2. The Garbage Post Challenge

In this episode, I reveal the marketing tool I've been teaching for years that's gone legitimately viral.

Meet the Garbage Post Challenge: 100 pieces of content in 30 days with only TWO criteria. That's it. No genius required. Just words + posting.

I'll share the jaw-dropping results thousands of people have experienced, and how exactly it works opens up the floodgates of your creativity and income.

Your brain will fight this challenge with everything it's got. And I'll teach you how to change those conditioned responses so that you can make breakthrough after breakthrough. 

Your magnetic marketing voice isn't going to fall from the sky. Let's speak it into existence. 

Transcript

 Hey friends, welcome to Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Today I'm going to share with you a tool that I used to teach only inside of my teaching community. People kept asking me, business coaches who are clients of mine kept asking me if they could share the challenge with their own clients because there are just too many magical results coming out of the challenge and they're using it themselves.

They're watching their peers blowing up. And then I was like, all right, I officially give you everybody permission to go share it with the world. So, I shared it and it is maybe the one thing that I've created that has, I can say has properly gone viral. Like people know about this challenge and they don't even know about me.

And so I introduce you to the garbage post challenge. Here's what some of my people have said about this challenge. Lori said. The garbage post challenge opened up the floodgates of all the value, all the wisdom, all the ideas that I always want to share out of my head and into the world. I stopped filtering myself, overthinking, second guessing myself.

I stopped hiding. Not only am I willing to be seen, but I'm eager for my people to find me because I know I can help them. And then Lori signed a bunch of clients during, the challenge. I also want to share with you the words of Mattea, who said it totally changed my relationship to my audience.

People have been thanking me for my content since a few days ago, since a few days into my first garbage post challenge. My vulnerability is helping people. I have my own back and I'm more confident making offers. And lastly, I want to share with you the words of Stella. She says it allowed me to show up face.

To face my fears dead on, to be annoying, to be quote unquote too much. It generated three new clients for me. I will 100 percent be doing it again. I trust myself and the spirit of my business. That's what the garbage post challenge did for me. So grateful for Simone. So these are just a few examples of the many, many things that I just have been tagged on, that people have been sharing with me.

In terms of how to help them to share and to influence people for the better and to create impact and money, all of it. So want to learn how to do this already? Let's get right to it. Here is the garbage post challenge. It's barest bones. 100 pieces of content pushed out into the world in 30 days. By content, I mean social media posts, emails, YouTube video, blog post, Instagram story, whatever.

A unit of a thing that you created going out into the world and meeting Another human being at least one other human being actual human beings 100 pieces and here's the very very important part the criteria by which you create and Share your stuff how you know, if it counts for the challenge how you know if it's good enough here It is number one.

It has to involve English words You have to write things or say things in English words. If you're marketing in Spanish or Japanese, then it should involve Spanish or Japanese words. But whatever your language you're speaking to your people in, it has to involve words in that language. Human words, okay?

That's number one. Number two, it has to be shared. Published. Posted. Sent. Uploaded. Out there. That's it. Words in human language. Posted. That's it. If you posted, good morning, it's raining today, that counts. Why? Because it involved English words and you posted it. If you posted a 5 second video of your cat saying, my cat is so cute, her name is muffins, that counts.

Why? Because it involved English words and you posted it. But wait, Simone! I hear you saying, That's not even marketing. Why would that work? What is the point? That's precisely it. When you think that's not gonna work, what you're saying is, That sounds like it's just gonna be crap. It's just garbage.

Yeah, that's right. We're aiming at the level of garbage. Your brain's gonna say, that's bad. And you're gonna tell it back. Yeah, it's called the garbage post challenge. It's not the genius post challenge. It's supposed to suck. So when you write something and your brain says, Oh, that's going to make you look bad.

You tell your brain, Oh, you mean like it's garbage? Oh, good. Cause that's what I'm going for. I'm doing the garbage post challenge. If it was super awesome, I'd be doing the super awesome post challenge, not the garbage post challenge. And Simone said I should do the garbage post challenge. So there it is.

I'm succeeding. I'm doing it right. So I want to add a caveat here. I'm not actually calling what you create garbage. Very important caveat. It is not garbage. I'm using the word garbage in a tongue in cheek way to be funny, to be a little outrageous, to be playful, to be talk to that part of your brain that is really profession perfec what?

I can't even say this word. Perfectionistic. and mean and is a bully about having to make everything A plus all the time. We're telling that part of your brain, you know what? Don't even worry about it. It's just garbage. It's crap. Nothing to look at here. Nothing going on. So now you might be wondering why on earth this would be so magical and useful and super effective for your marketing in reaching your people.

