The secret I’ve been keeping from you.

The Florence Given Show

Florence Given discusses her decision to keep a major, decade-long creative project secret for the past year. She explores the psychological

Key takeaways

• Sharing ideas too early can provide a false dopamine hit, making you feel like you've achieved something without doing the actual work.
• The 'vulnerable flame' of a new idea needs protection from external criticism to grow into a sustainable 'bonfire'.

Main topics

• Creative privacy
• Social media impact on focus

Notable quotes

You need to let them become a full fire and something that cannot possibly be put out before you share it with other people.

Conclusion

The episode encourages listeners to stop announcing their intentions a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Okay, there is something that I haven't been telling you. I've been keeping a big fat juicy secret and the funny thing is, is I've actually... kind of been telling you for like the last year. There have been so many moments in this show where I thought, fuck, I wish I could just tell them. For the last year, I have been working on something that has taken up an enormous part of my heart, my brain, my soul, my life, my time. And before I tell you what it is, I want to talk to you about why I've kept this a secret. I think there's something really fucking powerful about letting something exist just with yourself before you share it with other people. Whether that is a project, a relationship, a job, an idea. These things that we have, they're these very vulnerable, like little flames, like a tiny spark that's just starting to catch on. Speaker 1 (1:07) You need to protect them. You need to let them become a full fire and something that cannot possibly be put out before you share it with other people. So before I share my secret with you, I'm going to tell you why I've kept it a secret. Let's fucking go. Speaker 1 (2:07) So I don't know if it's the Scorpio in me. Okay. That's what one of my friends would say. She'd be like, Oh my God, Florence, you're such a fucking Scorpio. Whatever. Whatever. I keep my projects and my personal life very private. And I have always been this way. I think when I first had my social media account, I was a lot more like. flappy and would just say things and like didn't give much of a fuck. But when it comes to my projects and my ideas, I keep them very close to my chest. I think it's because I've learned that if I share something too soon with people, I lose my fucking steam. I lose my steam. I lose the motivation to actually follow through and do the thing because, oh shit, suddenly I'm faced with the very unglamorous work of following through with this thing. Okay. And I think there's a lot of value in keeping things private. And this is kind of counterintuitive to what a lot of the advice on social media is encouraging people to do, which is document the process, right? And I'm all for that. I'm all for documenting the process. I think it's beautiful. And I think it's such an amazing way to create relationship. with an audience, right? When you share your process with them. And I have done that before and I've done it in the past and I will still do it for things that maybe don't feel as vulnerable. But when it comes to a big idea for something that I am still in the woods of understanding, I don't want other people's opinions on it unless they're working on it with me and they're in the room with me and they are. a collaborator on this project. And so, yeah, I want to talk with you about what that's been like, because I, I'm a very private person and that might sound really strange to you because I share so much of myself online, but actually most people don't know much about me. I'm very, I don't know, just sort of. intentional when it comes to what I share on social media and when it comes to sharing projects and secrets. I don't like people to know and witness me. in this fertile stage of an idea before it's been able to grow and bloom and blossom into what the idea needed to become. Yeah. So without telling you what it is, yeah, because I'm going to tell you next week. Okay. I'm going to tell you next week, next Tuesday, the 29th of September, my big fucking secret. And this time with this project, I sort of had this instinct to go very quiet. I haven't been on social media a lot for the last 10 months. Maybe you've noticed, maybe you haven't because you've been interacting with my podcast, right? I've had this podcast running for the last 10 months, but when it comes to my personal social media, I have not been on fucking Instagram. I, because I can't, I cannot be on Instagram and also simultaneously create a very beautiful, deep body of work. that feels original and also just gets my full attention. These are the sort of sacrifices that I personally need to make for my attention span and for the depth that I want to go into my work. I cannot have too much noise and too much input. And so I haven't been posting on social media a lot for the last year. I felt this calling to go very fucking quiet. And my definition of quiet is probably not your version of quiet. Clearly I'm a fucking loud mouth. I've launched a whole podcast in the last 10 months and I'm talking a lot about my opinions, but I'm just doing this in my bedroom and uploading it to all of you. And I have an amazing team of women that work on this show that helped me publish and broadcast this and edit the clips and stuff. So I haven't been on the Instagram doing all of that. I have been with my secret project for the last year. And I need to know what my opinion on something is before I expose it to everyone and have all of that sort of feedback come through. And it takes a lot of confidence when you have a new idea. So confidence and restraint. You need a lot of restraint to be able to hold yourself back when you have this new idea, not to share it with other people. Because I think there's some like neuroscience thing behind this, that when you actually talk about your idea all the time, you get this dopamine hit of being seen as the person doing that thing without actually doing that thing. Okay. So, you know, when you have a big juicy project idea, right? You want to run a marathon. You want to start a podcast. You've got a new relationship even, right? And you're like, oh my God, it's going so well. It's going so well. And you're running around telling everyone. Or you want to write a book or you want to write an article. You want to do something new. You're doing something new and you go around and you tell everyone and you sort of get this false dopamine hit of doing it. But you're not doing it. You're talking about doing