with some of the things that I've want to talk to you guys and share with some of the things that I've been navigating with personally at the moment.

Speaker 1:

I know that it can be very easy to see what is happening on social media and, you know, see this very kind of perfect lifestyle. But remember that trend that was going around a while back where it's like social media isn't real and then like gave you like all of the realities that people were facing and you know it was kind of that just reality check of like. Oh okay, people are real and people are actually going through things and social media is a very one-dimensional view of things. That's kind of what I want this episode to be, where I'm just bringing you behind the scenes of some of the things that I've been personally navigating through, because business is hard and it can sometimes feel like are we the only one that's can sometimes feel like, are we the only one that's going through this? Like, are we the only one that's struggling? And like I just want you to know that if you have been struggling with anything whether it is health, whether it is something going on with your business, your clients, like it is normal to feel uncomfortable during this journey, like a lot of people do. And this is why we join mastermind spaces like I am a part of myself mastermind spaces consistently, so that I can talk to other business owners and just hear okay, I'm not crazy, everyone's going through this stuff, everyone has their own things, everyone's got their own vices. Like we're not alone in this. And I really want this episode to be healing for you in that respect where, even though you know on the surface it looks a certain way, there are still things that I navigate behind the scenes that come up for me at different points.

Speaker 1:

Now, a lot of you guys know that I am consistently preaching, that we are a work in progress and I am on a consistent journey myself of building my own inner authority, and that's a constant process because we consistently hit new energetic ceilings and there is this premise that I speak about new level, new devil where whenever you hit a new level, like something else comes up and the old stuff that you've been working through comes up in a different dimension. And that's kind of the whole purpose of inner authority, like the reason that you know I scaled quickly that now I am a magnet for money. You know, whatever you want to call it is literally because I am consistently doing this work, like I live this work, and whenever I feel whether it's discomfort, resistance, like a low feeling, I'm not trying to pretend that's not there. I don't do toxic positivity, I lean into it. I look at what's it trying to tell me and there is a lot of moments like that in business. Let's be honest. You know whether it's a launch not going the way that you want, or a client having something funky go on, or payment disputes, like there's so many things that require you to step up at different levels and the experiences and the problems that you'll experience when you're just starting are really really different to the problems that you'll experience when you're just starting, are really really different to the ones that you experience at 50, 100k months, if not more, when you're really scaling, and anyone that has like a really large business will, you know, vouch for that is. We all experience different problems like and in Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic she talks about. You know you choose the shit sandwich that you want to eat, but in any whether it's career pursuit that you're doing there is always a version of a shit sandwich. There is always parts of like whether it's a career or what that don't feel as good to do and I think we've got to really be aware of that.

Speaker 1:

So some of the things that I've been navigating recently. The first thing is recently I realized just how addicted to my phone I had become and I always talk about this concept of creating, not consuming, on apps, and around December of last year we made a really, really good push for TikTok and I was posting like pretty consistently on there. I had a video editor and it was hard. I just didn't vibe with that app. There was something about TikTok that energetically, just didn't feel right for me. It felt like a very young audience and it felt like the quality of lead that would often come through there wasn't of a very high quality, and that's been my personal experience. I know that people have different ones, but I think in general, across the board, the attention span on TikTok is just of a much. People are consuming much faster and I think the quality of lead is not as like high ticket as it would be for Instagram, for example, example. That's been my experience.

Speaker 1:

And so when we were kind of doing this push and I had like a couple of weird experiences in December where, you know, one of my TikToks went semi-viral and it attracted like all of the horrible misogynistic men of the internet just telling me that I should unalive myself, that I should for like the most ridiculous things I was doing, like a talking piece on Matt Rife and like talking about feminine authority. And obviously this is where I realized that feminine authority as a term was quite a charged word because it has gender in it, when actually, you know, feminine authority doesn't have anything to do with gender. So you know you may have recently noticed, have anything to do with gender. So you know, you may have recently noticed that I started talking about integrated authority and that's because I want that topic to be able to be palatable for a wider audience and to be able to talk about it without having to talk about gender. But that was actually a tipping point for that, because I was like, okay, I've got to find another way to talk about this.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, that like really knocked me and I had like a really weird experience where, okay, without going into too much detail, but I ended up getting psychically attacked in a dream and over the next two weeks after that dream, the attack that had happened, where it was basically like this physical torture thing and I was like awake, like it was like a lucid dream. I experienced all of it. It was horrible. It started coming out in my body and so I started developing bruises like aches and pains, random blisters would develop out of nowhere, my boob like swelled up really large, like all of this random stuff was basically happening and I ended up like having to go to a shaman and I was just like something's not right, like can someone like help me remove whatever has like attached? And I had to go through this long process and literally within a day of doing that, all of those symptoms disappeared.

