I think I have a name for how I teach. Slow medicine.
Hooks, trends, and clickbait are all over my feed, and I don't teach any of them. What I teach is long-haul work. Knowing your business and your audience as well as you can, and building from there.
Right behind that comes the question I can't shake. Does selling patience sell?
The foundational work can happen fast. I think you could take a day and do rough work on the basics: who you're talking to, why you're posting, what you want to say. What it needs is to be clear. After that, it's staying open and continuing to learn.
The slow part is the progress. Clear foundations still take time to show anything. That's what brings slow medicine to mind.
I see it in herbalism. I see it in fitness. I even see it in carpentry. In all 3, it takes time to see progress. Plans come together slowly. So does healing.
Then I open Instagram and see "How I grew my IG account to 300,000 followers in 30 days." It's easy to be sold on how quick it can be. I get why people click.
I wonder about the cost, though. Does burnout come that much sooner? Is it sustainable? Is it worthwhile? Or is it a wildfire in dry conditions, quick to grow and gone just as fast?
I think about this most with new and small business owners. So many of them are already burnt out on marketing. They've tried the fast version, or watched someone else try it, and they're tired. More speed doesn't seem like what they need.
Where mindset comes in
My guess is patience on its own is a hard sell. People want results, or at least some relief. "This will take a while" is neither. If someone is already burnt out and I tell them to be patient, I worry it lands as one more thing they're doing wrong.
This is where I keep coming back to mindset. Last week I wrote about how the hardest part is getting a business owner to sit down and do the marketing at all. I think there's a second hard part right after it: the stretch where you're posting and nothing seems to be happening. My guess is that's where a lot of people quit.
That stretch feels like a mindset problem to me. Whether I post is in my control. Who sees it isn't. "Don't miss twice" matters most in exactly those weeks.
Maybe what I'd teach is the part that makes patience possible. Progress you can count while the bigger results are still coming. 4 weeks of posting in a row is progress, even if the follower count hasn't moved. My Duolingo streak never made me fluent overnight, and I still kept going for around 1,300 days because I could see the number.
I'd want to be careful with this. Slow medicine can't turn into a way to dodge the question of what results to expect, or when. "It takes time, and here are the small wins along the way" is something I'd believe. "It takes time" on its own isn't.
So, does selling patience sell? I don't know yet. It's a lot harder to put in a headline than 300,000 followers in 30 days.
For now, slow medicine is the closest description I've found of what I do. Clear work up front, and patience for the progress. I'm going to keep it and see if it holds.