And let me tell you here's why. The biggest thing that gets in the way of your marketing that I have seen over and over and over and over coaching thousands of people on their marketing It's not your lack of brilliance, it's not your lack of creativity, it is not your lack of work ethic, it is not your lack of a charming, compelling, magnetic personality, or your lack of skill or expertise.

What gets in the way is, wait for it, it's perfectionism. Which is, of course, a word that I can't even say now. It's the part of your brain that says That's not good enough. It has to be good. That's bad. We have to wait until we have something brilliant to say. We have to wait until this is edited enough.

We have to make sure this doesn't offend anybody. We have to make sure this represents a blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. If it's not perfect, I'm not saying it. That's the enemy. Oh, it feels really bad to present something that isn't A It feels bad to present something that's not perfect. I have standards, you know, you know, I just don't have any great ideas.

These are all just different ways of saying my brain doesn't think anything that I have to offer is good enough. And only what my brain thinks is great is worth meeting the world. You see, we are primed, every one of us, since we were little kids going to school to always do our best. You gotta do your best!

And that was what was taught to us with the best of intentions from growing up. teachers, parents, always do your best. But unfortunately, that kind of screwed us up a lot. In order to access our true confidence and the true full potential that we have for unleashing our gifts, we have to allow putting out lots of work that isn't our best right from the get go.

So in fact, Doing so, putting out tons of B even C work, D work, F work, is exactly how you get to the skill, the level of skill and mastery that you want to be at. So a big part of getting good at marketing is just doing a fuck ton of marketing and deconditioning the part of your brain that says, well, that wasn't good enough.

You shouldn't have done that. Or at least, stop that part of your brain from running the show and making all the decisions for you. So what I'm presenting to you is trial by fire. It is like the fastest way to deactivate that perfectionism circuit in your brain, which is hiding your skill, your genius, your creativity, your awesome personality, your lovability from the world.

So, at the end of the garbage post challenge, that's when you've put out 100 pieces of content in 30 days, your brain's still gonna say all the same shit, like, that wasn't good enough, people are gonna laugh at you, there's no point, nobody cares, this sucks, this stuff's stupid. Here's the difference. At the end of the hundred days, you're gonna stop being impressed by those thoughts.

You're going to stop. These thoughts are going to stop having such a strong charge. You're going to react to them less. You're going to believe them less. You're going to stop letting those thoughts call the shots on what you do, don't do, how you show up, or don't show up. You're going to be able to access the courage and confidence that allows you to hit post right away, make offers right away, share right away, connect right away.

And here's some other magical outcomes that you'll have achieved by the end of the challenge. You will have taught your nervous system to decouple visibility with threat. A lot of the times we have in our brains, visibility and threat are linked up, they're conflated. When you post, quote unquote, garbage posts multiple times a day, every single day, by the time a few days go by, or a week has gone by, you will have taught your nervous system, Hey, some of that felt really fucking awful, but every time my brain told me I was gonna die, I didn't actually die.

The whole time my brain told me the world was going to end if I posted this thing where I was like stuttering and there was typos. But the world didn't end. And actually as a matter of fact, not only did nobody die, not only did the world not end, I actually feel more confident. I actually had all these amazing connections with people and created some great stuff that Really surprised even me what the hell why is this happening again a big part of what's likely holding you back from fully Expressing your power to market is your nervous system being really used to conflating visibility with threat an imperfection with threat And even as we say, I want my work to be out there, I want people to see me and love me and hire me, in your nervous system, being seen, being known, and even being appreciated could feel like danger.

So the process of exposing yourself to steady, low doses of visibility, and allowing your body to confirm, yeah, it's a little discomfort here and there, but confirm over and over again that you haven't died. Nobody died. You're safe. It's just pixels on the internet. Nobody got hurt. Everything's okay.

You're actually healing your nervous system. Your nervous system is gonna not only get accustomed to linking up visibility with safety, it might also link up visibility with fun. And then you'll have unleashed a huge part of your marketing potential. It's really good stuff. The second thing, another one of the biggest things that pull people back, is when you think about creating content for marketing, a big thought error that people have is, I don't know what to say, or I can't think of what to say.

Now, not knowing what to say is also part of this professionalist thought pattern that binds you to this kind of magical, illusory idea of there being a perfect, brilliant, genius thought that you, that exists, that you're supposed to know what it is and say, and believing that, oh, it's just so hard to know what it is.