Speaker 1:

But anyway, weird experience with TikTok and so kind of from that place I was like, okay, tiktok's like an odd place, but I never deleted the app and I had the app just kind of sitting on my phone and I was just going through and it started being like, first of all, like gathering market research, like what's doing well for other people. But over time that little excuse that I was giving myself just turned into I'm just scrolling now and TikTok's algorithm is so much more addictive than Instagram's like so much more addictive. And there is just a consistent new stream of new people, new content, like it's actually outstanding, like how they've done it, how addictive it is and how you can literally scroll for hours, days and consistently be fed something completely new and really interesting. And so I got started to get really addicted to it. But I didn't really realize that I was addicted to it because my partner also has. Like you know, we have some bad habits around phones that just we let kind of creep in. So up until about a month ago we had let it get to the point where you know if we were watching tv in the evening we'd be double screening and you know we'd be so preoccupied by our phone.

Speaker 1:

And I started noticing over the past sort of three months that my mental health was starting to dip a little bit and I was starting to feel this like feeling of I don't know whether I can handle this, and it's really weird because I'm usually a very positive, like I can handle any amount of pressure, but I was starting to feel this like I don't know whether I can handle this pressure. Like it felt like things were like mounting and mounting and I was having like more, not mindset spins, but just feelings of not being able to catch my breath and I was starting to almost feel like low and I was like what is going on? Like every so often I just have this really low moment. But then I'd counteract it by basically scrolling on TikTok and I'd be dopamine hunting. And I know I have an addicted personality. You know I am an ex alcoholic and sober now for coming up to five years, but I know that I do have that addictive personality and I have ADHD. I am a dopamine hunter.

Speaker 1:

So I was just like hunting for dopamine on these platforms and about a month ago I had this really weird weekend where Tom was watching a load of rugby and I didn't have anything else to do, so I just basically sat on the sofa and doom scrolled and I shit. You know, I was there for about three hours and I sort of got up in the end and I was just like I feel so shit and like I can't handle anything. I feel so low. And I just turned to Tom and I was just like I think I'm really addicted to my phone and I had this really weird thought where I was just like what did I used really addicted to my phone and I had this really weird thought where I was just like what did I used to do when I was growing up in the 90s like I'm a 90s baby, I was born in 1991 like we didn't have like phones or any of this shit, like when we were growing up. You know, it was just you went outside and you played.

Speaker 1:

And I said to Tom I was like I don't know what I used to do, like what did I used to do when we didn't have anything to do? And I was genuinely so confused and I said I was like would you be willing to do this phone detox with me, cause it's really hard to like navigate a phone detox when, like your partner's like glued to their phone. So he agreed and we decided to basically put our phones down and I was just like I'm going to like lock it into another room, I'm not going to go on it. And within, and I was just like I'm gonna like lock it into another room, I'm not gonna go on it. And within a day I started feeling a little bit clearer, my mental health had kind of cleared up. And then the next day we were like okay, let's go on a hike. This hike was so weird, so I, we got into the mountains and in Queensland, which is where we are, the jungle is like vast, it's like huge and you feel tiny like it's.

Speaker 1:

It's like huge and you feel tiny Like it's. It's dwarfing, like the trees are ginormous. It literally stretches for miles, upon miles, upon miles. And I realized and I'm always embarrassed to say this because I I can't believe it but like I hadn't been on a hike in five months, like since we had moved to the Gold gold coast, I hadn't done anything like that, and I think it's because I actually had like a little bit of a difficult time settling in the new place and, like you know, suddenly having this identity shift of being a mortgage owner, I think it really put me into like this place of just like craving routine and trying to find stability and wanting to just like nest and everything. But in doing that I kind of stopped doing the things that I know make me feel really healthy.

