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Key Takeaways

hello friends so this is a video i have very deeply struggled with sharing for quite some time um i would say years at this point and it could change things um it could change nothing i'm not sure but it's on my heart on my mind and i don't know if it's because i just celebrated a birthday but it just feels like this is the right time to talk this through and share this with you so that sounded really dramatic um so i'm gonna start kind of back at the beginning i started this channel um back in 2015 really before that it was like random family videos and vlogs um and like demo reels from when i was journalist and you can scroll down the scroll hole and find all those videos a lot of them are still there but in 2015 i sat in front of a window in my tiny little apartment um and had a little webcam i was basically in pajamas and i made a tutorial for my clients at the time um because i had a social media agency for years and i was working completely by myself and doing everything and i was like how could i duplicate myself and i realized oh if i make a youtube video and i just put on my channel i just send it to my clients then i'm answering all their questions at the same time without doing extra work brilliant so i do it don't really have anybody on my channel subscribed um not actively using the channel at all and i didn't really know what i was doing and i share it and i share it with my clients and the next thing i know it is getting seen by thousands of people and i'm getting all these requests in my inbox of people wanting to work with me and that was the beginning of the craziest chapter of my life um and that version of me is so vastly different than who i am today i love her i love that version of me um but i'm sure you can relate people evolve and the crazy thing about youtube and having a channel is that you actually watch yourself evolve and grow and grow up in front of you um and [Music] i have grown up a lot since 2015. that person who started this channel was fresh out of a very unhealthy relationship she was desperately trying to prove herself um and prove her worth without even really being conscious of what she was doing she was working herself into the ground she was grasping at straws trying to figure out what she was supposed to do um and she was very addicted to being busy um and to showing up and to seeking validation um and again not consciously but very sort of subconsciously and as i've grown up as i've been in front of you um i've been through a lot of different stages of my life and um from that stage i entered this like crazy explosive growth in this channel and in my business in the first year and just imagined this in that first year i had three million people who had watched my videos so imagine just going from someone who was like trucking along had this tiny little consultancy and i was working with my clients and i was doing marketing and social media for years and years and years behind the scenes and never really thought about having a brand or anything like that um goes from zero to three million people watching my videos in the first year it sounds dumb it sounds really dumb and it was a lot and fast growth is a really interesting thing and it's something that you know is kind of unique and there is no guidebook to handling it and so as i grew the very thing that made me successful which was you know experimenting and testing things out and i totally looked at this this channel as a complete experiment i had no expectations which i think is how you should do kind of everything because experimentation over expectation leads to so much more happiness and joy um and so i said if i made a video a week for the next year i wonder what would happen and what happened was the demand for my work and what i did and how i could serve businesses in terms of being a social media expert and this was like you know this is a long time ago so at that point there weren't a lot of us and um so there was this huge demand to work with me and that led me into okay clearly this is something that people need and want um and then i made my first course and then everything kind of just continued to skyrocket from there and i had all these opportunities come my way i got to travel the world i've been to so many places i've spoken on so many stages i've done all the things that i ever really wanted to do um and i know that sounds strange because i'm still relatively young and there's so much life ahead of me and now it's like i'm in this phase where i'm trying to figure out what's the next thing and i think i have figured it out and what i have come to realize is that what mattered to me in those early years just very deeply does not matter to me anymore and i think that that comes with maturity and i think that comes with really being a seasoned entrepreneur at this point i have technically been an entrepreneur for 14 years and i've seen a lot i've experienced a lot i have been through so many different ups and downs i've navigated them all and i'm super proud of the fact that i'm still an entrepreneur and i'm way beyond where i ever thought would be possible for me um and for my business and for my incredible team of humans unicorns that's what we call them i'm surrounded by the best people and i feel so grateful and i'm at this place where i'm just actively in the last couple of years unsubscribing from so much and it's a conversation i want to have with you because i think social media has a weird way of sort of keeping us stuck in one place and pigeonholed into one thing um and i have had to navigate that in a way where i really had to figure out how to detach my worth from my work and from what externally might look like success so things like vanity metrics and the the irony of that for me is that the more that i've done that the more i've gone deeper the more i understand exactly who i am here to serve and what my zone of genius is and where i want to focus the more successful internally i have felt but also the more successful the business has become you know behind