Table of Contents
Welcome back to another entry in creator reflection. This is a written series where I reflect on my journey as a creator and share the latest insights and progress so far. Today we’ll be talking about speaking from authority with humility, the creativity behind consulting, a repeating pattern for me around the lack of videos, working through crippling confusion to create clarity and some hot takes on AI and creativity.
Now, before we begin, I want to acknowledge that this quarter hasn’t gone as planned with my normal content, but allowing the universe to work through me and guide me into better paths than I could’ve imagined, I’ve been working on creating something way more important. In the past quarter, I’ve worked on healing key blockages and clearing major internal resistance and it’s resulted in me breaking through in key areas and most importantly — working on what I’m most called to do while I’m on this planet.
I’m at a crossroads right now because this is the first time I can confidently say that performance consulting is my top priority — if I wasn’t working on freelance stuff as well, this is all I’d be doing because I am in absolute flow with it. I do wonder if I should change this to a new format where I cover my journey to building this business as well because content and consulting are becoming one in the same thing and you’ll see that very shortly, it’s going to take over a lot of my content.
How did I move forward?
Speaking from an authoritative standpoint. For the longest time, I’ve struggled with speaking from an authoritative standpoint, but a big shift recently occurred. It was time to abandon the idea of just putting my perspectives out to document them and instead talk about things and teach things as an authority. Instead of just being a random dude, I’ve stepped into a teacher/coach/consultant role. At the same time, I’m balancing this out with humility. The truth is, I only know so much. The more I learn the more I realize that I know nothing in the grand scheme of things. Had to work through a lot internally on self-esteem, “coaching” and other points of resistance to get to a place where I can speak like this on things, but I’m really glad to be here.
Writing. I spent a lot of my time this quarter writing content for my program and for the public, almost all of which is based on performance in some aspect. This has been so growth-inducing on so many levels. The craft of my writing continues to go up, using my writing to teach has been deeply fulfilling, and I’m actively building out a private and public library of incredible information that people can use to transform their lives and their work. It’s everything to me. I’ve never felt as alive as I have while building out this library, knowing the impact it’s going to have. I’m having so much fun with it, that it’s already changing my content strategy for video, too. Thank you to everyone who’s helped influence this. This is only the beginning.
The process of editing writing. It’s become so much easier as I 1) improve my writing and 2) worked through resistance and I now care less about putting out incredible writing and instead just own whatever the quality of writing is at the time 3) I’m overthinking less around this 4) I’m now focusing on service and the message over how good my writing is. Great strides were made over this period.
Resumed the newsletter. I produce newsletters at about once a month right now, and I’m really liking this.
New content strategy regarding the podcast. I didn’t even try to make this happen, it just came to me when I was ready to let the podcast go. TLDR; I was presented with a strategy that gives me the flexibility to work with whatever and whoever, but to thrive in a solo podcast sense. It’s not set up to be a traditional podcast anymore, but rather a solo show based on call and response — whether it be guests, media, ideas, questions, etc. — where everything is super clippable. After this download, the podcast has jumped in priority above my second channel. I can’t fucking wait to implement it.
Making a well-edited YouTube video for a client. This process brought a lot of life back into me and reminded me how fun it can be to edit, as I filled it with memes and humour throughout the whole video. It also gave me a taste of how sweet it’s going to be to let myself be an artist again when I’m doing this full-time. I can’t wait to give myself permission to spend hours and hours on the smallest of things that are deeply creatively fulfilling to me in ways I couldn’t possibly explain through words.
Comfortability with memes and random shit in videos. I’ve really grown to like the style of spicing standard videos with more memes and messing around in a fun, comedic way. Going to continue with this going forward.
Getting back my monitor near the end of the quarter. Though I’m well trained in editing from just a laptop and a trackpad (did this for 14 years), I absolutely love editing from a monitor with lots of space and I’m so happy to have it back.
Minimizing my “active” items in my content stream. I had hundreds of content marked as “active” for a minute and it was deeply overwhelming. I went through all of them, de-committed to many, and readjusted where they existed in the flow (on hold, up next, future, etc.). Now, I have a much more realistic “active” area that instead of being crippling and overwhelming, is way more calm, concise and achievable. My next step is actually going through each of these and putting them out. Barring unseen circumstances, you’ll 100% see many of these released in the next quarter.
What requires improvement?
Freelance. I intended to be out by the end of Q2, but it’s taking a little bit longer than expected. As of right now, I’m planning for July is going to be my final month doing freelance creative/marketing. Even though it’s a good situation, good is the enemy of great and I know with every fiber of my soul that this is holding me back from pouring my all into my life’s work with consulting and content creation. I’m nervous, but really excited to take this leap of faith and maximize the opportunity that presented itself.
Videos. My top priorities this quarter were 1) healing whatever was stopping me from hitting new levels 2) building structure and creating a library of resources and materials for consulting 3) making enough money to stay alive, so videos unfortunately fell to the wayside. I’m so tired of posting the same message but with different words and excuses for the past 6 quarters…
Having a backlog of videos (and maybe worse, an attachment to finishing these before doing anything else). Again, same thing as above. So done with writing this out in these reflections. I want nothing more than to edit and post these bit by bit and I cannot wait to tackle this content in the upcoming quarter when I have more time and energy to allocate to this.