Speaker 1:

So, anyway, we went into the forest and for about 15 minutes it was as though my field of vision had become really, really small. And because I've been staring at the phone so much, obviously your field of vision is tiny and I think this is. There is a difference even between staring at a laptop versus staring at a phone, because the phone is so much smaller and so you're like focusing on a much smaller area, so my scope of vision had like shrunk. So, coming into this like hugely vast forest, I was like holy shit, this is so big. And I started feeling dizzy, like really dizzy, like I had to walk so slowly and I was like looking around, like my vision was like kind of not quite like coming into vision and I it was like almost a little bit blurry.

Speaker 1:

It was odd and I remember seeing this rock on the ground and it was almost it looked crystallized. And I sort of picked up this rock and I was like random, why am I drawn to this? And I kind of just held it and I was just like this rock is going to ground me. And so I walked with this rock and within like five minutes of walking with the rock, I started feeling so much more grounded, like I took some deep breaths into my body and changed my breathing and I suddenly completely grounded into the space. I was like, okay, I feel so much better now, this is great.

Speaker 1:

We got to the end of the trail and, um, as we got to the end, I was like okay, I feel so much better now, this is great. We got to the end of the trail and as we got to the end, I was like I'm going to take, you know, this rock with me and, because it's obviously like a really grounding thing, and I just had this very clear image of my mind of the rock going back into the lake and I was like, oh, okay, the forest wants me to like give this rock back. And then it just started crumbling back into nature. So let that rock go. And we walked back and we were driving home and I was like I feel completely different. This is so strange. I feel completely different. I feel like my creativity has come back online. I honestly feel like a different person.

Speaker 1:

And so, as I was allowing my creativity to go, new ideas were coming through, fresh perspectives, and I got this download of, like you know, download a breathwork app. And so I decided to download a breathwork app and the next day I started doing breathwork and I've always kind of I've known about breathwork and I have enjoyed it, but it's never been like a consistent practice because my body wasn't used to it and it does take a little bit of getting used to because you know you're expanding and contracting your body in ways that you haven't so for periods of time it almost felt a little bit painful and uncomfortable for me and I never wanted to go through the discomfort of making it regular anyway decided to change that. So the next day I started this breath work journey and I completely like something just like changed in my body at a cellular level and it's like all of these aspects of myself kind of like linked back together. I can't even describe it. And I just had all this realization. I was just like, oh my God, this phone addiction has been literally weighing me down for so long. So I literally got my phone. I deleted TikTok off my phone and any other app that was draining my energy and made a commitment. I was like I'm only going to be creating on Instagram. Now I am not going to be consuming in the slightest.

Speaker 1:

It has now been over a month and I can categorically say I have so much more energy, so much more clarity, so much more creativity, so much more energy, so much more hope, so much more momentum, like all of those feelings of like, dread, like can I handle this? Come back to the phone and I started researching the science behind this, because I also was doing a lot more breath work that there are two things that can really really create low moods and this feeling of I don't know whether I can handle it, which is, you know, I speak to a lot of people and sometimes people spin through these loops. Right, the two things are guess what they are? Number one, over consumption of social media and feeling like not being as grounded in your life as much. And number two this is so interesting your breath and how you're breathing. So if you are breathing in a shallow way, and often when you are over consuming on your phone, you will actually start to shallow breathe because it starts to stimulate cortisol, stress, response, anxiety, because you're watching all of these things. You know, people getting cancelled, blah, blah, blah, like all of this stuff, so your breathing gets shallower. When your breathing gets shall, you start to feel like you can't handle stuff because you are basically going into a fight or flight response, and so it makes you feel more depressed, it makes you feel more anxious and it makes you feel like you can't handle pressure. I mean, my mind is blown. I mean I knew this stuff conceptually, but like to have experienced the difference now.

Speaker 1:

So the reason that I'm sharing this with you guys is because I know for a fact there's probably some people that are listening to this right now that have been cycling through the same experiences that I was going through not knowing what's wrong, being like you know, I'm just so tired, I just have no energy. Like what's wrong? I don't have any time. That was another thing. Like I felt like I had no time, I'm just spending all my time fucking scrolling. I've got so much more time now. That's so much more time.

