It’s Two Cents Tuesdays ep.6! Each week I’ll be answering audience submitted questions over on my YouTube Channel!

Today’s question comes from Roseanne regarding my year off social media. She asks

“My sanity is still in jeopardy in this whole crazy instagram thing. It continues to get to me. I feel like if I don’t get better everyday my copycat competitors will steal all my clients. Shanna, how do you deal with this?”

This question is actually two-fold. On one hand it’s about my social media free experiment. Yea, if you haven’t heard I quit social media marketing for over a year!

But today I want to unpack the part of Roseanne’s question about copycats and competitors. Here’s my two-cents!

What should I do about copycats and competitors?

I know I don’t have to tell you, but we live in a noisy world. We have Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat (is that still in?), Marco Polo, Blogs, emails, ads … the list goes on and on! So much noise coming at us every single day.

We also live in a very visual world. We see what other people are doing a lot more than we used to. With the invention of google, we can find just about any type of information, inspiration and imitation we could ever be interested in finding. All that information starts to blur together and we begin to wonder if anyone has original ideas anymore?

I used to struggle with this.

Scarcity versus abundance. An idea Stephen Covey talks about in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

While I always wanted to live with the abundance mentality, there were definitely times I felt threatened in my business and defaulted towards that scarcity mindset.

I read the quote, “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle” and wondered “is that really true?”

But I’ll tell you what, the moments when I’ve allowed myself to get to focused on what other people are doing and whether or not it was / or wasn’t “too similar” to my own … were the moments I was hurting myself not them!

So what should you do when feeling threatened?

1.

Put your head down and keep doing your work.

Be competitive with yourself not others. Work to be better than you were yesterday, not better than someone else.

2.

Keep showing up.

Time has a way of sifting out the riff raft.

3.

Filter what you let in.

We are in control of what we let in. Sometimes that means unfollowing someone. It’s not them, it’s you. And that’s totally ok.

4.

Learn what you can and should seek legal action on.

This is a mistake many startups make. One I learned the hard way myself. Even if you cannot afford to hire an attorney to write your contracts, get educated on legalese. And grab yourself a lawyer written contract template! I recommend, The Contract Shop.

Related : I quit social media for a year, here’s why!

Related : My first day back : An open letter on quitting social media for a year.

Related : How my business survived a year without social media.