Have you ever spent ages crafting the perfect LinkedIn post, only to delete it in a moment of self-doubt? In this episode, Anna Lundberg dives into the so-called ‘LinkedIn spiral’—the cycle of comparison, perfectionism, and performative posting that can leave even seasoned experts feeling deflated. Tune in as Anna shares practical strategies for building your authority, setting healthy boundaries online, and creating a content rhythm that feels authentic (and gets results).

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction: Feeling discouraged by social media? Anna sets the stage.

[01:00] Why LinkedIn is the best platform for experts.

[02:33] The three traps: Comparison loop, perfectionism, and performative behaviour.

[05:43] Why engagement isn’t always value: Choosing the right metrics.

[09:12] How to show up authentically: Messaging, batching, and posting rhythms.

[11:16] Boundaries, batching, and separating creation vs. scrolling time.

[14:20] Find your cadence: How to set a sustainable rhythm.

[16:54] Celebrate the right wins: Prioritising real connections over vanity metrics.

[18:12] Permission granted: Show up your way, not the algorithm’s.

Resources mentioned:

• Book a consultation call
• Connect with Anna Lundberg: Get in touch on Instagram or LinkedIn.

LinkedIn overwhelm

This one is for you. If you have ever spent half an hour rewriting the same LinkedIn post, only to delete it, you’ve caught yourself checking views, likes or comments and then wondering, ugh, why do I even bother? You want to show up online, but it’s starting to feel performative, draining, or just plain discouraging. Listen up. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profit possible business as an independent expert. One that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for, ready to redefine success and build a business that you love. Let’s get started.

Okay, let’s talk about LinkedIn because it is absolutely the best platform, at least as of recording now in 2025, summer of 2025, the best platform for most of us as experts to I was going to use the thought leadership word already, but to position ourselves as an authority, I’m going to say to speak to our ideal clients, to connect with like minded people. And there’s so many reasons why it’s more effective than, you know, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc obviously depending on your goals. But for most of us as independent solopreneur experts, LinkedIn is an absolute godsend and is the platform I recommend to most of my clients. However, I have observed something recently and it’s with my clients, with beginners and with more experienced experts and it’s the LinkedIn spiral I’m going to call it. I need to flesh it out into a proprietary model, but for now it is first of all the comparison loop that we’re seeing. Our peers getting traction, offers, likes and wondering what we’re doing wrong. So my goodness, yes, I’m connecting with like minded people, but because of that I’m seeing, oh my gosh, so and so has just done a talk for this conference. I didn’t even pitch myself for it, but hey, and this other person, oh my goodness, they’re on this amazing holiday because yes, LinkedIn has become a little bit like Facebook in that we share the personal life as well.

This person’s just written a best selling book and this person, oh I can’t believe it, they’ve got like 500 likes and comments. I only ever get 5. The comparison loop is when we’re spiralling and comparing ourselves to people who are further along than us. You know, I’ve always said, don’t Compare your day one to someone else’s day 1000. I’ve been doing this for 10 years and grown my following of 12k on LinkedIn, you know, very organically, sometimes faster than other times, depending on my focus. It’s recently become more of a focus. There are others, I’m sure, who started way later than me and have far more followers. Grr.

Does that matter? That’s something to ask yourself, but it’s really dangerous because we can be super positive and clear on our business and the impact we’re making, and then we get kind of dragged down and our energy just goes. Because we’re getting caught up in that comparison loop. The other one is the perfection loop, when we’re just rewriting, especially when we’re starting out posting. Oh my gosh, I haven’t written in a while. I’ve got to write this perfect post. I’ll rewrite it a hundred times. I’ve spent hours on the perfect carousel. Oh, obviously I’ve got to find then the hook that I have to do.

And the picture is an AI picture. Do I even use AI to write it? Do I write my own? Will someone call me out for using ChatGPT? Or will it not be good enough if I don’t? Ah, trying to guess what’s going to work and wanting it to be perfect. And then I suppose the performance loop, that we’re just showing up because we think we should be there. So I’ve just told you, experts should be on LinkedIn. So now you’re there. Oh, I’ve got to be consistent. We talked about visibility and volume last week. You know, I’ve got to keep posting every day, all the time, and not just posting.