Speaker 1:

I feel like so many people are going through this and you don't realize that there is a very simple fix, and that simple fix is start breathing differently and get off your phone. And I say that with so much love and it's super simple and it's and it's really hard because sometimes it is the most frustratingly simple things that actually have the most profound effects. You know, for me the most profound effects have been number one when I gave up caffeine and I realized, holy shit, I have been severely dehydrated for the entire like 30 years of my life prior to this. And number two was when I started this breath work and I was like, holy shit, I've, I've just not been breathing right. I've not been breathing right. So I'm going to be doing a breath work facilitation program and I'm actually going to be bringing the breath into feminine authority manifestation school and, um, it's going to be affecting my programs. Um, if you are actually coming to the retreat, I'm doing a three-day workshop in Sydney in person. You're going to experience this on the third day as well, which I'm very excited about. If you want information about the in-person retreat, please give me a message and I'll send you over. It's a very, very reasonable price. It's under $1,000. So just give me a message.

Speaker 1:

But that's one thing that I've been navigating through and it's just so mind-blowing to me how such a small shift can be so impactful. And I've kind of spoken to a few of my clients about it and you just don't realize how addicted and how quickly you can become addicted, like you, because suddenly one small thing can become an unhealthy pattern and can become worse and worse and worse and worse over a period of time. You don't even realize it's happening. So question for you guys what is your relationship like with your phone? You know, what's your relationship like with your breath? Where are you currently breathing into your body? If you are feeling like you know you go through these cycles of burnout or you go through these cycles of feeling like there's a lot of pressure and you can't handle things, I am almost willing to bet that there is a breathing issue and a phone issue. So you can let me know if I'm wrong on that, if I'm way off the mark. And obviously there is a load of inner authority work and that's all of the work that I do in Feminine Authority Manifestation School. But those are just some simple fixes that I have found recently that have really helped.

Speaker 1:

Another thing that has been pressing on me over the past few months that I'm now finally coming out of is, as I kind of spoke about earlier, we moved to the Gold Coast and I became a homeowner. Now what I noticed was this increase of like pressure, like I was actually paying the same amount of rent that I am now paying on my mortgage. But for some reason, when I came here and I suddenly had this mortgage, the dynamic of it changed for some reason and this adjustment to suddenly being a homeowner was doing something to my nervous system and it made me really, really tired and I spoke about this like struggling to kind of land into the space. Like I was working quite a lot with a kinesiologist over the past few months to really just land into the space. Like I was working quite a lot with a kinesiologist over the past few months to really just land into the space a little bit more and to make sure there wasn't any entities and to make sure all of the feng shui was really good, because I just struggled to land here. And it's weird because this house is amazing, like it's incredible, and actually the feng shui of the house is really good.

Speaker 1:

So there was something in me that shifted when it's like my identity changed when I became a homeowner. Now I can attribute that to when I was growing up and some things that happened in my family when my parents bought the house that I grew up in and it was when I was about 10 years old and I witnessed some things around, you know, kind of taking a financial stretch and taking on this mortgage and what it did to like the family dynamic and stuff. And I think I absorbed a lot of that when I was young and I created these beliefs that being a homeowner is really stressful and it's going to really exhaust me and it's going to like affect my mental health and I had to kind of like unpick all of these. And so this is what I mean coming back to that inner authority piece, new level, new devil, right like my energetic capacity, as soon as I became a homeowner, changed suddenly.

Speaker 1:

This was a different dynamic that I was in, just because my identity I perceived that my identity had changed somehow and I went through this period of also feeling like I needed to grow up really quickly and that I needed to mature my brand and that I needed to like just a lot of these things that came up with this new level of being a homeowner. And so that's another thing that I've been kind of working through, which has been like a long process, which hasn't been like as simple as you'd think it would be like, because I'm trying to figure out, because it's very subtle. It's a very subtle feeling where it just feels like I just hadn't fully landed until about a month ago as well, and about a month ago I actually got really sick and I got like this cold and I was forced to just basically spend like a week in bed and over that period everything changed and I'm not entirely sure what happened, but when I got out of that sickness and maybe it was a spiritual purge I talk about this quite a lot where sometimes you know you get sick because you need to purge something energetically and I fully surrendered to that sickness. I didn't try to like force my way through it or anything, I just fully allowed myself to be sick and I was like what is this trying to show me? And I think it was trying to show me a lot about creativity. But I think as well, I really just landed into this house and I fully just allowed myself to be vulnerable in the space and and just released all of the desire to control aspects of, you know, my life and my business and I just succumbed to the sickness and my creativity just came back twofold and I stopped doubting as much. Like my clarity came back, my energy came back and I can't really like exactly say what shed. But in the final day that I was sick, I did like a very big um releasing session and it's basically a session that I give you guys the process to in feminine authority manifestation school to basically remove blocks or shed parts of yourself quite quickly from the body.