It's not worth sharing unless it's perfect. Unless it's right. That puts you in a bind of either forever waiting for those perfect thoughts to land on your lap, or when it's not landing on your lap, you're just like beating yourself up for having thoughts that feel like less than that. Or you're having ideas, but you're criticizing your ideas to death, or you're editing your ideas to death in a futile attempt to make those perfect, brilliant, genius ideas happen.

All in the meanwhile, you want to stab yourself in the face, and any creative inspiration that you might have had. Completely leaves the room in your effort to make it quote unquote good. Sound familiar? That, my friends, is a vicious cycle. So when you do the garbage post challenge, Just put your shit out there and don't worry about it.

You don't have time to babysit every single thing you posted and worry about it and obsessed over it and get paranoid when you gotta post a hundred pieces in 30 days because you gotta keep going. What almost everyone finds is that when you actually make yourself post something, anything, just whatever crap you think about, just a flyaway thought, a throwaway thought that you put out there just cause you gotta get something out there.

What comes out of you can actually be surprisingly valuable. My clients who do this always run into a ton of surprises. Like, oh, I just had a thought that I felt it was a throwaway thought, that nobody would care about, but I just posted it to meet the garbage post challenge quota. And then when I actually did share it, I got all these crazy responses from people being like, Oh my God, this is exactly what I needed to hear.

Oh my gosh, this is genius. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. I guarantee you, when you do this challenge, all the way through, you're gonna encounter this surprise over and over and over again. And when that happens, your brain learns by experience that your standards of perfectionism are full of shit. You have way more valuable ideas than you think.

Your ideas are way more interesting and universal than you give them credit for. What's obvious to you is potentially hugely valuable and transformative to somebody else. And you never get, you never got to let that idea meet the world. Because you weren't thinking it wasn't good enough. You weren't thinking it wasn't relevant.

You never got to mine from that stash of value that you already have unless you force yourself to practice that muscle of self trust over and over and over and over again. Just let it meet the world. Let it meet the world. Don't judge it. Don't analyze it. Don't overthink it. Don't criticize. Don't edit.

Put it out there. And also In this process, your brain learns to not attach too much importance to your own evaluations, to your own judgment of what's supposedly good or bad. By the end of the Garbage Post Challenge, a lot of people tell me, Yeah, like, I no longer listen to my brain when it tells me something is good or what's not, because you'll have had the experience of having been proven wrong too many times.

Your brain's going to think, Oh my gosh, I am going to post this because I have to meet the quota, but this is like so bad. And then 12 people will DM you being like, This saved my life today, thank you. Or you work on something for hours and you're like, Oh, this is so brilliant. And then you get it out there and it gets crickets.

You're going to learn how to not trust your own prejudgments. You're going to learn that it's more important to put your own shit out there. And you're not going to learn it in a theoretical way. learn it by experience. And that's when it really sinks into your nervous system. That's when it really rewires your brain, to be comfortable being courageous and confident.

You will not believe the number of people who tell me. I just put one garbage post out there, after another, thinking this is all crap, what am I even doing, this is a stupid idea, I don't know what Simone was thinking, telling me to do this, and all of a sudden, a client appears out of nowhere, and says, hey, I was looking for someone who does exactly what you do, and that thing that you just posted, I just found that and I want to hire you or somebody that you weren't even thinking about someone who wasn't even on your radar Cuz someone you randomly knew from school or church or whatever.

It's like hey I've been reading what you've been saying and I really connect with it I'd love to talk to you more about hiring you. We're inviting you out to give us a talk or whatever the very Volume of content that you put up to that you make yourself put out there without self censoring creates these opportunities for this kind of surprise and you gotta trust me on that.

And here's the third thing that the garbage post challenge gives you. So important. It teaches you how to find your own voice and hone your style. Now this is a critical concept in writing or any kind of creative endeavor is how you find your voice is by using your voice a ton. 

One of my favorite quotes is quantity makes quality. The more you use your voice, the more you push something, anything out there, the more you practice translating what's in your brain and in your heart into actual words and have them meet the world. That's how you discover what your voice is, what your own unique style is, not by thinking about it.

A lot of people say nice things about my distinctive voice in marketing. Like, Oh Simone, you have such a voice. I want to find my voice. But what they don't see is the hundreds, hundreds, thousands of posts and emails and this and that that I pushed out into the world that nobody saw. That didn't sound like me.