I’ve got to comment, I’ve got to share, I’ve got to engage. And this is just one tiny part of our business, right? In fact, when we don’t have clients, we have far more time for this, which is quite a dangerous, vicious cycle because if we have more time to spiral and spend on, you know, content creation, great that we can create some, you know, both volume and quality of content. But that is then distracting us from actually delivering work and from doing things that will move the needle from a sales perspective. And we’ll talk about sales versus marketing next week, in fact. So comparison, perfection, performance. What is underneath all of this? What’s underneath this LinkedIn spiral? Well, I think, and I’d be curious to hear what you think. It’s not a content problem, right. I come from a content marketing background, originally digital content.

I give you all sorts of frameworks on having, you know, the sweet spot in your content, the content pillars I mentioned last time as well. You know, we can work on that framework and so on. And that does help because it gives you the structure. But I think it’s more of a confidence problem and possibly a bit of a clarity issue. Above all, we’re really misplaced when it comes to the metrics we’re looking at, right? Because engagement is not value. And if I could shout something from the rooftops and print T shirts and mugs, this would be it. Clients are not commenters necessarily. Trust isn’t about following trends and jumping on things and so on.

I have lost count of the times people have said. In fact, I had a mum friend who posted a picture of Wisterio that went viral. Okay, so what? How does that build your business? You know, somebody posts a spontaneous picture they’ve put no thought into and that gets lots of likes and engagement, whereas the stuff, you know, the really thoughtful things that we’ve crafted over days and weeks gets crickets, as they say. Right. And we’re looking at the wrong metrics. In fact, it’s funny how often I refer back to my big corporate marketing days. But that was one of my big messages then too, that, you know, let’s say, and this is crazy that this is. I guess I’m.

I’m ageing myself here now, dating myself. But we used to have banners were a new thing at the time, right? And if you don’t know what that is in like a magazine, if you know what that is, that you’d have adverts, right? And online, suddenly we had the opportunity to put banner advertising on websites. They’re awful. But, you know, we had the opportunity and people would actually click them, but very few people would click them. And we would measure the banner success based on clicks. Whereas the. The point of banners, for us at least working in luxury perfume, was to raise awareness, brand awareness, recognition, positioning of the beautiful naked celebrities who are on our advertising, not to get them to buy necessarily. Obviously our sales teams wanted to drive sales.

The E Commerce team wanted us to click through to E Commerce. Fine. But if you only look at clicks when the purpose of the campaign is to drive awareness, you’re looking at the wrong metric. And that’s the case for all digital marketing, right? If we have an awareness campaign, we do need to look at views and impressions and so on. If rather we’re trying to build a community and drive engagement, then yes, we are looking at likes and comments and shares and so on. We just have to be super clear on what we’re looking at. And of course, a bit like, you know, if you’ve ever. I’ve worked with a coach to, to, to get fit, lose weight.

We’re not looking at the, the, the metric of the weight, first of all at all, necessarily. But secondly, if we are, we’re certainly not looking at the fluctuation every single day. Right. Because it’s sort of one step forward, two steps back. It can be really demotivating. So we’re looking at the overall trend over a period of weeks and months. It’s the same thing for content. Post the stuff, engage, get on with your life.

And yes, by all means, if you, you know, at the end of the week, look at how things have done at the end of the month, at the end of the quarter, and then tweak. If we just, you know, improve one little thing each week, let’s say we learn one thing, oh, this did really well. Let’s try something a bit more like that. Maybe the message really landed the format, then within weeks, months, we’ll have improved by so much. Right. But let’s not get caught up in that. We do our best, we put it out there and then we see what resonates. And as I keep saying, we’re creating a kind of tapestry of content.

Ideally also, by the way, evergreen content that people can reach all the time, not just these kind of flash in the pan posts that go out and then disappear. LinkedIn is getting better, actually, at showing posts in the feed, you know, a few weeks later, which is good. So how do we break this dreaded spiral without disappearing? Because as we said last week, visibility is important, even when we have sort of a more, I don’t want to say limited or a more a sense of enoughness when it comes to how many people we need to reach. Right. We want to build this kind of quiet authority rather than massive viral presence like a Stephen Bartlett or a Daniel Priestley and so on. Well, I would really anchor into your messaging first. Right. And it always comes back to this.

What do you want to say and to whom? Okay. If you’re trying to reach, you know, something, a busy HR executive, they’re not spending their time browsing LinkedIn. Some people are, but some people are, you know, rather via email and so on. So maybe we’ll talk about this Another week, too. A bit of cold outreach, dare I say it is going to be important, or connections or referrals. Maybe it’s about going to conferences where HR&L and D professionals will, will be participating. Right? If it’s. Yeah.

