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Content Insecurity

Suffering from content insecurity is a problem.
It happens when a thought leader can’t stop tweaking their content.
They repeatedly ask, “Is my content ready to stand on its own?” 🤔🤔

Content insecurity can make smart people do unproductive things,
I’ve seen four patterns that I want to share:

💎The Hoarder of Insights
This person keeps good insights to themselves. 🤐
They stay silent—rather than share any ideas.
“It needs to better,” they always tell themselves.
They keep polishing the idea.
And they never—ever—press “send” on the idea.

🆕The Perpetual Revisionist
This person creates a tornado of change 🌪️.
They share their ideas. But the ideas are always changing.
One day they share a 2×2 framework.
Tomorrow, the same idea is in a 6-step pyramid.
It’s incredibly confusing for their audiences.
No one knows what to expect from them.

💣The Self-Sabotager
This person’s expertise is their Achilles heel. 🦶
I’ve even seen world-class experts get tripped up by this.
The expert is 99% correct and yet they focus on the 1%
where they still are thinking it through.
But this I% impacts how they share they idea with others.
Audiences hear the expert’s self-doubt of the 1%,
and they wonder if the expert doubts the 99%.

🧶The Maker of Loose Ends 
The Maker of Loose Ends has great ideas,
but rarely they rarely finish anything.
They work on one insight for a while.
Then their attention gets pulled elsewhere.
They have a whole intellectual attic full of unfinished ideas.

So, how do you overcome content insecurity?

Mother birds push their babies out of the nest.
Thought leadership practitioners need to know when it’s time
to let their insights speak for themselves.

Avoid these four bad habits; trust your ideas. You can fly – and your content can, too!


I write about:
#ThoughtLeadership #OrgTL and #ContentStrategy