52. What to do when you're cringing at old posts

If you’ve ever scrolled back through your old posts and wanted to disappear into the floor… this episode is for you.

Simone talks about what to do when you're haunted by who you've been on social media: the angry rants, the fake positivity, the performative cool girl era, the MLM hustle days, the silence when it mattered, or just… a version of you that no longer fits. She shares her own evolution online, and why your past does not get to veto your future.

You’ll hear about:

• Why your future owes nothing to your past (and why you don’t need to “get everyone on board” with your changes)
• How to quietly drop old topics, dynamics, and spaces that no longer feel aligned
• A loving reminder that nobody is tracking your every move the way your brain thinks they are
• How showing up as your current self naturally attracts new people who love this version of you
• The radical truth that everyone has been the asshole in someone’s story—and why that doesn’t disqualify you from leadership, love, or visibility
• How extending more grace to your own messiness expands your capacity to love others as they are

This episode is your permission slip to stop letting your old posts, old choices, or old selves sit in the driver’s seat of your business. You’re allowed to grow. You’re allowed to change. And you’re allowed to start showing up today as the person you actually are now.

Transcript

Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business. I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

Today's topic is how to get over your social media past — who you have been.

You know, a friend of mine asked me a while ago about all the things I teach, right? About how to show up, how to be helpful, how to be useful, how to be a loving presence on social media. And they were telling me, you know, I wasn't quite that in the past. I have been mean, I have been critical, like I have been things that I no longer want to be. But it feels weird for them to show up totally different now.

Basically they were telling me they didn't really know how to deal with who they had been on social media, how other people had seen them being in the past. And it occurred to me that this person wasn't the only person. A lot of people have some version of this issue.

Maybe you look back at your old posts and cringe at how performative you were, how you were trying so hard to seem cool or interesting or together. Maybe you used to be really negative and cynical, constantly complaining or tearing things down. Maybe you participated in pile-ons or said harsh things about people you didn't even know.

Maybe you were being fake positive, posting inspirational quotes while your life was actually falling apart, never being real. Or maybe you stayed silent about things that mattered because you were scared of what other people would think. Maybe you posted things when you were drunk or high or angry that you wish you could take back.

Or maybe it's not even regret. Maybe you just changed.

When everyone knows you as one thing and you want to be something else

Let's say you started a new business as a florist, right? And everyone knows you up until now as an accountant. Like you've been an accountant, everyone in your life thinks you're an accountant, and you haven't even told anybody that you're now starting over as a florist.

And you might be thinking, oh my gosh, what are these people gonna think? Everybody thinks I'm an accountant. How am I supposed to break the news to them? You know, they're gonna think it's strange. They're gonna want an explanation. They're gonna think it's weird to go from being an accountant to a florist. They might judge me or they might think that I'm not a real qualified florist. All of these anxieties come up.

You might be wondering, is it gonna be weird for me to just change tones, change topics and just be different, just present differently?

And I think that's a really good question and I'm gonna tell you a confession, which is that I can really identify with this as well.

So many people who've been friends with me for years will attest — there have been times when I've been very negative on social media. I have posted angry things, sarcastic things. And I don't think anger is always bad, actually. I think there's very much a place for anger that comes from a sense of justice. But I've posted things that were angry just because I was angry and there was nothing redeeming about it, you know. It was just me venting my feelings in ways that I might not choose to today.

I have participated in gossip. I have criticized people in ways that I wouldn't do now because it's not how I want to show up now. So many things — I would not choose to show up that way today.

I have done all those things for many years in the past, and I've changed. And people who've been with me for a long time have seen me change. They have seen me grow up. And so I have been through this process myself, and I want to let you know that I'm not speaking as somebody who has always been perfect on social media and is perfect now. I don't even know what that means.

But the important thing is this — one thing that I can say is that in recent years I've been very courageous and I have shown up from the belief that I deserve to take up space and the work that I'm doing matters.

And I want to give you a few tips that will be useful for you if you want to make a change, if you want to start showing up differently to express the best version of you that you want representing your work.

Tip #1: Your future owes nothing to the past

Here's my tip number one and that is to remember that your future owes nothing to the past. And this is true in general in life. And it's also true just in terms of your work, how you come across on the internet.

If you've been participating in ways of talking, topics, groups, or anything on the internet that's been habitually negative, guess what? You are allowed to just quit. You're allowed to stop doing things that you are doing.

And I had to drop certain topics from my social media world basically permanently. Not because they were bad topics, not because no one should talk about those topics, but because how I was approaching those topics up until that point had been really negative and cynical and not really helpful towards anything and not really representing the kind of person that I wanted to be.

And I want to be very clear, this isn't about saying you have to be super positive all the time. I definitely do not believe that. But there is a difference between airing your anger or dissatisfaction or your disappointment or sadness — you know, there's a way to share these emotions from a place of love and clarity as opposed to just bitching, right? As opposed to just, I feel negative, so I'm just gonna come here and infect other people with my negativity. And there's no deeper purpose behind what you're doing, right?

I am not saying you have to be positive all the time. But if you have been habitually indulging in participation in groups or topics or engaging certain people, and none of it goes anywhere good, and you know what I'm talking about, right? The things that just make you feel icky in your body — you have permission to just stop.

Just leave those spaces. Just stop talking about those topics. Unfollow, disengage from things that you no longer want to bring into your energy field, into your time. And you know, like life is precious. We're only alive for so long, and you want to fill your time, your days with things that actually nourish you at the end of the day.

