The Dependency You've Accidentally Created
I've been sitting on something all year that I probably should have told you about sooner.
You know how sometimes you get an idea and you're not entirely sure if it's brilliant or completely mad, so you just quietly build it in your own business first to see if it actually works?
That's been my 2025.
While everyone else has been talking about showing up more consistently on social media, posting more reels, hacking the algorithm, I've been building the complete opposite.
And now that it's actually working, I feel like I should probably let you in on what I've been doing.
I've called it a marketing playground. A completely different way of thinking about how people move through your world and decide to buy from you. Not a funnel with linear steps as I've taught for years, but zones.
I'm not going to tell you exactly what those zones are or how they work, here, in an email to thousands.. because I've spent the best part of a year developing this and I want to get my IP protected first..... (unless of course you're on the inside)
....but I can tell you that it changes everything about how you can run your business without being perpetually attached to Instagram or any other social platform.
Here's the context behind why I built this:
You might know that this year has been challenging on a personal level. Life got a bit messy and complicated and somewhere in the middle of navigating all of that, I made a very deliberate decision about social media.
I didn’t want my income, visibility or momentum to be dependent on how often I posted or how creative I felt on any given day. I didn’t want my nervous system tied to an algorithm or my business stability held hostage by consistency streaks. I wanted more choice, more margin and more control.
At the same time, I was watching the online space become noisier, stranger, and frankly more uncomfortable. The performative success stories. The income inflation that doesn’t stand up to basic maths. The quiet backstabbing dressed up as collaboration. The toxicity masquerading as “high standards” or “truth telling.” And some genuinely bizarre behaviour that made me question whether we’d all collectively agreed this was normal.
What struck me wasn’t just how much of it existed, but how much of it was required to participate in order to stay visible.
To keep playing the game, you had to tolerate things that didn’t sit right. You had to perform certainty, drama, or relentless optimism, even when real life was asking for something slower, steadier, and more grounded.
That was the moment for me.
If your business only works when you’re loud, online, and emotionally available to strangers every single day, it’s not a business. It’s a dependency.
And dependencies are incredibly fragile under pressure.
So instead of asking, “How do I show up more?” I started inviting a different question. “What would your/my business need in place so it still works when you/I don’t?”
That shift changed everything. It moves you away from chasing visibility and towards building infrastructure. Away from borrowing attention and towards owning assets. Away from being constantly ‘on’ and towards designing something that could hold demand, trust, and revenue without requiring daily presence as the glue.
Ironically, stepping back from so much noise didn’t make me less relevant. It made me clearer. It filtered out the rubbish. It attracted better conversations, better clients, and better opportunities. And much more revenue for much less time spent.
And it gave me the one thing most people say they want but rarely design for in their business: stability with optionality.
I’m not anti-social media. I’m anti-dependency. And there’s a very big difference between the two.
If you’re feeling tired, disillusioned, or quietly uncomfortable with how the online game currently works, it might not be a motivation problem. It might be a structural one. And structure, unlike hustle, is something you can actually fix.
If you don't want your business to depend on constant visibility, then attention, trust and opportunity have to be designed into the structure itself rather than generated through effort. When you build something that works in the background, something that can hold people without pushing them, and allow relationships to develop without needing to perform on demand, everything changes.
Your business becomes more predictable and far less fragile, because it no longer relies on your energy or consistency to function.
That, more than any marketing tactic I’ve ever tested, has fundamentally changed my business.
I have kids. Co-parenting weeks. A chateau to run. Retreats to host. Personal things to deal with that don't pause just because it's time to post on Instagram. And the same is true for you.
The thing that surprised me most wasn't that it worked- I knew it would- but how much time it gave me back. Because once you build a system that doesn't require you to be constantly feeding it with fresh social media content, you get your life back.
You get to choose when you show up instead of feeling like you have to show up or everything falls apart. You get to deal with whatever life throws at you without your business collapsing in the background.
This year reinforced something I've always believed: your business should support your life, not consume it. It should work when you need to step back. It should give you the freedom to take time off, to handle personal things, to just live without feeling like you're abandoning everything you've built.
This is what I've been quietly building while everyone else has been shouting about the latest Instagram strategy.
A grown-up business model.
One that acknowledges that social media dependency isn't actually a business strategy, it's a trap.
One that works whether you post today or not. One that builds assets instead of just consuming your time. One that gives you your life back instead of demanding every spare moment you have.
AS SEEN iN
