Discerning Content Curation: Start with What’s Tried & New
Part 6 of The Intentional Visibility Project: An 8-Part Series on Strategic Visibility for Accomplished Women Over 50
Previously: In Part 5, we explored how your content is the mixtape of your wisdom—how curating what you’ve already created with the same care you once gave to making actual mixtapes becomes an act of self-love. Now let’s dive into the actual process of that curation.
What I’ve learned from my own experiences and guiding clients through this work for years is that the women who build lasting visibility aren’t the ones creating more content. They’re the ones being radically discerning about what they already have.
The Audit No One Wants to Do
In the past, I called this a “content audit.” Accurate, but no one wanted to do it, and after a while… including me. And before the everyday use of AI, this was a laborious process.
Then I redesigned my entire business three years ago and took myself through it, leveraging AI. That’s when I realized something: this wasn’t an audit. This was The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning for your content.
Stay with me here.
In Swedish death cleaning, you make decisions about your possessions with clarity and intention: What stays? What goes? What can be repurposed? What can be given away? What might have value to sell?
Your content deserves the same thoughtful consideration.
Not because you’re ending anything, but because you’re about to begin something. You’re architecting what comes next, and you can only build on solid ground.
The Tried & New Process
This is my methodology, what I’ve used with clients for years and what we work through together in my practice.
It’s deceptively simple:
- What stays? The content that still represents who you are and where you’re going. The pieces that hold up. The wisdom that remains true.
- What goes? The content that no longer serves. The ideas you’ve outgrown. The messages that don’t match your current work. Let them go with gratitude for what they taught you.
- What can be upcycled/recycled? This is where the magic happens. The content that has good bones but needs updating. The stories that matter but need new context. The frameworks that work but deserve a refresh.
- What can be given away? Content that might serve others better than it serves you now. Knowledge you can share freely to build goodwill and relationships.
- What can be sold? Ideas that have commercial value. Frameworks others would pay to learn. Experience that deserves to be packaged as a product or service, accompanied by your expertise.
Going through this process doesn’t just organize your content; it also helps you understand your audience. It reveals your content plan. It begins to define your services and offerings. It shows you exactly where there’s space for what’s new.
Why This Matters Now
We’re being told that AI will create all our content. That we should be posting seven times a day. That we need to be everywhere, all at once, performing for algorithms.
But here’s what very few people are talking about… discernment.
What if we focused on better, not more? What if we didn’t try to reach the masses with more noise, but listened first and created what the people we want to connect with already need? What if we tapped into our own wisdom and leveraged that, then asked AI to help?
When you’re thoughtful about what you share and curate your wisdom into an experience rather than endlessly creating for the sake of posting, something shifts. You stop performing and start building. You stop chasing trends and start establishing trust.
You become someone worth paying attention to, not because you’re everywhere, but because when you show up, it means something.
The Empowerment Part
There’s something else that happens when you do this work. This is the part I did not see until a few years ago. Yet, it’s the most important part.
You remember who you are.
Just when the world is suggesting you should step aside, reinvent yourself because everything you did for 30 or 40 years is irrelevant. But hey, maybe you should change your hair.
What if you didn’t buy into that narrative?
As women over 50, we’re told that if we want something else, we must burn it all down and start over. This sends a damaging message that amplifies what is now being directed at us at warp speed: “you’re not enough, everything you’ve done is irrelevant, nobody cares, what did you do to your hair, don’t eat that,” and on it goes…
We can choose to ignore those messages, not work them into our self-dialog, and do what we want. What if, instead of voluntarily burning it all down in the name of reinvention, we intentionally gathered what we already have?
Don’t burn down the ships. Call in the fleet.
Why abandon what has carried you this far when you can bring all your strengths and resources together for what’s next?
When you go through the Tried & New process, it’s possible to saunter into your third act on the platform of what you’ve already accomplished. You witness your own body of work in action. You recognize patterns in your wisdom that you couldn’t see before.
You find evidence to silence imposter syndrome. You stop telling yourself how much you suck. You gather strength from every part of your journey—the fleet, not just a single ship.
There’s no version of imposter syndrome that survives that recognition. Those gremlins leave the room one by one.
This isn’t just content strategy. It’s an act of self-reclamation and ownership of your story.
Notice How It All Connects?
By now, you’re likely seeing the pattern that runs through this entire series:
Your intentionality (Part 1) guides what you keep and release. Your architecture (Part 2) is built from these curated pieces. Your audience understanding (Part 3) shows you which stories matter most to them. The wisdom you’ve articulated through AI (Part 4) helps you see patterns you couldn’t see before. Your mixtape (Part 5) becomes the strategic curation of this wisdom.
And now, the Tried & New process (Part 6) is how you actually do it—with discernment, intention, and self-love.
Everything connects. Everything builds on what came before.
The AI Question
Yes, AI can help with this process. But not in the way most people think.
AI doesn’t curate your wisdom. It doesn’t know which pieces of your story matter most. It can’t tell you what to keep or what to release.
What it can do, once you’ve done the discernment work, is help you see new connections. Find new expressions for seasoned wisdom. Identify gaps you didn’t know existed.
But the curation? That’s all you. You’re the conductor of your experiences.
That’s the part that makes your content unmistakably yours. The part that turns your scattered pieces into a mixtape that tells the story only you can tell.
Let Your Body of Work Build Your Future
It doesn’t matter if what you have is a nearly-finished book, a course you set aside, or a collection of blog posts from five years ago. If it played a role in shaping who you are now, it’s valuable.
Instead of starting from scratch, you can infuse your voice and experience into new formats, reach new audiences, and multiply your impact—all by working with what you already have to surface the wisdom in your one-of-a-kind archive.
The world is drowning in information but starving for wisdom. What you’ve learned through living matters. By curating your wisdom rather than abandoning it, you bring forward not just information, but true, earned experience.
And that’s what the world needs from wise women.
This is Part 6 of The Intentional Visibility Project, an 8-part series exploring the strategic architecture of lasting visibility for accomplished women over 50.
Previously: Your Content is the Mixtape of Your Wisdom — Part 5
Next in the series: Listening First: The Relationship Architecture of PR — Part 7, where we explore how the foundation we’ve built becomes the basis for genuine relationships with media, podcasts, and the audiences you’re meant to serve.
Donna Cravotta is founder of Cravotta Media Group, host of The Real 50 Over 50 livestream, and creator of BeVisible.club. She guides accomplished entrepreneurial women 50+ as they architect strategic visibility that matches the significance of their work.
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