the scenes and that's the stuff that a lot of people don't see and i think that's important to share because i think it's really easy to assume that because somebody has this massive audience they are happy and successful and doing all the things and they're way beyond where you ever could be and the truth is if i could go back in time i would have been so much more intentional from day one i am so grateful for this channel i'm so grateful for the audience that i've built um i'm so grateful for you being here and watching this and i also recognize that i i am a little scientist at heart and i think every entrepreneur is and so i never really cared about grow girl go go grow i went through periods of that and i went through periods of like i got to get more subscribers i got to get more viewers i got to get more followers and it led to such a deep level of unhappiness and i lost my joy for what i did and i lost my purpose and i lost my direction because i was getting swayed by everything and feeling like i should do what everybody else was doing and i'm now out of place and like i said maybe it's because i'm getting old um where i'm just like no number of views or subscribers it doesn't make a difference to who i am as a person and my level of joy and i've had to actively unsubscribe from the need to seek out validation in that way the need to appeal to everybody the need to appease everybody the need to stay in a box the need to keep my mouth shut on things that matter the i've unsubscribed from external expectations because if i go back to the person who started this channel i started this channel with no expectations and i had to really come home to that and remove all the stuff that was causing a lot of chaos for me which was trying to be like other people in the industry or look at what they're doing and get caught up and go why why don't i yo do that or should i be doing that or the shiny object syndrome that we all fall victim to and what i've realized is the less clarity you have on your north star and where you're going the more chaos you create for yourself because if you don't really know who you are and you don't really know what you want and what your intention is and what the impact is you want to have you're going to get swayed and the very thing that i started this channel around was impact and that doesn't have a number on it and the more i can focus on the one human that i want to serve and show up for and i know i can have the deepest impact on the happier that i am and the more transformation i cr i can create for you and i can create for the people who actually need me and i'm not trying to stay at a surface level by appealing to everybody so will i continue to experiment and test and have fun on this channel absolutely but what i'm trying to say is that maybe you subscribe to me for a completely different reason maybe you subscribe to a video that has nothing to do with what i talk about now and the full circle part for me is that i started my career as a journalist and the irony is that my entire job and my business now is i help people use their story to create these highly transformative highly impactful online course businesses and so i still feel like that journalist and i still have that deep level of curiosity and that's really what my focus is on this channel it's a focus of self-awareness it's a focus of really owning who you are and owning your voice because for so long i had no idea how to do that and i now know what my voice is and i know what i stand for and i know who i am and i think it's important to have a gut check with you and go this is who i am and it's okay if we've outgrown each other because i'm i'm unsubscribing from a lot of stuff not just youtube um i'm unsubscribing from everything i mentioned earlier and from the need for any sort of external validation which i've really that's been a journey for the last couple of years since i hit burnout i realized that a lot of that stemmed from me trying to keep up with what i thought i wanted um it was this deep-rooted belief that if i wasn't busy i wasn't worthy or successful and i am i had someone say to me the other day you have the most boring business in the best way and i said i know it's stupidly predictable and it's very boring and we don't do anything crazy uh there's nothing like new or exciting coming up we just stick to the main thing and it's created this very boring very predictable very successful business and the version of me who started on here in 2015 never thought that that was reality or possibility so my purpose of making this is to sort of just check in and have a gut check with you and say i'm beyond grateful for what i've built on this channel i'm beyond grateful for you being here and i also recognize that we may have outgrown each other and that's all right and if you need permission to unsubscribe from beliefs thoughts in your life mindsets um expectations competition do that and if you need permission to unsubscribe from people that maybe aren't aligned with how you want to show up anymore or serve you in the way that you want for yourself that's okay too so not that you need my permission but i just wanted to share that because it's been on my heart and mind for a long time and i think it's important to really know my intention and who i am and my intention with this channel is to serve at a very impactful deep level and that requires me really narrowing my focus and being as honest and transparent as i can possibly be with you which i have been committed to since since the beginning um and i got lost along the way and i've made mistakes along the way and i've made really dumb videos along the way that totally are not aligned with my values or who i want to be but hey that's part of growing up i just happen to have grown up in front of a camera so i'm not going anywhere but i am just becoming more of who i am and unsubscribing from the things that no longer serve me or don't align with me and i just wanted to share that with you because maybe it's what you need to hear today so are you with me it's okay if you're not thanks for watching