How to Talk About Your Work on Social Media Without Performing

Many practitioners have an uncomfortable relationship with social media. They know they are supposed to share content about their work, and they have observed that practitioners who share consistently tend to attract more clients than those who do not. But when they sit down to post, what emerges feels wrong — too promotional, too curated, too much like performing a version of themselves they do not entirely recognize.

The discomfort is information. It is usually pointing at a specific problem with how social media content is being conceived.

The performance problem

Social media content about practitioner work tends toward performance when the goal is to appear a certain way: credible, successful, insightful, aligned. The posts that come from the goal of appearing these things produce content that other practitioners (and prospective clients) tend to experience as hollow — the polished caption, the inspirational quote overlaid on a sunset image, the carefully structured “5 things practitioners do wrong” post that reads like it was written to perform authority rather than share genuine insight.

The discomfort many practitioners feel when creating this content is appropriate. It is the discomfort of performing rather than sharing.

What genuine sharing looks like

Genuine sharing on social media is the same thing as genuine value communication in any other context: it comes from the practitioner’s actual experience of the work and is oriented toward the audience’s genuine understanding rather than toward the practitioner’s presentation.

The post that describes a specific pattern the practitioner has observed in client work — without polishing it into a lesson or a list — often lands more genuinely than a carefully structured piece of content. “Something I keep noticing with practitioners who undercharge: the price they are afraid to say out loud is usually the price that’s in conscious relationship to what the work actually produces. The fear is partly about whether the work is worth it — and the outcome review process is often what shifts that.” That is genuine sharing.

The orientation that prevents social media from becoming a pitch: the orientation that works for in-person value communication also applies to social media. Is the content designed to move people toward a decision? Or is it designed to share something genuinely true or useful? The second produces the content that feels different — and tends to attract a different quality of engagement.

What genuine sharing includes

Genuine sharing in the context of a practitioner’s work might include:

What you have observed. Something specific about the patterns that appear in the work — described specifically, without reducing it to a lesson. “I’ve noticed that the practitioners who move most quickly from undercharging to aligned pricing are the ones who have done explicit outcome review — they’ve actually looked at what happened for their clients and written it down. The evidence changes something internally.”

What you are thinking about. A genuine question or observation from your own practice or development. Not a performance of wisdom — a real thing you are noticing or thinking about. “Working on my own value articulation this week and noticing how quickly I default to describing what I do rather than what it produces. Still.”

What you know that is useful. A specific insight from the work that is genuinely helpful to someone who might be reading — not packaged as “5 tips” but shared as a thing you actually know from actual experience.

Authentic versus convincing social media content: the social media version of convincing is content designed to create a state of wanting in the reader — want to work with this practitioner, want to join this program, want to be where this practitioner seems to be. Authentic content shares something true and lets the reader decide what to do with it.

The volume question

A common social media advice is to post consistently — daily, or several times per week. This advice creates a production problem for practitioners who can only share genuinely when they have something genuine to share.

The honest answer is that forced frequency often produces performing content. A practitioner who posts three times per week from genuine observation produces more value (and usually more genuine engagement) than a practitioner who posts five times per week and runs out of genuine things to say by day three.

Outcome language in social media posts: when social media content does describe the work explicitly, the same principle applies: describe outcomes, not features. “Sessions available weekly or biweekly” is a feature post. “The pattern I see most often in practitioners who finally cross into aligned pricing is…” is an outcome-adjacent post — it describes the territory in a way that is genuinely useful.

The self-promotion question

Some practitioners avoid social media because they experience any sharing about their work as self-promotion — and self-promotion feels inconsistent with their values around service.

The distinction: self-promotion is oriented toward the practitioner’s appearance. Sharing genuine insight is oriented toward the audience’s understanding. A post that shares a genuine observation about how transformation work functions in a specific domain is not self-promotion. It is service to the people who might benefit from the insight.

The inner alignment behind authentic social media sharing: a practitioner who is genuinely oriented toward service can share on social media from that orientation — sharing what is true and useful, without monitoring whether it is making them look the way they want to look.

The Abundance GPS Skool community helps practitioners develop the inner orientation and the practical approach to social media sharing that feels genuine rather than performed. Join us here.