I want to talk about some of the things that I wish I had known sooner that would have prevented me from burning down my seven figure Creator business last year and hitting a total reset button on my personal brand and my business number one I wish someone told me about the importance of depth versus trying to build a business off of volume no one really drilled the numbers in for me and told me the consequences of what it's actually like in the long run of constantly trying to build your brand and your business so fully
based off of volume you're going to hit a point where you're completely exhausted because all you're trying to do is get more customers get new viewers get new subscribers and that's what puts you on this Perpetual hamster wheel of always creating content but worse off creating content that you don't even like because if you look at a standard funnel you've got the top of funnel content that's going to appeal to the masses and that's the type of content that you want to create to get new people if you're constantly creating top of funnel content as
an artist as a creator you might literally hate yourself because you're creating content that you probably don't even actually like in my case I was constantly doing content like how to grow on your Instagram how to grow on YouTube all these types of things that would really appeal to the masses but wasn't actually nurturing my existing audience because they had already heard all those things before and also wasn't necessarily fueling my own passion and creativity and so that's what caused me to burn out because I felt really inauthentic playing this character that was constantly making
top of funnel content now going back to my main point you actually don't need that many people to build a six or even seven figure Creator business and I want you to imagine this scenario imagine if you cultivated a very very engaged audience of 1,000 people who love you for you who want to evolve with you who want to grow with you then imagine you starting a membership that is a $100 a month where people get to talk to you you help them you give them exclusive content you're solving their problems if you do the
math if all 1,000 people decide that this membership is worth it because they want to feel inspired by you they want your help that is $100,000 a month that you'd be generating from the same 1,000 people over and over and over again that's a $1.2 million business and the truth of the matter is a lot of you guys watching this video probably don't even want a million dollars maybe some of you are just trying to get your first $10,000 a month consistently and so that number that 1,000 person number is is actually a lot less
than you think if you decided on a business model where you are prioritizing retention and you're prioritizing increasing your customer lifetime value then you wouldn't be in a position where you constantly need new customers 24/7 all the time and so when I think back on my Creator journey I wish I had known that I actually didn't need that many people in order to build a sustainable business because I drove myself to the ground constantly trying to get new viewers new subscribers new new customers and I also drove myself to the ground constantly launching new things
because my business model wasn't set up in a way that prioritized retention or that made retention easier and so my advice for those of you who are starting a creater business or you're maybe in the middle of building your creater business I want you just to re-evaluate where your attention goes and rather than neglecting the people who have chosen to opt in to you where you could actually be yourself where you could actually like show them who you are are even if those videos don't get crazy amount of views you know that you you're building
a relationship then you wouldn't need to constantly be doing content you don't like at extreme volumes that you don't like either and I genuinely believe that more creators would not burn out and they would be a lot more happier if they were more focused on building a genuine Community from the get-go second piece of advice I want you to stop feeding the pig so when I say feeding the pig I'm talking about back then when I was in university I had a brand management Professor tell us that whenever a product line was suffering the biggest
mistake that every company makes is they cut the budget and they stop feeding the Pig and the product line dies even more because nobody is injecting energy into it and so I always think about stop feeding the pig because I realize that when I had videos that took off on my channel I would feed the pig I would keep doing the same videos because I wanted to grow and that's what I valued at the time I wanted to have like a really big YouTube channel I wanted wanted to get as many views as possible and
so I kept making the same types of videos that I knew was performing and on a tactic level that was a good tactic but it literally ate me away inside because I just did not even like making those types of videos but yet I still kept making them which then attracted even more people who wanted them and so then I had built an entire business with people that wanted things that I didn't didn't really love myself that I didn't really want to do anymore and so it became this like self-fulfilling prophecy and I basically dug
myself into this hole because I kept feeding the pig and so my advice now is that really think about it think about do I actually want to build a business around this and would I be able to do it for five plus years 10 years I'll give you an example I had a video that got 2 million views recently and it's me talking about like the 13 lessons now that I ever since I've become a millionaire blah blah blah I could have chosen to keep doing videos based off of Finance or based off of like