I mean, if it’s. I think I talked about this last week. If it’s a particular profile of a customer who won’t want to admit in public their problem, which is a lot of us, right, People won’t necessarily want to say, hey, I’m really struggling in my business, or I’m really overweight and I’d like to lose a weight, or I’ve got this diagnosis, you know, those aren’t things necessarily we’re commenting on a stranger’s posts. So it’s rather going to be in conversations offline, away from the spotlight. So anyway, anchor into your messaging first. What do you want to say and to whom do you want to say it? And you know, again, I’ve been doing this for a while and I ebb and flow with how I do it. But I do recommend, to the extent that you can, to batch content. Right.

I’m now recording, so let’s see how we go. Four podcast episodes, I’m going to say this morning, to record them, to send them off to my editor, and then I can batch videos and the show notes. And so on another day for my LinkedIn, I’m getting better at scheduling things in. What’s it called? Ahead of time in advance was what I was looking for. The downside of that is that it makes me less spontaneous and less sort of in touch with what I’ve written if I do it too far out. And I do also make sure that I’m online those minutes that it goes out. So most days it, at least. So if it’s going out at 9 o’ clock in the morning, I come back from the school run, I’ve got sort of 10 minutes before, 10 minutes after to engage, to comment, and then I, as I say, I go off with my life and business.

But if you can batch it, you know, when you’re in a creative frame of mind, when you have clarity on what your messaging is, create your content. Don’t put pressure on yourself. When you’re in sort of the scroll of doom phase to go, I should be writing something interesting. And then you’re just going to compare yourself to others and get into perfection and performance. Right. So time box, time for creating content. And then your scrolling time is, is separate from that. And speaking of time and separation, set yourself boundaries so as I said, I just gave the example that I come back generally sort of quarter to nine to quarter past nine.

Let’s say I’m engaging on LinkedIn now, that’s not to say that I don’t dare I say, you know, check LinkedIn. Maybe at lunch, maybe when I go to the toilet, you know, a bit of a, like here or comment there, reply to a message that’ Fine. But what we don’t do is let that become another hour, two hours of totally unintentional scrolling that isn’t, you know, contributing to your business. If you do like to scroll funny videos or I like recipes or fitness things or whatever on Instagram, by all means. But don’t count that as work. Right? That’s a separate block of time to your marketing and sales time. So separating content from your scrolling time, but then setting boundaries, giving yourself maybe half an hour in the morning, if that works for you, and then maybe again later, one of my clients in the accelerator said, actually, and this was on Instagram, but she’s unfollowed people or doesn’t follow people like her. And that’s so good because, yes, there’s a time and place for learning from other people and experts and so on, and we do want to engage and collaborate, but if it’s too close, then we’re being influenced, we’re getting that paranoia and we’re just, oh my gosh, she’s doing it better than me.

And that’s just not helpful. Right. So both for your sake and for theirs, it’s better to have that boundary and to mute or unfollow or, you know, create lists if you are. And, you know, depending on how advanced you are on LinkedIn, I don’t want to overwhelm you, but if you are following sort of a strategic commenting approach, I’d really recommend again to time box that and have particular people you want to comment on who are maybe in adjacent spaces or who are, you know, massive thought leaders in your space and aren’t your competitors because that’s just silly. If we’re just commenting on each other’s posts, trying to steal clients, but doing that rather than just scrolling mindlessly. Okay. If you’re being strategic about it and then speaking of boundaries, really having. I’m all about rhythms and things.

You know, I’ve probably shared many times that when I first started working myself, you know, 12 years ago or so, I suppose, arguably 10 years ago, because in the first couple of years I was consulting and that was a bit different. I thought freedom came from just being free. Oh, my watch is telling me to move about. I’ve been standing still for too long recording these podcasts, so I thought that I didn’t have to set an alarm. And I just go with the flow and so on. But it turns out you don’t end up actually achieving your goals when you do that. So having a loose structure, and I talk about the ideal week, having kind of a sustainable cadence, it’s fine to have one post a week. That can still build authority if it’s consistent and intentional.

