The idol of advice is giving other people's strategies, expertise, and frameworks more authority over your next move than God's specific leading in your life. When I launched Clear Authentic Brands, I knew the digital landscape had changed. So I researched all of it: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn. I took courses, watched hours of video, studied what was working. And the algorithm filled my feed with more: more DM playbooks, more funnel templates, more expert frameworks, each one contradicting the last. Six months of implementing, pivoting, and trying again. No traction. No identity left. I had lost myself completely in everyone else's answers. James 1:5-6 became the mirror I couldn't argue with: if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That was exactly where I was. Six weeks of silence, deleted apps, and no outside input rebuilt the ability to hear.
When I launched Clear Authentic Brands, I knew the digital landscape had changed from my 406 Marketing days. New era, new platforms, new strategies. So I researched all of them: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn. I took courses, watched hours of YouTube, studied what was working. And the algorithm immediately began filling my feed with more: more DM playbooks, more funnel templates, more expert frameworks, each one contradicting the last. Six months of implementing, pivoting, and trying again later. No traction. No identity left. I had lost myself completely in everyone else's answers.
James 1:5-6 became the mirror I couldn't argue with: if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That was exactly where I was. I was asking God for direction while spending every waking hour consuming other people's strategies. The asking and the seeking were pointing in opposite directions. It took six weeks of silence, deleted apps, and no outside input to rebuild the ability to hear. When the fog cleared, I sat down with my own story, my own journals, my own gifting, and built my brand from that foundation. Not from someone else's playbook.
- Expert advice isn't an idol when it's in proportion. The problem is when every strategy you encounter gets more weight than what God is specifically calling you to do.
- The algorithm makes the idol worse. Once you research one marketing strategy, your feed fills with competing strategies, each contradicting the last. That noise is dangerous.
- James 1:5-6: if you lack wisdom, ask God. But the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. Too many voices without God's anchor will toss you.
- There's a difference between a learning season and a creating season. Sometimes you need to consume and study. But at some point you have enough information. The obstacle becomes continuing to consume instead of acting on what you know.
- Getting still means actually deleting the apps, not just limiting your time on them. When you're addicted to checking, willpower doesn't work. Access has to go.
- The rebuilding starts with your own story, not someone else's template. God is the author and creator of your life. He has given you specific giftings, calling, and experiences. The brand you build should come from those, not from someone else's playbook.
- You are in a season of planting. Plant in the quiet. Strip off whatever holds you back. Keep your eyes on the author and perfecter of your faith. The harvest is his job.
What is the idol of advice and how does it affect your business strategy?
The idol of advice is the point where you're running on other people's strategies more than you're running on God's specific direction for your calling. It doesn't arrive dramatically. It accumulates. You research one platform and the algorithm serves you a dozen more.
The specific mechanics of how this happened to me: I came into the Alaska chapter knowing the digital landscape had changed. So I studied: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn strategies. My feed filled up with more. More experts, more contradictions, more urgency about whatever platform was working this week.
The result: I lost confidence, lost my sense of why, and lost the grounding I started with. I was pivoting before anything had time to work. And underneath all of it was the deeper problem: I was praying to God for wisdom while seeking the answer from everyone else. James 1:5-6 names that experience exactly: the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind.
I feel blown and tossed by the wind. Just blown and tossed each way, this way, that way, with every wave that comes at me, with every gust of wind that comes at me, whether it's this expert saying do this, or this expert saying do that. And here I am thinking I'm asking God for wisdom, thinking I'm asking God for strategy, and I'm praying to him about it, but I'm looking for the answer from other experts.
Amy Dardis, Episode 25How do you know when you're in a learning season versus a creating season?
A learning season is when you're in new terrain: new platform, new model, new industry, new phase of the business. Reading, researching, and getting mentoring are appropriate and necessary.
The idol kicks in when you keep consuming after you have enough information. When continuing to research is a way to delay acting. When you've been in learning mode for months and still don't feel ready to commit to anything, that's not a knowledge problem. It's a hearing problem. You have enough information. You don't have clarity. And the solution is not more input.
My signal that I had crossed from learning into consuming: I couldn't tell anymore what I believed. My vision had drifted. My reasons for doing this had faded. When that happens, no more strategy is going to fix it. What's needed is silence long enough to hear your own voice again, and specifically God's voice about your specific calling.
How do you rebuild a brand that's authentically yours after being lost in other people's frameworks?
You go silent first. It's not enough to just spend less time on social media. When you've been addicted to checking for the dopamine hit, the decision point is already gone. The apps need to be deleted. The newsletters need to be unsubscribed. The inputs need to stop before the internal voice has any chance of being heard.
Six weeks. That's how long it took me. Not a weekend. Not a week. Six weeks of nothing but rest, walking, Bible reading, journaling. The clarity came gradually, like eyes adjusting.
