There is no denying it, women have this innate urge to impress other women. Do we get new clothes or in hopes that our husbands will comment on them and appreciate them? No way, it’s our girlfriend and other women who we secretly hope to impress.
As we journey into motherhood together we continue these same practices personified because now we have these little human beings that we are trying to understand for ourselves. Take the growth chart for our newborn and babies doctors visits. How many of us know our kids actual measurements versus knowing what percentile they are in. Everyone knows and rattles off their kid’s percentile but few of us actually remember the individuality of how our kids literally measure rather than measure up to everyone else.
Stop Trying to Impress the Wrong People
Social media is pretty much ground zero for impressing people who don’t matter. We have newsfeeds filled with acquaintances who we want to impress. Generations in the past only had to worry about looking good one day every 10 years at their high school reunions. But not our desire to keep outward appearances is pushed upon our everyday lives. Take the selfie stick for example. We literally don’t care how ridiculous we look standing alone taking a photo of ourselves holding a stick. We could care less about how we actual look in real life in this exact moment to take a photo that inaccurate portrays us so that we can further build our online presence in hopes of “likes” and “comments”.
Would we enjoy more without social media? No doubt out world would be smaller but it might just be richer too.
Start Impressing Those That Matter
Impressing other and social media personas really come to a head when our kids get involved. It’s easy to get caught creating an illusion of who we want our lives to be and focus on checking our likes and comments on our photos. But as mom’s this can quickly get in the way of spending quality time with our kids. I’m not talking about the quality time where we take our kids one on one for a special activity, I’m talking about simply engaging our kids throughout the mundane every day activities. This imbalance occurs because the more time we spend distracted by impressing others on social media, the less we impress my kids. So ultimately, whose opinion of you do you hold in higher regard, your social media acquaintances or the people who you love who are right there in the room with you, seriously, right there behind this phone screen.
Gain Actual Likes
What would it look like if instead of trying to grow the social media version of ourselves we just simply strived to grow as better individuals. What would earning those “like” look like in real life? Can that be accomplished while holding a selfie stick? Most likely, we probably need to set down the selfie stick and spend a whole lot more time connecting with the people around us.
Summary
I know I’m passing out a prescription for an illness that I have too. I mean seriously, I’m the pot and you’re the kettle in all this. And I’m not faulting social media. I just think that sometimes all it takes is a moment of reflection to realize that maybe we are a little off course. Maybe our course has just run astray today or maybe we are finding that day after we really are caring more about what we look to our digital friends than what we look like in the eyes of those we love.
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