Leaning into Slow Growth

Magical things happened when I let go of my obsession with outcomes and started enjoying right where I was.

Hey friends! Today’s post is a followup of sorts to what I learned in a year of writing about an unpopular topic. While the first post was about all the millions of things I tried in growing my first newsletter (including what worked!), this one reflects the shift that happened when I stopped focusing so heavily on outcomes. Most of us aren’t in this for overnight success, yet we often expect it. Organic growth takes time. It’s a slow build, and efforts accumulate over months and years. I’m learning to enjoy the ride, and I’d love to hear from you if you’ve had a similar radical reset in your approach to this work.

For most of last year, I was consumed by only one goal: growing my newsletter. I threw myself into every strategy to expand my subscriber base, and it was madness-inducing.

I had started my newsletter, Almost Sated, to build an audience for the book I intended to write about the first year of intuitive eating. My reasons for writing the book were simple. When I stopped dieting, I realized re-establishing trust with my body was going to be a long, challenging process. All the books I read were written by dietitians and therapists, experts not “real people,” who focused on the steps to take and the reasons why. But none discussed the big challenges and things to watch for, what might actually happen to your body—the good and the bad—and how to handle them. With a background in journalism and consumer writing, I realized I could be that voice!

I began writing on Substack to address the gaps, but the growth was slow, much slower than I had ever experienced as a professional marketer, and I got so caught up in promotion that it overshadowed my original purpose. Months went by, I didn’t work on the book, I only focused on growth.

Organic marketing is often a slow build, and especially when starting from zero, but I had forgotten all about this. Caught up in the comparison game, I was constantly checking my progress against others. A manic drive took over.

All throughout that first year of publishing, a mantra played through my head, a whisper that grew louder with time: "Let go of attachment to outcomes." I knew I needed a radical reset, but I had no idea how. At the end of the year, I took two weeks off to reflect on my goals. December came and went, but I still didn’t know how to quiet that internal hum. In January, I did a 15-day kundalini yoga reset. The theme was "Making Space for the New," which emphasized letting go of what was no longer serving us. In each session, we physically pushed away with the palms of our hands the things we wanted to shed, and I put everything I had into pushing away that attachment to the outcomes.

I wasn’t going to stop writing or following best practices, but I needed to let go of expectations around what would happen after I hit publish. I intentionally took a step back from promotion and started this newsletter, which reflected my years of professional experience, so that Almost Sated could be purely about writing.

For my mental health, I shifted away from Substack and went deeper on LinkedIn, which felt better aligned with my content marketing work. Writing is half my focus, but the other half is content marketing for myself and clients. I wanted to show my clients that LinkedIn could be successfully leveraged for lead generation and brand building. To do that, I needed to understand the platform better.

This is where things got interesting. I could’ve easily fallen back into obsessing over results, outcomes, and numbers on a new platform. Oddly, landing the LinkedIn Top Voice badge helped me distance myself from it. I spent most of the fall trying to earn my content strategy badge, but I was unsuccessful and gave up until April when I made another go of it after listening to a few more people talk about how they got it. This time, I earned the badge in three days with just four articles.

And then I started hearing things like, “Wow, I can't believe you got the badge with less than 1,000 followers.”

That less than a thousand followers bit stuck in my head, but instead of seeing it as a negative, it helped me see I had knowledge others didn’t. Having a smaller following was one of my superpowers, because it allowed me to relate more closely to those who are just starting to build their brands and businesses, my target audience. But the difference — my differentiator — is I have been doing content strategy for over 10 years and was a digital journalist and newspaper editor 15 years before that. I have the skills and knowledge, I’m just not there yet. And instead of falling into the comparison trap, I could lean into helping people with the skills I have right now.

Rather than obsessing about moving up to the next level, I decided to focus on helping as many people as I can writing and connecting rather than stressing about numbers. That radical reset was the shift I needed!

Since then, something magical has happened. I’ve had more notable growth moments. Although small, they reflect that shift. A few weeks ago, Karen Cherry from Pubstack Success heavily promoted my article on what I learned in a year of writing about an unpopular topic. This brought in new subscribers, who read more of my work, and another article took off, which inspired a follow-up that also got heavier-than-normal promotion.

Interestingly, more people seem to be helping me. I’m getting invited to speak and share my knowledge. People with larger followings are asking me to coffee. My work is getting promoted more organically. It feels like doors are opening in a way they weren’t before.

Maybe this is a natural progression, what Cherry calls stage 4 of the Substack evolution, where you settle down and enjoy the ride. It’s happening on both platforms, though. I’m finally having the synergy I chased all last year, but without obsessing over numbers. Slow and steady is the hallmark of organic marketing, but it can also be the burnout-proof path to sustainable growth if you let it.

Now it’s your turn. I'd love to hear about your own radical resets or tips for sustainable growth. Let me know in comments.