millionaire stuff but I genuinely like do not want to build a brand around that and I don't want to attract more people that want Financial advice from me I don't want to feed that pig I'm going to keep doing the content that I want to do even if it doesn't get a lot of views and it doesn't get a lot of people the people that I do attract the viewers that I do get I know are 100% aligned with me and my values and I'm more interested in the long game of building a genuine Community
than building a fake one building one that's just like yeah sure I've got the numbers and I've got all these things but I am not happy and so stop making videos that you don't enjoy stop pleasing people that you don't even like and and getting feedback from people that you don't even like you don't even see yourself vibing with like stop all of that and I know it sucks in the short term feeling like oh like I'm growing so slowly or like oh like no one's paying attention to me but even if you did choose
fast growth by trying to please everyone and doing things you don't even like you're still going to have to burn it down eventually unless you're able to like play that character and you're okay with that but again I don't think a lot of us are okay with that and so it's really like you pick your poison like what do you want for yourself stop trying to be perfect because sometimes Perfection is what alienates people for a majority of my content career I really tried hard to position myself as an authority as an expert I would
always be like yeah I'm making all this money or like oh look at how much growth I have in terms of my subscribers because I thought that saying those things would make me be more accepted and would make me feel liked but when I actually think back when I started whenever I saw these gurus or these experts present themselves I would be like wow it's so unattainable or it just feels so unrelatable or it just feels so I don't know I feel a distance with them and it's funny because over time I became one of
those gurus and I became one of those experts thinking that it would make me be love D and it would make me be accepted and yes of course I I do feel like it contributed to a sense of authority but at the end of the day if I'm trying to build a relationship with people and I'm trying to build a genuine Community I feel like there is also Merit in showing your mistakes in you know sharing your lessons versus teaching versus being like you should do this or you should do that and like here's the
framework and here's whatever if I were to go back in time I would put less pressure on myself trying to be an expert because when you try to put the expert hat on you almost approach your videos differently like there's a different vibe to the video like for me when I'm going into filming this video I'm not like okay I'm going to be this expert and I'm going to tell people like I am the authority in content creation no my vibe going into this video which dictates how I talk is you're my bestie and I
don't want you to burn out the same way I burnt out and so I'm going to sit you down and tell you one to one this is what I would do differently had I known how my journey was going to pan out again I'm not saying that being expert is a bad thing like if you're trying to position yourself as an expert good for you you can be a teacher you can do all of that but from my experience of trying to put the teacher hat on and always being a teacher and always being an
expert you just put immense pressure on yourself to always have the right answer and when you're trying to have the right answer you then overthink your scripting you then overthink how the video is supposed to look because you're trying to be perfect and I wish someone had told me and sat sat me down 5 years ago or 3 years ago being like hey it's okay to not be an expert it's okay to be a friend and nowadays with chaty PT I feel like people can just get the answer anywhere but what people can't get from
Chachi PT is someone that reminds them of them telling them a story that really resonates and that makes them feel an emotional connection stop speaking poorly to yourself and this kind of stems into like inner child healing which is something that I've been working on a lot since coming back from my sabatical because I realized that our relationship with our parents is the first example that we have on what relationship should look like and I learned that a lot of my burnout a lot of my people pleasing a lot of my perfectionism really stemmed from
my childhood and so through my healing and recovery process I've had to really look at my childhood gain awareness and then being able to rewire them and I'll give you an example that I have recently rewired that has helped me a lot I am very hard on myself and the truth is that's how I was raised and so my mentor talked to me about this and he was like okay when you are speaking to a child you can speak to them in one or two ways so let's say you are teaching your kid how to
cook or something like that you can either be like why didn't you pick up the pan oh my gosh you haven't even scrambled the eggs yet oh look you forgot the salt and pepper if your parents talk to you like that and if you actually had a little reaction of like oh my gosh this brings me back back to my childhood I'm going to predict that's also how you talk to yourself that's how I talk to myself because that's how my parents talk to me growing up is you didn't do this or why didn't you
do that or you missed this it was always focused on the things that I wasn't doing rather than celebrating the things that I actually did and that's just how it was in my childhood right I don't hate my parents I like literally love my parents but I had to really revisit my childhood in order to rewire a lot of the behaviors that was making content creation and business so stressful and so hard for me especially on my mental health now that's one way you can speak to a child the other way that you could speak