Nobody was looking at it. I was just putting it out there because I was practicing using my voice. But all that volume? All that practice getting shit out of my brain and onto paper, onto screen, is what allowed me to experiment and iterate over and over to refine and hone what now people see as like, Oh, that's Simone's distinctive voice.

I didn't have it, day one. Now it took me years by the way to get here and it doesn't have to take you years because I didn't have Me as a coach back then I figured it out from scratch You have me as your coach so you can save yourself all the time that I spent on trial and error Learning what I know now I'm just giving it to you, so it's gonna take you way, way less time than it took me.

But you know, when you get out of your own way like this, when you get over yourself, and stop babysitting the quality of each thing, and despairing, oh, it's not, doesn't sound smart enough, professional enough, and unique enough, da da da, like your favorite person that you like to follow is not good compared to them, and why would anyone pay attention to me, da da da.

When you stop giving all of that so much oxygen and you just get busy creating and sharing and creating and sharing, by the end of the hundred posts that the challenge requires, you're going to marvel at yourself for how much more of your own distinctive creative voice you know, how much more ownership you feel like you have over it.

It is gonna be a billion times better use of your time than just sitting there, feeling blocked, ruminating, thinking. When is my own distinctive voice gonna fall from the sky? It won't! So, I actually have people create a chart, right? A chart with like a hundred cells, like a counter. And you fill it out.

You put a check mark in each of them as you do the challenge. And you fill it out until you get to a hundred. Right. You put a sticker you can draw and make it fun for yourself. So I'm recommend having something concrete like that, hopefully. Um, so that something fun for you. So where you can track how many posts you're doing, how many more you have to go, maybe every 10 that you do, you can give yourself a little celebration, celebrate with your friends

That's, that'll make the process, more enjoyable. And by the way, once you finish a hundred, you can go for another hundred. There's no, I'm done with the garbage post challenge. Hell I'm still doing the garbage post challenge. And I'm like, however many years into business, the more you do it, the more you get compounding benefits in your business.

Now, another important note about how to do this right. Your brain, let me tell you right now, is going to keep arguing with you about the right way to do it. It's going to keep being confused. It's going to want to go into confusion. It's going to be like, wait, but is this the right way to do it? Is that wrong?

Is this how we're supposed to do it? A hundred posts in 30 days? Does that mean like three a day? Or do I take weekends off? Or if I did like 0 posts for the past 30 days? two days. Do I want to make, do I, do I have to attend tomorrow? What if I want to get it all done in a hundred days? Does it count if I posted just a picture?

Does it count if I didn't make an offer? Does it count if it's not about business? All these questions are going to come up where your brain's going to forget what the challenge is. And the challenge is number one. Human words. English words. Number two, shared. Period. And all the brain drama coming up is actually part of the challenge.

It's part of the learning process. Cause the point is to expose you to all the shit that your brain is going to tell you to make sure that you're doing it. Quote unquote, right. To protect you from what it thinks is going to be like a pack of hyenas who are going to attack you and eat you alive. And you die.

If you do it wrong, you're going to die. But what's actually happening is that you're just putting some words on the internet. You're adding pixels to somebody else's screen that they're most likely gonna take. Point three is is, you know, 0.0, 0.3 seconds to scroll past. The stakes are just not that high.

Getting to remind yourself of that over and over is just. Words on the internet that someone's going to scroll past. Whenever your brain wants to like make up a rule so that you can sit and be confused about whether you can get it right, you have to remind yourself, I'm literally only doing this so I can learn how to disbelieve my brain when it says something's wrong and something's right.

Okay? Now. I'm going to reiterate the basics one more time, write it down and read it every time your brain tries to complicate it. It's so simple. 100 pieces of content in whatever form in 30 days. It has to have English words and words in whatever language you speak. It doesn't matter how many words, it can be two words, it can be a thousand words.

And number two, it has to be shared with other people, posted, submitted, sent, published. It has to meet the world. I don't care if you say, hello, this is my dog. I don't care if you write a paragraph on novel. I don't care if you talk about your frittata recipe or your recent, most recent breakthrough. I don't care if you make an offer for your new course or talk about your innermost feelings.

I don't care. 100 pieces of them, 30 days. You're going to be a different person by the end of the 30 days. And there's so many astounding surprises waiting for you along the way. Alright my friends, let's do this. If you're doing this and you have any questions, you want encouragement, feel free to get in touch with me on Instagram.

I'm @simone.grace.seol and I'll see you there or here, anywhere, whatever. I'm all over the place. I'll talk to you next time. Bye.