You are not doing it wrong

What If You’re Not Doing It Wrong?

I’ve recently started posting on social media again.

Which means, naturally, I’m already being told what I’m doing wrong.

Post more often. Post less often. Use video. Don’t use video. Make the first line stronger. Shorter captions. Longer captions. Show more personality. Be more polished.

Most of it is well meant, which is the awkward bit.

People are usually trying to help. They see something that could be improved and point it out because, from their perspective, they are being useful.

And sometimes they are.

But when every conversation starts with what needs fixing, you stop noticing what is already going well. Worse, you can start losing trust in your own judgement.

The same pattern is everywhere in health and wellbeing.

Spend five minutes online and somebody will be explaining that you are exercising incorrectly, eating incorrectly, sleeping incorrectly, breathing incorrectly, stretching incorrectly, communicating incorrectly or healing incorrectly.

Your squat is wrong. Your breakfast is wrong. You’re drinking coffee at the wrong time. You’re stretching the wrong muscle. You’re setting boundaries badly. You probably aren’t even resting properly.

Apparently we have now reached the stage where lying on the sofa can require professional supervision.

A lot of this advice is technically reasonable. But technical correctness is only part of the picture.

If somebody has finally started exercising twice a week after doing almost nothing for three years, immediately pointing out every flaw in their technique may improve their biomechanics while quietly destroying their confidence.

If somebody has started cooking at home more often, explaining that their ingredients are not quite optimal may move them slightly closer to nutritional perfection while making the whole thing feel considerably harder.

The advice may be correct but the overall effect can still be unhelpful.

When improvement starts to feel like failure

Modern self-improvement culture has a strange ability to turn almost any progress into evidence that you are still getting something wrong.

You start exercising, but your form could be better. You improve your diet, but now someone wants to talk about seed oils. You sleep seven hours instead of five, but your tracker says your deep sleep is disappointing.

At some point, improvement starts to feel like an endless performance review.

And if every attempt is followed by another correction, it becomes easy to reach a simple conclusion:

I can’t trust myself to get this right.

Self-trust is built through evidence. You try something, see that you can do it, repeat it and gradually become more confident.

If every attempt is met with a list of errors, you collect different evidence. You notice mistakes before progress. You hesitate before acting. You check what other people think before trusting your own judgement.

Eventually, avoiding being wrong becomes more important than moving forward.

Fear of being called out

Social media has amplified all of this because criticism is public and, worse, often performs well.

There is an entire genre of content built around taking somebody else’s video, sticking your own face over the top of it and explaining what they have got wrong.

A trainer corrects another trainer’s technique. A nutritionist reacts to somebody’s breakfast. A therapist analyses a relationship clip. A communication expert explains why somebody’s perfectly ordinary sentence was apparently manipulative, avoidant or traumatised.

And, frankly, some of the people who do this are among the laziest content creators online.

They haven’t built an idea. They haven’t created anything original. They have simply borrowed somebody else’s work, imposed themselves over it and picked holes in it.

It is much easier to criticise than create.

There may still be useful information buried in some of those videos, but the constant underlying message is the same:

Be careful. Someone is watching.

That can become a powerful brake on behaviour.

People stop posting because they worry about saying the wrong thing. They stop exercising because they feel self-conscious about technique. They stop experimenting because they are convinced there is a correct answer they have somehow missed.

They wait until they know enough, feel confident enough or have researched enough.

Which usually means they wait.

Perfectionism often looks responsible from the outside. Sometimes it is just fear dressed up as preparation.

The skyscraper problem

There is an old analogy I like about building the tallest skyscraper.

You have two options.

You can build a taller one.

Or you can knock down the one that is currently tallest.

The second is considerably easier.

A lot of criticism works the same way.

It is easier to explain why someone’s exercise programme is flawed than to help them find one they will actually follow.

It is easier to criticise someone’s meal than to understand the life around it.

It is easier to pick apart somebody’s communication than to sit in a real conversation where emotions are high and nobody has had enough sleep.

Correction can create the appearance of expertise because finding flaws is usually easier than creating something useful.

A better starting point is often to ask what is already going well.

Not as empty positivity, and not because everything is fine. Simply because behaviour that is working gives us something to build on.

If somebody has started walking three times a week, that gives us something useful.

If they are sleeping better on the days they move more, useful.

If they cooked four nights this week instead of ordering takeaway, useful.

If they posted something online despite feeling self-conscious, useful.

Those are all pieces of evidence.

Evidence builds confidence. Confidence makes repetition easier. Repetition builds consistency.

That loop is far more useful than constantly reminding someone how far they still have to go.

Good enough is underrated

One of the ideas I keep coming back to is good enough.

Good enough gets published. Good enough gets practised. Good enough goes for the walk, eats the meal, has the conversation and gives you something real to learn from.

Perfect stays in draft form.

A lot of people do not need more criticism. They already have a very efficient internal department handling that.

What they need is enough evidence to trust themselves again.

I’m trying to remember that with social media too.

Right now, the goal is not to become brilliant at it. The goal is to post, become consistent, learn what feels natural and tolerate the fact that some posts will be better than others.

I can improve later.

First, I need something worth improving.

Because if every first step is treated as a mistake, eventually people stop taking steps.

Sometimes the better option is to stop knocking the building down and help them add another floor.