I ran a workshop yesterday with a group of creators, mostly people in the early phase of putting their work out. They were asking the kind of questions people ask when they’re worried they can’t keep up with whatever cadence they think they’re supposed to keep up with.
I told them something I meant practically, and then I heard it land differently than I’d meant it.
I said, “Presence is the prerequisite of trust. People don’t trust what they rarely see, but they trust what shows up in their world consistently over time.”
That’s the strategic fact. It’s why the creator who publishes once a week for three years outgrows the one who publishes every day for three months and then vanishes.
But here’s what seemed to land most in the room, and I think it’s worth repeating.
The same law runs inside you.
Your audience trusts you through presence. And you trust yourself through presence. The mechanism is identical. Show up for yourself a dozen times in a row on the thing you said you’d do, and something in you settles. Miss three times and the settling unwinds, and you start trying to make up for it with intensity, which is the thing that breaks you.
Most people I talk to have a commitment problem disguised as a content problem. They keep making plans that require a version of themselves that isn’t available yet. Twice a week. Every morning. The plan is sincere, the calendar is real, and the trust keeps getting broken, because the ask keeps being larger than the person can deliver on the day.
If you’re accomplished, this is more dangerous, not less. You can push through. You can override yourself, deliver by sheer will on the ambitious cadence for a stretch. And then the crash. And then the story that you’re inconsistent, or not cut out for this kind of visibility. You’re cut out for it. The plan was too big out of the gate.
The fix looks almost boring from the outside. You make smaller commitments than you want to. You build a buffer before going public, so the grace is structural, rather than something you have to summon after you miss.
This is one of the things we can unpack on an exploration call together. We look at the actual shape of what you’re committing to, and whether that shape matches the version of you who’s showing up today, not the one you wish would show up.
If the gap between your plan and how you are able to show up right now keeps breaking trust, that’s the work.