Lillian Ahenkan – better known to the world as her moniker Flex Mami – is one of the most concise and considered communicators I’ve ever encountered.

Whether it’s a natural talent or a knack honed by years of communicating via 15-second Instagram story blocks, she has an exceptional ability to spout sentences that sound like viral tweets waiting to happen.

So it’s ironic that one of the driving forces behind her success has been her sense that “while I like myself a lot, I’m very aware that I’m not exceptional.” While many would argue with that stance, the author of The Success Experiment isn’t being self-deprecating. “I’m not the smartest person, I’m not the most learned person”, she told journalist Brooke Le Poer Trench at our International Women’s Day 2022 event, proudly in partnership with MYOB. And in the early days of her career, when she quit PR to pursue gigs as a DJ, “that in itself felt really motivating, because success as a concept always felt like it was for the most exceptional people.” So what does success look like for this ultimate multi-hyphenate? “I have to live with myself for the rest of my life. And so all these small moments where I choose myself over the illusion of likeability or success is another day where I win” (see what I mean about the quotables?)

It’s an interesting stance for someone whose likeability and sheer charisma is so off the charts that she amassed a following that turned into a career which she has previously described as “getting paid to be myself”. But likeability is something she’s happy to exchange in order for boundaries. And she’s learned that the hard way. “For the longest time I’ve been trying to find a way to exist peacefully on the internet, without having to feel as though I am now responsible for all of these people who happen to experience me”, she told the AllBright audience. “I would be behaving almost like an entertainer, a performer, or a jester; for consumption – without recognising that people on the other end were building friendships and connections with me. I had all these parasocial relationships that I didn’t know how to control, or I didn’t know what the rules or the guidelines or the expectations were, and as I was encouraging people to share with me or to create camaraderie, that was scaling far beyond what I could have even imagined.”

The result was a community that sometimes demanded more of Flex than she was willing to give, or placed expectations and obligations upon her that she had no interest in fulfilling. And that was at the milder end of the spectrum. “It’s all so personal, but it also has nothing to do with me”, she says. “People wanted me to talk more about what it was like being a woman in a male-dominated industry, not registering that I don’t want to internalise any more oppression that I’m experiencing. People wanted me to talk about fatness or Blackness, or spirituality…but this isn’t for me.”

Grappling with this was hard to come to terms with. “For the longest time”, Lillian told us, “I couldn’t be accountable for the beast that I had created. I felt almost like a victim of the success that I had created for myself.”

And while obvious solutions existed – such as closing out her DMs or making her content strictly work-related – they seemed “antithetical to what I want to do on the internet. I do want to facilitate conversations, I do want to create community. But not at the expense of myself. And so it got to the point where I had to create some hardline boundaries for myself and to not be so naïve to the consequence of existing in this lawless place.”

Those boundaries “100% did make me less likeable”, Flex agrees, “because I had to be really critical about what space I was taking up as a Black woman in white Australian media, the archetypes that were thrust upon me.” But it was crucial to enforce them. “Because I happened to be fat and also happy, suddenly I’m a body positivity activist. Because I like myself, suddenly I’m creating space for other people. I refer to it as the ‘Mammy’ archetype…and it left no room for my actual personality.”

It might have been tempting to fall into her own mythology, for someone with less self-assuredness than Lillian Ahenkan. But as a young woman, she had been spurred on by realising that “people had certain beliefs about women, or certain beliefs about Blackness. Absorbing this in my early adulthood”, she explains, gave her a sense that “‘woah, people think I shouldn’t be here? I need to stay! I need to take up extra space! Because there is no way somebody thinks that I’m not worthy of being here by virtue of these arbitrary things.”

Conversely, in her early twenties, Lillian realised that some arbitrary things could work in her favour. When she booked her first gigs as Flex Mami, for example, “people weren’t looking for logical, qualitative, or quantitative reasons why I would be there. For example, when I started DJing, you would assume that people who would then go on to book me for future gigs would have seen me DJ – not the case. They would see my outfit, or see my look, or see who I was associated with and assume that I was good at this thing. That to me was like ‘woah, ok, it’s about perception and bias, not about skill or talent.’”

And while she says she spent the first five years of her career “trying to prove to myself that [my success] wasn’t a fluke”, in more recent years her focus has shifted to finding ways to make “existing on the internet” a sustainable career. As a hungry audience demanded more and more from her, she realised that what she needed was to change the model of communication. It needed to be an exchange – and this requires a level of investment from her followers. “What is the exchange for me sharing? Because I can just give you work-related updates; I can tell you when new products are coming out, I can tell you when I’m speaking somewhere. But if you are requesting more, what are you willing to exchange for that?”

The solution? To monetise the close friends feature on Instagram, giving followers the option to pay a monthly subscription fee for access to exclusive content available only to Flex’s close friends – of which there are thousands. “It created a new level of respect for those who were investing in me as I was investing in them”, Flex says of the arrangement.

But not even close friends get all of Flex. That’s something she’s come to realise is totally unnecessary. “Nobody was ever asking for me to show up as my whole self, I just assumed that was necessary”, she explains. “And then started to resent the fact that I had to do so. Now, even on close friends, I’m not showing up as my full self. Yes you’re getting my full personality, but I’m not sharing a lot of my relationships, I’m not sharing the back end of running my business, I’m not sharing my quirks and neuroses…I always start with ‘what am I happy to share?’ And then go from there.”

To where, exactly, is a mystery. And it’s not Flex’s job to tell you.

Missed this conversation? Catch the replay here.