What Social Media Can’t Give Us
On connection, comparison, and the kind of community I’m trying to build
A week becomes a month, a month becomes six months, six months becomes a year.
The hours lost to scrolling others content. The search for the right approach. The unfamiliarity of a new platform.
I find myself agitated.
I start to type these words and I’m interrupted. Again. Again.
I sit with the agitation. I don’t feel comfortable on Substack. I don’t know the platform well. Yet a part of me calls me forward to just write something.
A year has passed since I tried to move from my own website for my weekly newsletter to Substack. That year has brought change.
A calling to keep working on creating the Like Hearted Community.
I’m into my sixth year of my weekly online community, Like Hearted Leaders. This past year I’ve been deep into reflecting what exactly that community is. Why it matters and why many members stay for years.
Like Hearted Leaders (LHL) is the hour in your week that you didn’t know you needed. A check in for yourself and an hour of deep connection with others. The leadership angle refers to purely your own leadership of your life.
Deep transformations have happened in that space and the community help and hold each other in the moments between those Friday meetups. That is the true definition of community. Yes I lead the meetings but much magic happens outside of that time because LH’ers have a deep sense of connection and belonging.
In a world which easily allows us to fall into solitude without us even realising it, community is more needed than ever. Like a wolf in sheeps clothing social media lulls us to believe that we have connection. We think we know the other but all we really see is the curated posts of other humans hoping to be seen.
Living their best life. Eating out with friends. On holiday with a loved one but the picture is incomplete. We piece together the pictures and compare our lives, mapping our happiness against perceived norms.
If only we had their relationship, car, job, insights, opportunities then … we’d be ok. (We tell ourselves.)
Life is an illusion.
Life is a projection of our thoughts, manipulated to match the stories in our heads.
We need to break out of this cycle. Bring love where there is fear. Bring hope where there is despair. Bring depth to connection.
The Likehearted Community is my attempt to bring that connection to life. To create space for like hearted humans to have a deeper type of conversation. That goes beyond the curated and leads us to remember that beyond the stories, the illusions, the comparisons we are worthy of love, abundance , happiness and connection. We’ve just forgotten.
Until next time. Thank you for being here.
Claire (with love) .🧡