Is Your Audience Slowing Down Your Growth?

One of the most amazing things about Blogging happens when your Blog begins to attract an audience outside of the normal people you associate with day to day.

In the very beginning the first readers of your Blog may be your friends or family who come to read your posts to show you some support, or perhaps to even heckle you a bit.

But after a while, an audience starts to gather and most of the people who start to read your posts aren’t your friends, family or colleagues.

All of a sudden you begin to attract a group of like-minded individuals who find your writing interesting and helpful so they subscribe to your Blog and begin to read regularly.  Some even begin leaving comments.

When you reach this level in your Blogging career, an amazing thing happens – you begin to feel validation.

You write a Blog post, and your Blog readers understand it, enjoy it and find it valuable.  It’s a great feeling.

Sometimes you’ll have an idea, and you’ll try sharing it with your friends and family but they just won’t get it, or won’t be interested in it.  You then write a Blog post about this idea, and your Blog readers love it.

This feels great.

Every Blogger who’s gotten to this point in their Blogging careers will know what I’m talking about.  Whereas previously their ideas and insights became topics of conversation with family, friends or colleagues, now all of a sudden you begin to go straight from having the idea to writing a Blog post about it.

You begin to care what your Blog audience thinks more than what your friends and family think, because your Blog audience is usually at the same level of awareness as you and they actually get what you’re writing about.

Have you ever felt this way?

I know I have, but this past week I started thinking about the other side of this coin.

I actually started thinking about this after I wrote my Blog post “How I Manifested a Mac Book Pro For Free“.

The Blog post and the video I created were both very well received on my Blog and I received a lot of positive comments and emails.  I even got a call from my Dad who congratulated me on the win, as he often reads my Blog.

However, an interesting thing happened when Tyler Cruz posted a Blog post on his site which talked about me winning this laptop and he put a direct link from his site to my article and posted the video on his Blog for his audience to watch.

I’ve gotten to know Tyler fairly well over the last year or so and even though we think alike on a lot of entrepreneur / business related topics, I know one area where Tyler and I are different is in the area of personal development.

I’m totally into personal development, having read over a thousand books on personal development related topics over the past 15 years.  Tyler, on the other hand, I don’t think has even read one book on the topic.  It’s just not an area of interest for him, which is OK.

He has read books on Poker, however, because that’s something that interests him and I couldn’t tell you a single thing about Poker.  It just doesn’t interest me.

When Tyler posted my video on his site, I was very curious to see how his audience would react to it.  As expected, the reaction to my post on his Blog was totally different from the one I received on my Blog.

Some people reacted in a similar way, but a few people basically told me I was full of crap talking about “visualization” as if it had any effect on my win.

I found this very interesting, because Tyler’s audience is similar to him.  I don’t ever remember him writing a Blog post saying he doesn’t believe in personal development stuff, yet he attracts an audience with similar beliefs as him.

So when I write a Blog post and post it on my site, I usually get fairly positive feedback because most of the people that read my Blog believe in the things I write about, such as Law of Attraction, Visualization, Personal Development etc.  Yet, the exact same Blog post on another Blog gets a much colder reaction.

This got me thinking.

What would happen if my beliefs began to evolve and change to another level?  How would my audience react?

My guess is that if my thinking started to evolve, my new Blog posts probably wouldn’t get a very warm reception unless my audience grew with me, or I began to attract a new audience.

A similar thing happens in “real life” when you don’t see a friend for a few years and during that time you go through a period of growth but they don’t.  When you get back in touch with them, you often find it difficult to have a conversation about anything meaningful because they’re still stuck in their old way of thinking but you’ve evolved past that.

The important thing to take away from this is that while having a Blog audience that understands you and believes in the same things you believe in can be great, the same support you get from them now could hold you back in times of growth.

I’ve seen this happen with a few Bloggers, where they evolved past a certain level of awareness and outgrew their audience.  What usually happens is that their audience kind of turns on them for a while and starts to complain that all the new posts are “crap” compared to their old stuff.

This usually lasts for a while until the Blogger begins to attract a new audience who’s at the same level of awareness as the Blogger.

The challenge is not to get too attached to the support you get from your audience because the minute you start to take a step outside of their comfort zone they may try to pull you back to where they’re at.

Of course this isn’t unique to Bloggers.  Anyone who’s ever had an influence on any group of people in the history of human kind has probably experienced this issue.  Anyone from great leaders to Hollywood actors or even pop stars may experience this.  One minute they get all the support they could ever want from their audience, and then they evolve into a new level of awareness and their audience turns on them.

So, I have one question for you: Is Your Audience Slowing Down Your Growth?

Regardless if your audience is 10,000 Blog subscribers, or the four lunch buddies you eat with every day – are you dependent on their support, and unwilling to grow because you’re afraid of losing that support?

Are you strong enough to evolve and grow consciously even if the people around you don’t grow along with you?  Or are you stuck, living out the rest of your life dependent on the support you get from your audience?

Something to think about.