What I found in the silence was my own story. I went back through ten years of journals: themes, questions, convictions, struggles that had been appearing consistently since my early 20s. The things I'd been writing about for a decade were the things I needed to be talking about publicly. That was the brand. Not a niche I identified by studying the market. The actual recurring content of my interior life across ten years.
Resources mentioned
- Ep 24 — The Idol of Approval — Previous episode: needing stats to validate your calling
- Ep 26 — The Idol of Pride — Next in the series: leaning on credentials instead of God
- Free Hiring Resources
Full transcript
Welcome back to the podcast. I'm your host, Amy Dardis. And in today's episode, we are continuing on in our series of idols in business, idols in entrepreneurship. And in today's episode, we are diving into the idol of advice: getting direction, advice, strategies, wisdom from people more so than seeking it from God. An idol is an object or a concept that we give a higher priority than God. It's anything where we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of God. It's anything that consumes our heart, imagination, or devotion more than God. It's any good thing that we elevate to a higher place of influence, prominence, power in our life over God.
So the question ends up being: where is our hope? Is our hope in God? Or is our hope in the advice and strategies that we get from business experts, from people who have had success in their business, in this world? And they're sharing their knowledge, their expertise, and we're seeking that, we're valuing that more so than what God is specifically asking us to do or leading us to do. And once again, this is me airing all my dirty laundry out here. This one kind of wrecks me because I have really sought the experts more than God.
Knowledge, advice, strategies, learning: it's a good thing. It's absolutely a good thing. And it's not always something I have placed above God. In the right perspective, it is absolutely beneficial. I know there have been seasons of my life where the books I read were incredibly impactful, or the conferences I went to, or leaders I listened to. They are sharing wisdom, sharing knowledge, sharing their story. And we can learn from anyone's story. But the risk is how much power and influence are we giving it in our life? Comparing our story to their story? And that's where I have certainly gotten tripped up.
As an entrepreneur, I want my business to be successful. I am a researcher. I do like to learn. I will look at 10 different paths. I will study, I will learn, I will ask a ton of questions. I am a reader. I will listen to podcasts and YouTube videos and blogs and get my hands on anything I can to wrap my head around what's going on. And so when it comes to strategy and branding, I have always struggled to find what works for me, to find what makes sense for who I am, how I'm wired, how I'm created, the work I'm doing, and what showing up authentically actually looks like.
When we were first launching our web design business back in 2011, 2012, we knew nothing about business. We were just green in every area and had a lot to learn. We started trying different things and we really never ended trying new things because the more we tried, the shorter and shorter time span that we spent actually sticking with a strategy. We would try this approach and give it a little bit. Well, nothing would happen. So we would try something else. And nothing would happen. So we would try something else. And we expended so much time and energy trying all these new things. Eventually we kind of settled into something pretty consistent. We finally found our groove of who we were and how we wanted to run our business and help clients.
Then we ended up launching this new brand, and we knew we were going to do it differently. The digital landscape had changed tremendously over the last five years. AI is just coming out faster and faster. Algorithms are changing so much. It's a totally different landscape. So we're like: let's just forget what we know and come into this with a fresh slate. And so we started researching. Let's look at what's happening on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn. Trying to understand all these different platforms, trying to understand the strategies that were working. Taking courses, watching YouTube videos, studying the platforms.
And as I'm doing this, my algorithm is getting filled with even more and more of this type of content about marketing and funnels and DM strategies and AI. Because that's how the algorithm works today: once you get into one rabbit hole, they just pour it on thick. And it's like nothing else exists in the world except for that one thing, because that is all your feed is filled with. Every time I get on social media, every time I get on my computer, I am just getting inundated with all of these messages which just send this message home: what I'm doing isn't good enough, what I'm doing isn't working. I should be trying this, I should be trying that.
The problem is there's a strategy for everything. And it wasn't about what strategy works, because they all work in and of their own sense, in the right circumstances with the right audience, depending on your brand and what you bring to the table and how you want to show up in the marketplace. But I was getting caught up in all of the advice, and I was losing my way. I was losing my focus, I was losing my sense of why, losing just that dream and that vision and that grounding that I had started out with. Because as the weeks went by, as the months went by, and I was just looking at this expert, and that expert, and that expert, and reading books, listening to podcasts, taking online webinars, trying to implement all kinds of different things at the same time. Meanwhile gaining no traction, not being consistent long enough with anything to see anything stick, and losing my confidence and my very sense of self along the way.
And the more you flounder, it's like the harder you kick and the harder you fight, and the more and more under you go until you realize that you don't know which way is up anymore. You don't know right from left anymore. And it's just this paralyzing, terrifying moment where you're like: what did I do to myself to get here? And how on earth am I going to get out? And so I dug myself into this hole with everything: my business, my strategy, my identity. And I knew I could not keep going, I could not keep pivoting back and forth.