The resistance I have around making video content. Even after healing key things, I’m noticing there are key things stopping me. The order I put things in — it has to be in this order, or I don’t do it. Guilt around working on content instead of consulting or client work. Resistance to making decisions and cutting off a version of reality that could exist. And other things I can’t logically describe, but I can feel intense resistance when I either think of content or go to work on it, which has created the internal chaos I’m experiencing. I also wonder how much of this is a momentum issue that will be mostly solved once I just tackle these videos that I’ve had in the vault for the past year and a half. But at the same time, the root cause will bring it back so it’s still key to heal through whatever’s actually going on.
Podcast. Still awaiting the completion of some main-channel and second-channel videos before I begin to tackle this. I’ll also realistically need to wrap up freelance before I re-launch this. But at least I have clarity on what I want to do now with the incredible download that I received earlier in the quarter.
Newsletter functionality. The newsletter began as an experimental series on my website where I’d post the archives, but I never came back to change it or set up the functionality to build an email list and actually send it out to people’s inboxes. This is a must-tackle in the next quarter as I’m ready to build up my list.
Consistency with coming back and editing/finishing. I’ve noticed a lot of resistance around this as a general theme throughout my life, and definitely in my creative endeavours too — especially when I develop too much attachment towards the project, topic or message. It’s key that I work to clear the underlying energy here, update my self-image to be the type of person who consistently comes back to edit/finish things, and then actively take the necessary actions to back up this new behaviour, whether I feel like it or not.
Lessons
Speaking from experience is the best way to share knowledge. It allows you a certain level of power and conviction that you can’t achieve unless you’ve lived it. I absolutely love sharing what I’ve learned and applied.
I feel incredibly alive when sharing useful insights and information. It’s one thing to document your journey, it’s a whole other beast to share knowledge that has the ability to immediately impact the being on the other side of the conversation
You can both speak from a place of authority, yet also speak with humility too. They’re 2 completely different variables that can both be true at the same time. [Observing Andy Frisella]
The consulting business is more creative than I could’ve ever imagined. Before I began all this, I thought it would be tapping into a very different aspect of me. But I was wrong — it’s just as creative as everything else. Building out the structure, the systems, the material — it’s been an absolute joy to me. Especially as I work through any relevant resistance I have and once cleared, I naturally lean into my life’s work as a result.
Performance consulting is going to bleed into my main channel. I’m having so much fun writing about performance and spirituality, that once I put out the videos in my queue, it’s very likely that my content will become heavily centered around helping people maximize their potential. As I talked about in the last creator reflection, my content and consulting are about to become very merged.
Shorts and videos are on completely different algorithms. It’s like they’re 2 apps under YouTube that have very little overlap in audience. I’ve seen many, many short-form creators with millions of views on each of their shorts but get only in the 10’s of thousands of views on their videos. That’s absolutely insane to me. While it’s useful to build up a short-form audience, know that there’s a good chance that very few of them will actually make their way to your long-form videos.
Pay attention to what naturally flows out of you. Lean into that, optimize for that. [Samir of Colin and Samir]
If you’re really confused or struggling with something that logically should work, work on healing whatever’s coming up and addressing the root cause. That resistance can cause more sabotage than you could possibly imagine. I spent months trying to sit down and put together a one-page consulting page, to no avail. I never liked how it came out, I could never press publish. I reworked it over and over again and most times I’d sit there completely confused and not be able to do anything — it was hell. I then gave up trying to will it into existence, peace processed on what was happening inside of me, and then boom — enough cleared where it all came to me as a download, I released my care that I once had, and the consulting page was ready to go in just a couple of hours.
Call and response is the foundation for how a conversation functions. If that’s the case, to keep a solo podcast interesting, you must approach it with a call and response too. If you don’t intend on having a conversation with another person in each episode, you can structure the show in such a way that the call becomes an idea, a question, an event, or a piece of media, while your thoughts, emotions and reactions are the response. This is how you can create a natural conversation that’s worth listening to as a solo podcaster.
Not using AI is a superpower. While everyone else is relying on something that could easily be pulled away from them1, social credit score-based access, an EMP, the list goes on., I’m building skills that will stay with me forever. And if the time comes when AI vanishes, I’ll be prepared to win because I didn’t take the lazy shortcuts everyone else did.
People want to support humans who are creating and putting in real work, not humans using AI. The pendulum is going to swing back to a place where the best thing you could do in business is to do things either without AI or keep it at an absolute minimum. There is nothing compelling about going with someone who generated their mission statement through Chat-GPT, used AI to generate “art”, or leveraged Jarvis to write their blogs. Time will show that people will opt to buy and consume from the people creating and working as authentically as possible, not those who are unskilled enough that they need to rely on AI.
Final thoughts
Really excited to do what I can to wrap up freelance in the next month, take this leap of faith, release the content that’s been on my hard drive for what feels like forever now, and continue executing big with performance consulting. I’m so excited for what’s ahead and to go all in on what matters most to me, while building up my businesses in the process.
As always, I hope this brought you a lot of value. Thank you for reading.