to your child if you are teaching them how to cook is oh my goodness great job putting the pan on the stove now the next step is to put the egg and to scramble it oh my gosh you are doing such a great job if someone spoke to you that way that would also change the way that you speak to yourself as an adult and nowadays I'm trying to speak myself in that way that I just presented which is a way more encouraging celebratory tone so for example I'm no longer thinking oh my gosh I
missed an upload oh my gosh I didn't get enough clicks or ah like if had only I had changed the thumbnail or if only I had a better hook nowadays I'm like wow congratulations you just came back from a 12month break and I am so proud of you for even posting that video today or I am so proud of you for gaining awareness that you need to take a break and that you're not going to fall back into your old patterns of for the sake of being consistent burning yourself out that's the way I talk
talk to myself now the way that you talk to yourself literally changes the way that you act and the way that you act changes the results that you get there's this like self- coaching model called TF your thoughts dictate your feelings your feelings dictate your actions and your actions dictate your results so if your thoughts are constantly you criticizing yourself that's going to change the way that you feel dat a day it's going to make you not want to film content it's going to make you not want to show up to your community those feelings
are then going to dictate your actions and then those actions of you not showing up of you not like you know loving on yourself of you not doing whatever you need to do that's going to dictate your results you're not going to get the views that you want the subscribers that you want the community that you want to build it's self-sabotage whereas if you thought positive thoughts to yourself you are encouraging that's going to change the way that you feel you're going to wake up you're going to feel anxiety to make content that's going to
then change the actions that you take you're actually going to film you're actually going to post the video and that's going to change the results that you get you're going to end up building a beautiful wonderful Community who loves you focus on setting creative goals as well as metric goals back then when I would make videos pretty much every single video had a goal I want this amount of clicks I want this percentage of a click-through rate I want this audience retention it was all based on numbers and because I was so focused on trying
to hit these metrics and I chose my video topics based on these metrics that also led me to feeling really inauthentic 5 years down the line of being a Creator nowadays rather than setting metric base goals I set a lot of creative goals so let me give you an example this video right here my creative goal is to be able to speak to a camera and feel like I'm just talking to a friend like you and I were grabbing coffee and you're asking me for advice because I've been a creator for 5 years I had
to burn it down and now I'm just like telling you what were mistakes that I made what I would have done differently that's my goal of this video is to be able to like convey that type of energy and so I've noticed that since setting these goals that aren't necessarily tied to metrics it's it's allowed me to actually grow creatively it's allowed me to not feel as much pressure making these videos because my goal is not to have a crazy retention rate or click-through rate or whatever it's really for me to express my thoughts in
a different way that maybe some of you guys are not used to or haven't seen before next thing that I want you to know about and that is content is really there to capture who you are in this moment in time even though in the moment you think that whatever you're going to post is going to Define your entire creation career it's not and that's speaking from someone who's pivoted many times in the past years ago I did Beauty content because in that moment of time I genuinely thought that being a makeup artist was what
I wanted to do but then through the act of actually creating the content I realized that I don't want my face to burn because of all the scrubbing and having to do all these makeup looks and I also found that being in the beauty Niche was really expensive I always had to buy new palettes new products new brushes to to switch things up but I'm so glad that I took took the leap to even try and create the content to capture who I was in that moment of time and then recognize that it wasn't for
me then afterwards I ended up starting this YouTube channel where I wanted to share what I was experiencing of quitting my 9 of5 my lessons there my advice there to anyone who was in a similar situation that is what I wanted to do in that moment of time and thanks to me pursuing that and trying that and then posting my videos I ended up building a really small and loyal community and then that's where I met a friend who wanted to collaborate on a video we created a video about Instagram and my part of the
video ended up going viral and that's what really helped escalate and like accelerate the growth of my channel and then that escalated into me talking all about social media selling courses around it having a lot of clients and then through that process I realized I actually don't want to be playing this character anymore I feel very out of like authenticity with myself my values are changing and so I'm going to decide to let that all go and then from there I took a year off and I came back and now you're seeing the video that