And there's a verse in James, James 1:5 through 6: if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. And I read that and I was like: oh my gosh, like that's me. I feel blown and tossed by the wind. Just blown and tossed each way, this way, that way, with every wave that comes at me, whether it's this expert saying do this, or this expert saying do that, or run ads, or do organic or do long form or do short form or do reels.
And here I am thinking I'm asking God for wisdom, thinking I'm asking God for strategy, and I'm praying to him about it, but I'm looking for the answer from other experts. I am looking to social media, I am looking to content, I am looking to experts to tell me what to do. And I remember thinking: if someone would just tell me what to do, that makes sense for me, for my business, for my approach, for my audience, for who I am. That would just help me a lot. Like just tell me which path, and I'll go down that one. And there were 50 paths in front of me, and I was like: I don't know which one to choose.
So I get to this breaking point, and I'm like: I just have to reset. And part of that resetting was having to drown out all of the noise and all of the distractions because I realized it was too tempting, too confusing. It was too easy to open up my phone, pull up an app, and just be inundated. I almost didn't even have the self-control or the self-discipline to even stay off the apps at that point because I was just so addicted to the dopamine hit of checking. So I finally shut it all down. I got off social media. I unsubscribed from every newsletter in my email. I deleted the apps from my phone. And I stopped working. I stopped striving, I stopped trying. And I literally just had to embrace the quiet and embrace the stillness and seek God in that season.
It took six weeks. Six weeks of nothing, of just waiting and resting and not being on the platforms and not subscribing to other advice or strategies. Because I ended up coming to this realization: what am I doing here? What am I doing with my life? What am I doing with my business? Did God really call me to do this? What do I really believe? Because if he did, then he has a plan. If I'm here in his purpose and in his will, he's going to show me the way. He's going to open a door. But I have to wait for that. I have to trust him in that. I have to seek him in that. And I have to recognize that I don't have boundaries in these other areas. And that is messing with my ability to hear, my ability to listen.
Through the silence and the waiting and the stillness, little by little the fog began to clear. Not one moment where I was like, bam, got a word from God. It was just a slow clearing. Like if your eyes are blurry and you can't make out what you're seeing. And then the closer you get, the more the picture comes into clarity and into focus. The closer I was getting to God, the more clarity and focus I was having around my life and around my business. And I had to repent. I had to come to terms with the fact that I had been wanting him but not wanting him. I had been wanting his wisdom, but looking to the world for it, looking to experts to tell me what to do and what was going to work in my business.
It's not that their advice was wrong or bad, but it's just that God is the author and creator of my life. He is the potter and I am the clay. He has given me these giftings, this calling, these experiences. He has orchestrated all of these pieces to come together in his timing because he has a plan. He knows the plans that he has for me. And if I want to walk in that, I need to go to the person who's in charge. I need to go to the person who's orchestrating the things. And that required canceling everything out. It required a season of silence and surrender and seeking so that I could get back to just the foundation: God, you're in control. You're the one who gives wisdom. And I want to wait to hear your voice to tell me what to do.
And so without any other voice in my head, without social media, without emails and influencers, without any of that, I sat down and I started to write it out. I started to go through the story. I started to pull out the themes. I started to clarify my own brand, but my own brand through God as the author of the story, through him as the one who was leading the way. And he knows what comes next. And so I just had to take the time to do that and to put those boundaries in place to say: okay, this strategy that's going to work for me is very much dependent on how you created me. And I can lean into what I have, and I can seek you for everything, for strength, for guidance, for peace, for joy, and you can lead me along, giving me the wisdom, the courage, the faith to just pick it up one day at a time, to share a story one story at a time.
And right now, right now is not a learning season. Right now it's not a consuming season. There are seasons for that: seasons to read books, to learn, to wrap our heads around things, to do research. But then there are seasons for creating. Seasons for realizing that we have enough information, we have everything that we need. And now it's time to act, now it's time to obey, now it's time to build, now it's time to create. And we're going to do that in faith, with consistency, with discipline, to keep our eyes on the creator, on the author and perfecter of our faith, and to run with endurance the race that is set before us.
Now we are running. Now we are stripping off the things that hold us back. And right now, social media holds me back. Other people's ideas and influences hold me back. So I have to strip those off and do the work that he's called me to do because that's just the season I'm in. I'm in a season of planting. So I'm going to plant and I'm not going to give up because at the right time, there will be a harvest, there will be a blessing if I don't give up and I just keep my eyes focused on God. So that's all I have for this episode. As always, you can learn more at clearauthenticbrands.com. I'll see you next time.