People absolutely love talking about personal brands and what it means in terms of content, but that’s not what a personal brand is. OK?

In this episode I’m not going to get into that entirely and I’m sure I will probably do another episode soon on personal branding because it hurts me so much.

But the reason I bring it up is because I believe my personal brand is that I say all the things that other people are afraid to.

I am the one who calls out the bullshit.

I tell it straight.

I stand tall no matter what’s thrown at me.

And I get messages all the time to the tune of thank you so much for speaking up.

I’ve always wanted to but never could.

Or you’re so brave.

I could never do that.

So please keep on doing what you’re doing, or even you.

You say what we’re all thinking, but we see how people react to you and that’s why we don’t say anything.

And now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love getting these messages because it means that my message is landing and that my contact is truly helping people.

And it means I’m also helping people see through the noise, through the bullshit.

But it’s made me wonder why people think I’m so brave or so strong.

Like what is it that I’m doing that suggests this?

Because I certainly don’t feel that way inside.

I mean, a lot of the time I’m crying due to the hateful messages that I get online, but I feel the pressure of having to keep showing up because people keep saying my content is needed and that it’s really refreshing.

So I continue to post my opinions and then I continue to receive the nasty messages and I continue to act like everything is OK.

But sometimes it really does take a toll.

And I’ve been thinking about it lately and what the cost of that toll is.

And so that’s what this episode is all about.

It’s one of my personal interludes where I open up about what it’s always like, like being known as the strong one, and whether it’s healthy, being a voice for your audience or whether it’s actually sometimes more powerful.

Just a step away.

Hello and welcome to Sniffing Out the Bullshit, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs who want help wading their way through the bullshit jungle of entrepreneurship, and then the tools, skills, and mindset that are actually required for success.

I’m your host, Sabrina Chevannes, the no bullshit entrepreneur.

Being the strong one has basically become part of my identity.

People expect it now.

If there’s a lie to expose or a scam to call out, everyone turns to me.

Like Sabrina.

What do you think of this?

As if like I’m this unshakable truth machine, constantly ready to dissect the next bit of bullshit on the Internet.

But being that person, it’s kind of heavy.

I’m basically consuming a bucket load of bullshit every single day.

Now I’m sure everyone is as that’s why I do what I do, but many people either don’t realize they’re consuming the bullshit or they’re muting it and scrolling like pass.

But me on the other hand, I go down this huge rabbit hole on each bullshitter and I dig into their past.

I look at their qualifications, their experience, and see if they’ve even had any clients before.

And it turns out most of them haven’t.

Kills the police, you know?

And then I end up collecting their posts.

I make a note of the bullshitters, and I use their content in my bullshit of the week.

And you may ask, why on earth do I bother doing this?

Well, that’s a good question, and I’ve been asking myself this for a long time now, because it does seem pointless.

I’m just immersing myself in really depressing content knowing that fraudsters are bullshitting their way to a six figure following and scamming money out of the pocket of hard working but naive people.

I don’t think it’s right.

So I speak up even if only 10 people are listening because if I can help 10 people not to be scammed and see the signs of a bullshitter and save them from a future incident, then that’s totally worth it to me.

I mean, the bullshitters are getting seriously more sophisticated.

I nearly got done multiple times this month alone by totally different types of schemes.

Like it’s crazy how good people are now at lying, faking and cheating.

And thank you AIA lot of that to you.

So I’m doing my best to here to try and make original content that’s genuinely helpful and valuable to my audience which takes me hours and hours each week.

But all I seem to get is oh shut up you bitch from some rando on the Internet or one of the bullshitters.

But the huge following sends me that sends out their minions over to my page and start harassing me even though I don’t actually mention names.

But they obviously recognize what I’m talking about.

So it gets difficult.

And because I don’t have a huge following, mainly because I haven’t bought my followers like other people have, I seem like I’m not credible somehow and people don’t listen.

But yet the ones who purchase all their followers and their engagement get immediate credibility and therefore people trust them even though they don’t have any experience.

Because that’s how the world works, messed up as it is.

So it can be pretty demoralizing because doing the right thing always somehow seems to lead to less favorable results.

But I say strong and I have faith because that’s kind of all you can do.

Or you end up getting super down yourself because strength has a shadow side.

And that’s something we don’t talk about enough.

Because every time I put myself out there, I know I’m inviting backlash.

I know someone’s going to take a clip out of context, make a meme or write a nasty comment.

And yet I still do it because I believe someone has to.

I believe there’s too much bullshit and entrepreneurship, too many people selling illusions and manipulating hope essentially, and I just can’t sit back and watch it.

But being the one to say that out loud, it’s draining, it’s isolating, and it takes a toll that most people will never ever see.

And as I said, constantly sniffing at the bullshit means I’m surrounded by it.

Every day I’m reading lies, analyzing scams and hearing stories and people have been ripped off or misled.

My DMS are filled with people confiding at me about fake coaches, shady agencies, exploitative business partners.

And I want to help, I really do.

But consuming that much negativity?

It sticks to you and it gets under your skin.

It makes you cynical, much more so than I already was, and it starts to make you wonder if there are any good people left.

You kind of lose faith in humanity when the negativity is all you hear, and that’s when it hits me.

That same strong identity people praise me for is actually the very thing that’s wearing me down.

And I’m not letting myself process things or even give myself a break.

I’m showing up every single day because I think this is what I should be doing, not because the world needs me.

Like most people wouldn’t even notice if I was gone, right?

Let’s be, let’s be honest about it.

But it’s because I believe someone has to speak up about this stuff.

I see more and more of it every single day and I feel like there are like hardly any good people doing legitimate business anymore.