Speaker 1:

And so I did that process and I physically felt something shift from my body and I was like, oh, it feels like a weight has just lifted and I haven't felt that same pressure since because it was affecting you know the way that I was showing up. It was affecting the energy levels that I had it affected. You know how I felt about like the next moves in our financial journey, because the next move is really, to, you know, start buying investment properties, and I was having some fear like coming up around that which now I just don't feel these identity shifts that I'm talking about can come up at any different level and you know it could be the identity shift of like going from a six-figure business owner to a multiple six-figure business owner and suddenly you feel like you're a different person and you need to show up in a different way and you need to behave in a different way when actually you don't. It's like an external thing that's shifted. Something in your belief system has shifted and makes you feel like things are different, but they aren't actually different and you need to figure out what that is. Or it could be literally becoming a homeowner, like me. It could be as soon as you start making above a certain amount of money. It could be becoming a mom. You know all of these things. There can be identity shifts that come with it. But it's what we do with those identity shifts Like.

Speaker 1:

Are we going to allow it to restrict us or are we going to kind of surrender to it and allow the purging that needs to take place happen so we can step into the next identity that we have coming? Because remember that any expansion is built out of discomfort. Think about the tower card in tarot it's all about. Sometimes you need to deconstruct everything, to rebuild everything in a better way, in a stronger way, and this is the entire kind of premise of inner authority building is consistently leaning into discomfort. To deconstruct what is old and build something new, you are breaking the habit of being who you've always been to be, who you want to be in the future.

Speaker 1:

And these little identity shifts can be sneaky, sometimes you don't notice them, but the symptoms that they can create are the things that you'll notice. First I feel tired, I feel like I'm sabotaging myself, I feel like, you know, the list could go on and it certainly did for me, and it wasn't until I really got serious about, you know, shifting all of this, working with a kinesiologist, going really deeper into what I was feeling around this particular identity shift, that actually it started shifting. Instead of trying to resist it and be like why does this have to be a thing, I just submitted to the fact, okay, I'm clearly going through this identity shift, submit to it. And then I got sick and then it all purged. I'm going to end this episode here because I've kind of given you guys like a couple of things that, yeah, have been going on behind the scenes for me and have definitely know affected me personally, and, um, that I've been navigating the polarity of, like showing up as a business owner and some of these like more difficult emotions that come up. And that doesn't include any of the stuff that was happening with family or outside of that. So this is just that reminder that, like what you see on social media is just one half of the story, and I have definitely made an intentional shift to be less of a quote-unquote influencer on my Instagram stories and really have my business, be my business on social media.

Speaker 1:

I will be sharing a little bit more personal stuff on my podcast as I come back into the season a little bit more, but I really want you guys just to, yeah, remember the reality that we are all dealing with polarity. We are all dealing with ups and downs in business and it doesn't matter whether someone is trying to get their first 5K month, trying to get their first 50K months at consistent 100K months seven figure business, eight figure business Everyone experiences the same polarity. Everyone, everyone's going through something and so just remember that you know the next time that you're catching yourself like getting caught up in what someone else is doing and thinking someone else's life looks perfect, just remember that it's not. Just remember that there are always things that we are healing with and if you are experiencing any of the things that feel hard or that have had a lot of polarity in them, just know that you're not alone, and the biggest thing that I can suggest is getting in a space where you can talk about this stuff and see how normal it is.

Speaker 1:

You are not the only one that is going through this, you are not alone, and the sooner that you can realize that entrepreneurship is, there isn't really a time where it becomes quote-unquote easy. There's a time where it becomes more manageable and your problems become different, and it's a very rewarding journey. But as soon as we kind of stop striving for I want I just want life to be easy the more we can then accept that life is going to be filled with ups and downs and polarity and when we can accept that life becomes a hell of a lot easier because we're not searching for easy. We're searching for growth, we're searching for joy, we're searching for passion, but we're not expecting things to be easy, because that's not the purpose of life. We've come here to grow and growth doesn't happen in easiness.

Speaker 1:

So I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode. If you did, please make sure to tag me on your story at hayley june lloyd, and let me know your biggest takeaway. It means the absolute world to me. If you resonated with any of this. Please share your experiences with me too, and I'm sending you so much love. I'll see you in the next episode.