You Need To Start Thinking Like An Influencer

My book is out! You can get The Girls Are Not Fine here.

I know what you think when you think influencer. You think exaggerated expressions, unfounded shock and awe at mundane things, vapid and cynical manipulation. You think pretty girl, soft job, discount code. You think of someone gasping at a moisturizer like it cured cancer. You think: not a real career.

I want to talk you out of that contempt. Not because it’s unkind (though it is) but because it is expensive. Every hour you spend feeling superior to her is an hour you spend refusing to learn the one thing she has worked out that you haven’t. Drill a level deeper than the ring light and the trending audio and you’ll find a skillset you have been trying really hard to cultivate for years and don’t even know it. The same one your reviews keep circling, the same one you’ve paid for in courses and frameworks and coaching calls, the same one that gets written on your appraisal as ‘an area for development’ year after year while you nod and promise to work on it. You don’t recognise it in her because it doesn’t arrive with a certificate or a job title. But it’s there. And the gap between the two of you is not talent, and it is not luck. It is a mindset you keep refusing to shift.

So first, let’s talk about what makes influencers click. What makes you and me buy something a stranger is yapping about on a screen? Why do we comment ‘link’ on every third video? It’s simple, and it’s a skill you’ve been told you need to work on a thousand times: effective communication. The influencer you’re watching has mastered the art of a few things, and none of them are an accident.

First, she is an expert at breaking down value propositions in a way that actually sells something to her audience. She does not look at declared value props and recite them back to you. She simplifies them in a way that is accessible to her target market. She is not optimising for information per word, she is optimising for intention per word. She is not selling you a product. She is selling you a promise that you can be just like her if you buy this thing. Think about how violently that differs from how you communicate. You are in a meeting somewhere, burying your one good point under nine qualifiers. You are writing a deck where slide four contradicts the urgency of slide two because you were scared to commit to a single claim. You mistake density for rigour. You have convinced yourself that if you make something hard enough to understand, someone will mistake the difficulty for depth. She has convinced herself of the opposite, and she is the one getting paid. Clarity is not the dumbing-down of intelligence. Clarity is the highest expression of it, because it means you understood the thing well enough to carry it across to someone who didn’t.

Which brings us to the second thing. She has a preternatural ability to read your mind. Well, at least it looks like that. She seems to say exactly what you’re feeling a second before you feel it, and you find yourself nodding along, because if she can read my mind, surely she’s right about everything else too. She is not reading your mind. She is guiding your thought process. When she sat down to script this, she did not start with the product. She started with how she wanted you to feel, react, spend. She decided on the outcome first and then wove the words backward from it, like a map drawn in reverse. She understands the one thing most marketing experts spend entire decks pretending to know and never actually do: how you make someone feel decides how they will act afterwards. Emotion first. Everything else is just the route there. You do it the other way around, every single time. You lead with the information and hope the feeling shows up on its own. You present the data and then act wounded when nobody is moved by it. You walk into the room with your evidence stacked up like firewood and forget that nobody has ever, in the history of being persuaded, been persuaded by firewood. They are persuaded by warmth. She builds the fire. You hand people logs and wonder why they leave cold.

Third, she doesn’t hesitate. She talks to you with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she has to say. Now, a lot of that is editing trickery. You can auto-cut every pause and filler out of a monologue, and she does. But here is how she actually does it, before the editing ever touches it. She records what she wants to say, and she pauses between each line, each thought. She lets herself think, consolidate, and then modulate her voice into precisely what she means. How many times have you been told to slow down and give yourself time to think through a sentence? And how many times have you ignored it, because you decided that intelligence is expressed through force and not through deliberation? You believe the person who speaks first wins the meeting. You believe the person who speaks fastest is the smartest one in the room. You have watched confident men say nothing at length and mistaken it for authority, and you have tried to copy the wrong half of what they were doing. What you keep forgetting, and what she can teach you, is that force has to be preceded by deliberation. You have to know exactly what you need to communicate before you open your mouth to communicate it. Hesitation is talking before you’ve thought. Deliberation is thinking before you talk. From the outside they can look identical for a second. They are not.