Right. And so coming up with a rhythm that works for you again, I have a podcast that I’ve been doing. I think we’re, you know, we’re approaching almost 400 episodes for five, six years, whatever it is. I’ve got my LinkedIn, I’ve got Instagram, which I kind of come back to sometimes. I’ve got my email newsletters. There’s a lot for me. You may not be quite there with that complexity, or you may be and you may have a team, who knows? But the. Whatever, wherever you are, starting out more advanced solo team, you plus ChatGPT or whatever, just decide intentionally about your strategy and your structure for this month.

Let’s say stick to that. And then if it’s too much, you didn’t manage it, let’s scale it back. If it’s too little, you feel, actually I could do a bit more, then let’s add something onto that. I really layered things on. When I first started, I think I was blogging, then I added a newsletter, then maybe a Facebook group. You know, it took time, and the newsletter was once a month. Then it was fortnightly. Now it’s weekly.

Oh, it’s sounding like a lot, isn’t it? So choosing a cadence that’s sustainable for you and then reusing what works. Oh, my gosh, I need to get better at this because every post doesn’t have to be new. In fact, if we’re speaking to our ideal client, you know, we’re all so busy, they need to see things again and again. I talked about the whole visibility thing of how many times people need to see your message, but if we’re constantly talking about different things, that can be really distracting. Now, of course, when you’re first starting out, you might want to try lots of messages to see what lands and what you think is. Is your real thing that you want to go deep on. But ultimately, you do want to try to sort of pick a team and stick with it, at least for a month. At least for a Quarter, as I keep saying, then you can move on to different content pillar, a different audience, a different offer.

But you want that kind of consistency of message so that each little piece of the tapestry builds on the other rather than just being, oh, now she’s talking about this, and oh, what’s this? And they’ll just kind of disconnect or they won’t see enough of you in the same realm to get it. And then you know what, I also want you to celebrate things, I suppose, and it might be, you know, okay, that post didn’t get a lot of likes and, and views and so on, but two people reached out to you and said they want to have a call. That’s amazing. So much more important than likes and impressions or whatever or, you know, even separately to this, maybe a past client, you’ve, you’ve nudged them. And again, we’ll talk about a bit more sort of outbound outreach next week. Someone’s kind of resurfaced and said, hey, actually I’d like to work with you again. Or maybe it’s a referral sparked by something you said. So, you know, they didn’t like or comment on your post, but they’ve gone, oh my gosh, this was really interesting.

And I’ve actually passed your details on to a colleague or a friend who needs your help. Right. So that’s so important. So, yeah, let’s take a step back and really get clear on what do you want to say to whom. Try to do some batching, try to separate your creation from your scrolly time, set those healthy boundaries and choose a cadence that you can stick to that feels consistent. And I say easeful, I think is the word. It’s not easy, it’s easeful. So look, if this hits close to home, if you want to get some support building a content rhythm that actually works for your business and your energy, we can work one to one actually on that.

So I have my authority accelerator programme and personal branding has always been a really big part of my work. And as I keep going on about, I used to do content marketing in my digital role back in the day. This has been something I’ve been thinking about, you know, for 15 plus odd years. And it’s something I’m very passionate about. So if you’d like to have a chat about that, you can reach out one step outside.com forward/cool. Or I would. And, and I should say as well, I would simply ask yourself, okay, what would it look like if I showed up my way? So give yourself permission. I’M giving you permission, even though I can’t.

And you don’t need to have my permission. I’m giving you permission to do this your way. No one out there has the answer. There are some methods that work for some people. Some people have gone viral with certain things. Are they earning more money as a result? Who knows? But the point is we can and dare I say it should do it our way. And as long as we’re clear, we’re intentional, we’re learning. And yeah, being authentic to ourselves, actually, I guarantee you will actually get better results than if you try to contort yourself and follow all these algorithm hacks and things and crazy schedules that just feel too overwhelming.

Okay, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this as well. If you want to message me the Instagram Anna SE Lundberg, where you can hopefully find me Anna Lundberg on LinkedIn as well. And hear your thoughts on this. Okay, See you next week. Building a strong personal brand is important, whether you’re a freelancer, an entrepreneur, or an employee. If you’d like help getting clear on what you want to stand for, mapping out how you can amplify that message, and stepping up as a true leader in your industry, get in touch. You can book a call at onestepoutside.com/call.

Building a strong personal brand is important, whether you’re a freelancer, an entrepreneur, or an employee. If you’d like help getting clear on what you want to stand for, mapping out how you can amplify that message, and stepping up as a true leader in your industry, get in touch. You can book a call at onestepoutside.com/call.

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