Baiting via social media - Don't trust everyone in your inbox

Social media makes it easy for people to get access to you. A message can arrive from someone you have never met, and within a few minutes you can find yourself having a conversation about fighters, coaches, gyms, promoters or other people in the sport.

That is where you need to be careful.

Not every DM is innocent conversation. Some people will deliberately bait you into saying something.

They may ask what you think about a particular coach. They may tell you that they have heard something about a fighter and ask whether it is true. They might make a negative comment themselves and wait for you to agree. Sometimes they will keep asking questions until you eventually say something that can be taken out of context.

You might think you are just having a private conversation. They might have a completely different reason for starting it.

This is particularly important in fight sports because the community is smaller than it looks. People know each other, information travels quickly and disagreements can easily become personal. Something you say casually in a DM can end up being repeated to someone else, screenshotted or presented very differently from how you intended it.

That is why disconnecting from your DMs is important.

You do not have to respond to every message. You do not have to give your opinion about everyone. You do not have to defend yourself, explain your relationships or get involved in someone else's disagreement.

Sometimes the best response is no response.

For fighters, there is also a bigger reason to create distance from social media. Training, fighting, recovery, travelling, work, sponsorships and everything else that comes with building a career already take a huge amount of attention.

You do not need to spend your remaining energy managing hundreds of conversations online.

As your career develops, it can make sense to have someone else manage part of your social media, particularly between fights. A trusted third party can handle routine messages, filter genuine opportunities and deal with basic enquiries while you concentrate on training and your life outside the phone.

This does not mean disappearing completely. It means creating a boundary between your professional profile and your personal attention.

You can still create the content. You can still communicate with your audience. You can still be visible. But you do not necessarily need to be personally available to everyone who decides to send you a message.

That distance can also protect you from being drawn into situations that have nothing to do with your career.

If someone keeps trying to steer a conversation towards another person, especially asking you to criticise them or confirm something negative, that is usually a good reason to step away from the conversation.

The safest things to say about people are often the things you would be comfortable saying if they were standing directly in front of you.

That does not mean you cannot have opinions. It means you should be conscious of where you are expressing them, who you are expressing them to and why they are asking.

As your profile grows, more people will have access to you, and not everyone who engages with you will have good intentions. Some people genuinely support you. Some are curious. Some want information. And some may simply be looking for something they can use.

You do not need to become suspicious of everyone.

You just need to become more selective about where you put your attention.

Between fights, training should be the priority. Recovery should be the priority. Your personal life, relationships and work also need space. Social media should support your career, not consume the time and energy you need to actually build it.

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is close the conversation, put the phone down and get back to your own work.

Train. Fight. Build your career. Build your relationships in real life.

You do not need to win every conversation in your DMs.

And you definitely do not need to give someone else the words they were trying to get out of you.