Finally, she knows her worth. She does not mention a product in her content unless it enriches her somehow. Sometimes that’s an exclusive brand deal. Often it’s an affiliate link. She understands that people are willing to hand her their attention, which makes her an arbiter of focus, which in turn lets her control where that focus goes. Attention is the only resource that has actually become scarcer in your lifetime, and she sits on a reservoir of it. She does not fritter that leverage away to be nice. She makes money, and she is unashamed about it. She knows that what she does is worth paying for, so she makes sure she gets paid for it. She does not give brands her space because they were nice to her. She does not accept ‘exposure’ as a currency, because she knows it doesn’t clear at the bank. She does not chase likeability, because she can evoke things far more valuable than being liked. She can manufacture lust, jealousy, aspiration, hunger. She knows exactly how powerful those are. So she prices herself accordingly, and then she does not flinch when she asks for her worth.

You flinch. You have a rate, and you discount it before anyone has even pushed back, just to spare yourself the silence after you say it. You add the apology before the invoice. You take the meeting for free because asking to be paid for your time feels grubby. You have been taught that wanting money makes you less serious about the work, when she has understood the opposite, that refusing to be paid is what tells the world your work is a hobby.

The reason you are allowed to sneer at her is that the skill is coded female. Everything she is good at: communication, reading a room, managing how people feel, making yourself watchable, making desire visible and then satisfying it, is precisely the cluster of competencies women are told are natural, effortless, innate to them. And anything a woman is told she does naturally, she is told she should do for free. Care is natural, so it’s unpaid. Beauty is natural, so it’s expected. Charm is natural, so it’s not a skill, it’s just personality. The genius of the influencer, the thing that actually enrages people, is that she took the entire bundle of feminised labour the world insists has no market value and she built a market for it. She is charging for the things you were ordered to give away. Of course she is resented. She broke an agreement you didn’t even know you’d signed.

So when you tell yourself she ‘didn’t work for it,’ understand what you are actually saying. You are saying that the work doesn’t count because women have always done it for nothing. You are not describing reality. You are defending the discount. And the discount you are defending is the same one being applied to you.

Because the labour is real, and you know it’s real the second you try to do it. Go and shoot one video. Try to compress something true into fifteen seconds that a stranger will not scroll past. Try to write a single line that stops a thumb mid-flick. Try to say the thing you mean, to camera, without your voice doing the apologetic upward tilt at the end. Try to read your own analytics and feel nothing while a post you were proud of dies in front of you. Try to do it again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, in public, where everyone can watch you miss. The reshoots, the testing of hooks, the spreadsheet of rates, the figuring out of which collaboration is worth her name and which one is a trap. You only get to believe it’s easy because she is good enough to make it look easy.

We vilify influencers because we’d like to believe they hacked the game. The story we tell ourselves is I worked so HARD for my skills and she didn’t, so it’s unfair that she makes more money and gets more adoration than I do. We soothe ourselves with yeah, but MY career will last longer than hers, this is obviously just luck. It is a comforting story, and it lets you keep your contempt and your inertia at the same time. If she only got lucky, then there’s nothing to learn, and if there’s nothing to learn, you never have to do the uncomfortable thing, which is to admit she is better than you at the exact skill you have spent your whole career claiming to value. Credentialism is the last refuge here. But I have a degree. But I have ten years of experience. But I have a real skill. You are bulwarking your legitimacy to institutions as if they are still the ones handing out the money. They are not. She skipped the line you are still standing in, and the reason that feels like cheating is that you have confused the line with the destination.

What if I told you that you both have the exact same skillset? What if I told you she is, in fact, far better at the same job than you are? What if I told you that influence is a currency, and that you’re running low on it, not because you don’t have the skills, but because you keep waiting for someone to notice you and pay you what you’re owed? What if I told you that you have been treating your own influence like something that will accrue on its own if you’re patient and good and quiet, when it is in fact the one asset that does nothing at all until you decide to spend it? And what if I told you no one is coming to do that for you?

No one is coming to discover you. No one is going to walk over and hand you your worth, correctly priced, with interest for the years you waited politely in line. There is no panel reviewing your case. There is no silent authority keeping a ledger of everything you did without being asked, preparing to settle up. You already have everything she has. The communication, the read on a room, the ability to make people feel something before they’ve decided to. You have just been spending it for free on people who will never pay you for it, because you were too proud of the contempt to use the skill beneath it.

Drop the contempt. Keep the skill. Start thinking like an influencer.

A shameless replug: My book is out!

You can get The Girls Are Not Fine here.