And if this means that you have to unfollow certain people or unsubscribe or leave certain spaces or stop engaging with certain people, this doesn't mean that you hate them. It doesn't mean you're judging them. It doesn't mean anything, and you don't owe anyone an explanation or an apology. You can just stop and walk away.

Let's say you are a problem alcohol drinker, and you want to stop drinking alcohol. You're going to AA, like you're like, I have an alcohol problem and I want to stop. Right? You wouldn't go back to all of your drinking buddies that you used to get drunk with and try to get each of them to understand why you're no longer drinking and get them all to understand and sign off on your decision. And go to all the bars that you used to drink at and be like, "Okay, guess what guys? I'm not gonna come up here anymore 'cause I'm not drinking anymore." You wouldn't do that. You would just stop drinking, right?

If you used to post a lot of angry political rants and now you want to show up with more nuance and less rage, you can just start doing that. If you used to overshare about your relationship drama and now you want to be a little bit more private about some things, you can just stop. You can just drop it.

You don't need to post an announcement explaining your evolution. You don't need to apologize for who you were. You can just quietly step into who you're becoming. It's not anything about them. It's about you and the decision that you are making towards creating the kind of life that you want to live. It's your life. It's all you baby, and you get to own it.

Tip #2: Nobody cares about you as much as you do

Secondly, my second reminder is that nobody cares about you or remembers your history or thinks about your history as much as you do. And I say that in the most loving way, in the best way possible.

Nobody cares that much. Everybody thinks that everyone else is out there watching them and keeping a tally, keeping tabs on their behavior and judging them and noticing if they're doing things differently. But the truth is everybody's way too self-obsessed to even notice what other people are doing.

So if you're worried about people judging you and thinking things about you — which they're probably not, because guess what? They're thinking about themselves as much as you are thinking about yourself. And so they just don't have that much room left over to think about you.

The cool thing that happens when you start showing up as yourself

So I want to tell you about one cool thing that happens that I didn't really know, that I got to learn more and more about as the years went by in my business. Which is that a really great thing happens when you start showing up as yourself, as your most authentic self on social media as that is evolving.

Because of the nature of social media, you start to make new friends.

If you spend all of your time being really negative with a certain set of friends, and you start being positive, yeah, you might lose some of the negative friends. But guess what? You're also gonna start to connect with new people who are vibing in the way that you're vibing, right?

And if you want to really start speaking out about political issues and you start posting about political issues, guess what? You might lose some friends who are really uncomfortable with that, but you're gonna make new friends with other politically conscious people that you didn't even know were in your orbit. They're gonna all come out of the woodwork and they're gonna want to be friends with you. They're gonna want to talk to you.

If you used to bond with people over complaining about your industry and now you want to focus on what you're building and creating, guess what? You're gonna attract other builders and creators.

If you used to be all business bro energy, talking about hustle and grinding, and now you want to talk about rest and sustainability 'cause you learned and evolved, people who resonate with that are gonna find you and love you.

And this almost always happens in ways that are really surprising.

And you're gonna make new friends. That's how social media works. That's one of the things about it that's actually wonderful. You can connect with like-minded people who, whether they're in Sweden or Illinois or South Africa, you know, that's how it works.

So trust that the new friends that you're gonna make on social media who celebrate who you are, who you're becoming, are gonna be far more numerous and the positive impact that you're gonna make on their life.

So whether you're cringing about your old MLM posts, your performative activism or your fake positivity, your oversharing, your silence, your mean girl energy, your try-hard coolness, or whatever version of yourself you're ready to move past — you just get to move past it.

No big announcement needed, no explanation required. No big show of remorse needed. Just start being who you are now. Because people, there are people out there who are waiting to meet the new version of you and fall in love with you and support you and build the world that you want to live in with you starting now.

Everyone has been an asshole

And the last thing I want to tell you is that everyone has been an asshole. Everyone has been face down in the muck. Everyone has hurt other people. Everyone has embarrassed themselves badly. Everyone.

I mean including Mr. Rogers, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou. Everyone, every single person you admire has said things they regret. They've gone through phases that they cringe at now. They've shown up in ways that didn't reflect their values. They've hurt people they cared about. They've been petty, small, cruel, careless.

All of your heroes, I promise you, have had moments of cowardice. They've been jealous, insecure, defensive. They've all lashed out when they were scared. They said the wrong thing at the wrong time. They've broken a promise. They've told a lie.

Everyone has been the villain in someone else's story. And that's not an excuse, but it's just the truth, universal truth of being human.

We are all learning as we go. We are all messy and complicated and contradictory, and that's okay. That's actually just what it means to be alive. Nobody gets through this without stumbling. The gap between who we want to be and who we actually are in our worst moments, that gap is universal. It's not a sign that you're broken. It's not a sign that you're unqualified. It's a sign that you're alive. And that is a gift.

You know, if a stained past, if an imperfect past was a disqualification for people to do the work of their lives, we would have no one left in the world to do any work. So don't count yourself out.

And here's another cool thing — when you can have more grace and love for the messiness of your own humanity, you expand your capacity to see and understand and love other people exactly as they are, not as you wish them to be.

The softness you extend to yourself becomes a softness that you can offer others. The forgiveness you grant your own stumbling becomes the forgiveness that allows you to offer to others. That makes room for truer, deeper, more rewarding connections. And you stop needing other people to be perfect. You stop being shocked at their flaws. And all of this just creates more room for genuine connection and love in the world.

So keep going friends. Like I said, your future owes nothing to your past. Don't let your idea, your assessment of how you've been in the past, hold you back from becoming the person you want to be. The version of you that you want to be in the future is waiting for you, and it's never too late to start being who you really want to be.

The time is now. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.