In fact, I, I started this new Instagram account recently to separate my personal professional stuff.

So this is where I post, tried to post like all my professional stuff, my, you know, YouTube stuff, my blogs, this, this snippets on this podcast and stuff.

And like everyone on there who doesn’t know me, who’s come across my content is actually calling me a scammer because that’s now the default.

They don’t care that I have an MBA or that I have 15 years of experience running an agency or that I’m a chartered marketer.

All they see is 100 followers and they think scammer.

Which is why I actually totally get why people buy followers like I, I get it because if this is how I’m treated, then you probably feel like you have to.

And you know, I could just not do it.

I could just not show up.

Like, why?

Why would I?

And why should I put myself through all that?

But because I want to believe there are few people out there who see past the vanity metric stuff and still want to learn something legitimate rather than a new hack or shortcut.

However, I know that if I then purchased 100K followers and told people there was a cheat to earn 50K months consistently, I’d probably end up getting a tonne of engagement on that.

And once again, thinking about that is pretty depressing.

So I have to constantly bring myself back down to why I’m doing it, and it’s to help the few people who want to be helped, those who actually want to know the truth.

And I will keep doing it for them.

But I realize now that I really need to look after myself in this process.

Social media is actually toxic as fuck and even if you just follow like what you consider are the positive accounts, they’re often filled with toxic positivity.

And you also end up doing this like upward social comparison thing and you can’t help but compare yourself to other people.

So you end up feeling inadequate, like it happens to so many people.

And I’ve done a bunch of content on this on my YouTube channel, by the way.

So please do look me up on YouTube and check out the links in the show notes to see that stuff.

As like, you know, when I started doing more about this and learning more about the psychology, I, I realized I needed to protect myself big time.

So now I I regularly check out from social media and not because I’m busy on holiday, but because I absolutely need to for my own mental health.

I just can’t bear to read another story of someone being conned.

And so sometimes I need to just sit in silence away from screens and just breathe again.

So like, there was this guy.

He we just decided just minds me because this guy recently messaged me.

I was sharing a story on my LinkedIn about how terrible my month of October was.

And like, I’d unfortunately been mugged.

I’d been assaulted on the street.

I, I had a lot of crap happen.

And he said to me, he was like, you know, do you think that these people who you’re exposing are targeting you?

Like he like he genuinely thought that.

And I was like, what?

And I was like, no, it’s just the Pebble of living in London.

He was like, well, you’re calling out a lot of bullshit, these people and you know that they won’t they won’t stop at anything to, you know, clear their name and make sure they keep up a scam.

And it, it did start making me think.

It started making me think about how truth telling can make you a target because it’s, there’s this even darker side of social media too, right?

There’s like, because the Internet really doesn’t like truth tellers.

So when you speak up, you become like a mirror.

And not everyone likes what they see.

In fact they really don’t like it and they often get mega defensive about it because they cannot process what they’re hearing and they’d rather believe in the fantasy than the truth.

So instead they turn it around on me.

And like for example I’ve had meme pages made about me, like whole websites like with seriously bad visuals and all sorts of AI generated crap.

It’s seriously disturbing and I’ve had entire threads tearing me apart and saying incredibly personal and nasty things, emails calling me Abagon and Grateful difficult, you name it.

And then of course, the classic, the racist, the sexist messages that hit a different kind of nerve.

I know, I know the people who do this kind of thing on the are the ones with the problem and I shouldn’t listen to them.

But when you’re getting these messages multiple times a week, it’s not that easy to switch off.

Because when you’re visible and vocal, some people don’t want to debate you, they just want to break you.

And I’m not going to pretend that doesn’t hurt.

And yes, I have thick skin and I’m technically I’m strong, but I’m still human.

And sometimes a strong one means crying in private, not because you’re weak, but because you’ve had to be strong for too damn long.

But as I said, I have to keep reconnecting to my purpose.

It’s what keeps me going.

So every time I think about quitting, every time I feel like I can’t handle one more nasty comment, I’ll get a dm from someone saying thank you Sabrina, you stop me signing up to that fake programme or you made me feel seen when I thought I was the only one.

And that’s what I remind myself of.

I’m not doing this for the people who send hate, I’m doing this for the people who needed to hear the truth.

And as I said, if I’m helping just a handful of people each week, and that’s still a hell of a lot more than the trolls on the Internet are helping.

And I’m happy that I’m just doing my bit for humanity.

So I realized that being strong doesn’t mean being bulletproof.

It means standing up anyway, even when you’re exhausted and even when you’re scared.

It means knowing the mission matters more than the noise.

So yeah, being the strong one comes with a cost.

But it also comes with meaning.

And maybe that’s the trade off we all make when we choose to live truly, authentically, to speak truth in a world built on philtres and facades.

But if you’re listening to this and you’ve ever felt like you have had to hold it all together, and please hear me when I say this, it’s OK to put it down.

It’s OK to just log off.

And it’s OK to not be strong all the time.

As the popular phrase goes, it’s OK to not be OK.

Because strength isn’t about never breaking, it’s more about being honest enough to admit when you do.

So I just want to say a big thank you so much to everyone who’s taken the time out to listen to this personal interlude.

I do these episodes to really let people in and know the truth about what it’s like being an entrepreneur so that people will realize that it’s not as easy as people make out it to be.

And it’s not as glamorous, and it’s definitely not as Smith, but it can still be magical, and it can still be incredibly rewarding, especially when you know you’re not alone.

So if this episode hit home at all, maybe share it with someone who looks strong on the outside, but could really use a reminder that they’re allowed to rest, too.

And thank you so much to your lovely people.

I will see you again next week.

Until then, keep sniffing at the bullshit.