We've always been told that if you want to reach people, you have to hit their pain.
"Rub salt in the wound."
(basic social media advice, tbh)
But the problem is we misunderstood what that pain actually is.
Because when everything you post is about how stuck someone is (how invisible they feel, how much they're getting wrong) guess who shows up in your comments.
Exactly that person.
The one who complains about the algorithm instead of posting.
The one who says, "I'd love to share more, but I just don't know what to say."
The one who sees herself as someone content happens to, not someone who has something to say.
How do you expect someone like that to actually sit down and write?
You don't.
"If you're tired of feeling invisible online…"
"If you're sick of watching people with less experience get more attention…"
"If you're exhausted from overthinking every caption…"
Those lines work well when you want to attract people stuck in the complaint.
All because we misunderstood what "hitting the pain" means.
There are two kinds of pain.
One is the pain we just described: talking to people who are stuck and know it, and stay there.
But there's another one that I find way more interesting.
The pain tied to potential.
This is the pain of knowing you have something worth saying (your experience, your perspective, the years of doing the thing) but every time you try to put it into words, it comes out flat. Or you even delete it before anyone sees it.
That's not a victim's pain.
That's frustration.
And frustration is a positive-energy emotion. It's the one that makes someone finally try telling it differently, instead of rewriting the same bio for the fourth time.
That's the pain worth speaking to.
Not "you're invisible and it's a mess."
But: you're sitting on something real, and you haven't found the way to say it yet.
So, when you put yourself out there, stop seeing your audience as people who need to be convinced content matters.
Start seeing them as people already trying (they are already writing, already showing up) who just haven't seen that the story was the thing all along.
I was at a farmers market here in San Diego last weekend, and I watched two stands sell almost the exact same thing.
One vendor kept saying some version of "you NEED this, your gut health is a mess without it." People nodded politely and kept walking.
The stand next to her just told you what she'd learned from three years of getting her own fermentation wrong before she got it right... and there was a line!
Nobody in that line was more informed than the people who walked past.
They just believed her more, because she wasn't selling them a problem.
She was showing them she'd already lived the "figuring it out" part they were still stuck in.
That's the whole thing.
That's the person who reads one post and thinks: finally, someone said the thing I couldn't figure out how to say about myself.
Do whatever you want with this.
But if you're ready to stop talking to people stuck in the complaint, and start writing to people who are already in motion.
The Story That Sells You is where I show you how to find the stories you're already sitting on, and how to actually tell them. Access here
It's not what you say, but it's how you say it.
- Nuria
