Just Post It!
When entering the digital world, it is easy to want all content to be polished and perfect. When starting the You’re A Gift Podcast, I thought about pre recording all the audios, and editing the videos and the audio. After talking to a friend, however, I came to a different decision. While talking about the launching process, she inspired me to have the boldness to share my content even if it is not technically “perfect.” She helped me realize, “Oh, I should be proud of what I’m creating.”
At the time, I had posted a handful of podcasts, but had been keeping them under wraps. They weren’t recorded professionally, they had just been me talking to a camera. My friend asked to listen to them. In that moment, I felt so shy. Normally, I love hearing people’s feedback and how to improve, but this time around, I didn’t want to relisten to my voice and notice my mistakes. When starting out, the podcast didn’t have an official structure, super awesome equipment, a script to follow: it was just me with a heart to share and a gist of what I wanted to talk about that day. I click the Facebook live button, I talk live on camera, I don’t do any editing and I just upload it. I chose to do it this way because I knew I would let fear that it has to be perfect hinder me from posting. If I had a beautiful plan of recording, editing, adding awesome music introduction, it would have taken ages to actually put it out there. Clicking the live button gave me that positive push that I needed to actually start the launch of You’re a Gift. Even if I have my dog barking in the background, or times I get distracted and lose my train of thoughts, I’d rather make the audio and the whole experience more candid and more real. As much as my brain tells me I should be perfect, no one is perfect. “Nobody’s perfect” is a phrase we all know, but it’s a process to accept it as true. My purpose as a creator and an entrepreneur is to show the world that sure, nobody is perfect, but everyone has a special gift of their own.
When my friend asked me for a link to the podcast, that’s when I realized, okay, I need to be more proud of the work that I’m posting and if I’m not proud enough to share the link with even my closest friends, I’m never going to be brave enough to share the link with strangers online. So I told her, “I’m a little embarrassed, but you know what, here it is,” and I sent her the link. I told her, “You’re the first human being that I sent this podcast link to. Thank you so much.” She provided me with that positive push, and I finally had the motivation to listen to my own podcast. I expected to cringe, but it really wasn’t too bad.Of course, there’s always room for improvement, such as the quality of the audio and keeping my puppies quiet. Despite this, I really believe that in the future when I have professional equipment, these will be the time that we can all refer back to and be like, oh, remember the time when there were just dogs barking all over the place and all these distractions going on?
I’m in the process of creating an online course for entrepreneurs, bloggers, and anyone who can utilize social media to scale their business or personal brand: so basically, this is for everyone who wants to use the internet effectively. I am someone who’s always loved social media. Five years ago, I started a different social media agency, but the biggest pain point was in the hours after hours spent writing creative and engaging captions and hashtags, and trying to make the content look pretty. Anytime I had new content, I had to do this process over and over and over because didn’t want to just copy and paste the caption that I use from like a couple of weeks ago. I felt that would be tacky and people would notice. This created a process of trying to juice out something new for so many different clients. Before I knew it, I created way too much work for myself, and yet undervalued my work and was severely underpaid. I took in way too many clients, more than I could handle. Eventually, between juggling clients and wanting to grow my personal brand, I felt drained of all my creative juices. I had no idea what to write. My brain started saying “I don’t know, I don’t care,” and that’s when I really started to burn out. For me, this was not a slow burn out, but I seriously crashed and burned. I questioned what I was doing. The business I had started because of my love for social media became “work” and it was no longer fun.
In the online course I’m creating, I will cover how to avoid that entire pain point of juicing your content to a point where you burn out. I’m going to provide like hundreds and thousands of frameworks for social media creators, managers, business influencers, whoever is using social media and wants to take it to the next level. These frameworks can be used to insert your own story, instead of copying and pasting content and hoping it is effective. Everyone has a different story. Every single framework will be different, and as you customize them, no two will look the same. It might be a template that asks you “What are the top three things that keep you motivated and keep you working hard to achieve your goals?” My answers might look something like, “Number one, going to sleep early and waking up early. Number two, surrounding yourself with people with similar mindsets and similar goals. Number three, reading a book.” This is just one example of many frameworks that can help you think creatively about how to engage with your audience.
I want to provide that framework to save hours and hours of people trying to be creative on social media. As I was working on that course, I came across a really deep question online that I wanted to talk about. “If you knew you weren’t going to fail at something you want to try, if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do?” That question hit me hard because that made me think about how people usually tackle things and people usually try to accomplish something, not only because they enjoy doing it, but also because they need to be financially well off and financially free or things like that. When you’re guaranteed of success, no matter what you do, that changes the whole game.
For example, I once asked my cousin why he changed his major to IT, he simply said, “because the industry will give me more money.” I asked him, “are you going to be happy doing that?” To which he said, “yeah, it’ll pay me.”
So let’s think for a moment. What do you love doing? What are you doing right now? Are you doing it because you love doing it or because it pays the bills or is it a combination of both? Now, let’s say success is a guarantee. Imagine if no matter what you try and pursue, you’re going to succeed. If your goal is to make a million dollars a year, that’s a guarantee. If you’re going to have a million subscribers on Youtube, that’s a guarantee. If success was a guarantee, what would you pursue? Would you want to still be doing what you’re doing now?
This exercise gave me more confidence than ever because if success was guaranteed and I know I’m going to succeed, no matter what I pursue, I would be doing the same thing. That is already my mindset. It took me so many years to get here. Of course, as a human being, I still worry about things. I fear I won’t achieve my goals. But happiness in the day to day is achieved when you’re doing what you truly enjoy doing. That “thing,” whatever it is, that sparks joy and gives you a sense of purpose, that is your gift. If your gift is your true passion, there’s always a way to turn it into a profitable business that won’t drain your creative juices. That’s part of my inspiration behind creating You’re A Gift. I would love for you guys to share that passion with me. My passion is to help people realize their gift and turn it into a profitable business. My vision is to share my experiences, both my successes and my failures, to inspire others. If you’re an introverted entrepreneur like me, I want to teach you what I’ve learned about public speaking skills and stage presence. I would love to hear your stories.
I think an important question to ask yourself, especially during this pandemic when things are so uncertain, is “Why am I doing this?” Do you find enjoyment in your job and is it helping you grow into the person that you want to be? Asking myself this really changed the way I thought about my passion and reaffirmed that I am walking the right path, I am doing what my heart is telling me. If success was guaranteed in any field, would you still be walking the same path?
