Hello friend. So this is a video I have very deeply struggled with sharing
for quite some time, I would say years at this point. And it could change things,
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. That sounded really dramatic.
So I'm going to start back at the beginning. I started this channel back in 2015 really,
before that it was random family videos and blogs and demo reels from when I was a 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 and had a little webcam,
I was basically in pajamas, and I made a tutorial for my clients at the time, 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 it on my channel and I just send it to my clients, then I'm answering all of their
questions at the same time without doing extra work. Brilliant. So I do it, don't really have
anybody on my channel subscribed, 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 of these requests in my inbox of
people wanting to work with me, and that was the beginning of the craziest chapter of my life.
And that version of me is so vastly different than who I am today. I love her, I love that version of
me, 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.
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
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, and she was very addicted to being busy, and to
showing up, and to seeking validation. And again, not consciously, but very subconsciously.
And as I've grown up, as I've been in front of you,
I've been through a lot of different stages of my life, and from that stage I entered this
crazy explosive growth in this channel, and in my business, in the first year, and just
imagine this, in that first year I had three million people who had watched my
videos. So imagine just going from someone who was 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,
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 is unique, and there is no guidebook to handling it. And so
as I grew, the very thing that made me successful, which was experimenting and testing things out,
and I totally looked at this channel as a complete experiment. I had no expectations,
which I think is how I should do everything, because experimentation over expectation leads
to so much more happiness and joy. 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
a long time ago, so at that point there weren't a lot of us. 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, and then
I made my first course, and then everything 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 of the things that I ever really wanted to do.
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 have
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, 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 keeping us stuck in one place and pigeonholed into one thing,
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 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
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 of 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've been
so much more intentional from day one. I am so grateful for this channel, I am so
grateful for the audience that I've built, and I'm so grateful for you being here and watching this,
and I also recognize that I am a little scientist at heart, and I think every entrepreneur is,
and so I never really cared about grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, I went through periods of that,
and I went through periods of, 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
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 at a place, and like I said, maybe it's because I'm getting old, where
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.
I've unsubscribed from external expectations because 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
don't I 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 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 unsubscribing from a lot of stuff, not
just YouTube, I'm unsubscribing from everything I mentioned earlier, and from the need for any sort
of external validation, which 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. It was this deep rooted belief that if I wasn't busy I wasn't worthy or successful.
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." There's nothing 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 a reality or possibility.
So my purpose of making this is to just check in and have a gut check with you and say
I'm beyond grateful for what I have 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, 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 the beginning.
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 happened 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.