you're watching now where I am like you know what I'm just going to have fun with social media I decided to also start another business with my fiance that literally does not rely on my face in order to be successful it's called super Boba if you guys want to check it out but I wouldn't have decided and I wouldn't have come to this conclusion had I not done everything else that I did in the past and then a few years later I might completely change again and so the point of this is there are so
many of us who feel like whatever we're going to do on social media is going to define the rest of our lives and so we don't post anything at all because we're perfectionists we're holding on to that piece of work because we're scared that it's going to Define us we're overwhelmed we feel like it needs to be perfect and that's a big reason why so many newer creators don't start at all or so many existing creators don't pivot at all they don't change they don't try but if you look back in my journey if I
had stayed in the same place and if I was telling myself that H do I want to be a beauty Creator oh I'm not sure let me hold on to this let me not start I would have never started the YouTube channel I would have never built a million dooll business and then I wouldn't have burnt it down and then totally found my values and I wouldn't have started a new business I wouldn't have been in this place that I am now if you're someone who's watching this video and you're holding on to a piece
of content you've been holding on to it for like months it's sitting in your drafts I want you to post it and just trust that it's not going to Define you I wish that I created more evidence for myself that it was safe to take a break the reason why I did not take breaks as much as I should have is because I didn't think that it was safe to I thought that if I took a break I would lose everything everyone would leave me and so I never took a solid break and so because
I never took a solid break I never created evidence for myself and then it was just this Perpetual cycle and that's why I burnt out and what a lot of people don't know is that during my sabatical when I took 12 months off of social media off of my business I literally slept 12 hours plus a day for like half a year I also was incredibly sick for the first few months of my sabatical because my body was literally holding on to so much stress so much anxiety so much like sleep debt that I forced
my body to just like put to the side put to the side because I was constantly on survival mode when I was being a Creator and when I was running my business and so when I finally had the opportunity to rest my body just had a significant Purge and I was so sick for months and what that taught me was that whoo I could have easily prevented this if I had taken more breaks throughout my career and so looking back now I wish that I took those breaks to show myself that nothing is going to
burn down if you choose to take time off for me I took a year off and coming back I realized whoo there's still a lot of people in my community who still want to hear from me and if anything they want to hear more from me because they miss me because they haven't seen me in a while and so when I'm feeling off I'm like okay taking a day off is actually not that scary taking a week off is not that scary taking a month off is not that scary because I'm someone who's taken a
whole year off and I survived it and that's because I created evidence for myself and so if you're watching this I really want you to challenge yourself to take a weekend off or I hope you're taking a weekend off but to take a week off and see how that feels notice that nothing was so drastic nothing was so bad that your career is over and then now that you've taken a week off okay great maybe next time take two weeks off maybe next time tell your audience hey I'm taking the month of August off or
I'm taking the month of January off like train your audience train your community to be used to you taking breaks you're demonstrating to them that this is the healthy way to approach content creation to approach business to approach life and so another thing that I want more people to know about that I wish I knew about back then is I wish I stopped thinking like an employee and I started to think like an investor so when I say thinking like an employee I would constantly be chasing that monthly paycheck and so what ends up happening
is if you are so desperate for making sure that you're making enough every single month you then choose to do things that you don't actually want to do so for example I had a friend who already had a lot of money in her savings account she was fine she was safe she had her needs met but because she was so fixated on making like 20K a month 30k a month whatever she would then continuously take on clients that would burn her out every single month rather than just taking time off to work on a passive
income product that would then make up her whole Year's worth of income in like one launch let's say how I relate this back to creating evidence for yourself that it's safe to take a break it it kind of comes back to not feeling that like feast or famine lifestyle every single month and to instead invest in your health invest in bigger projects invest in your creativity what if taking a month off of your business a month off of your creator work and you actually healed yourself worked out you were able to be out in nature
you were able to like love on yourself you then end up having this fabulous idea and you launch it and then you make all of your income in like one month like what if that was the scenario that could happen happen but for a lot of people that's not happening because they're not allowing themselves to take that creative break to take that time off and what I've learned from creative recovery is that withdrawal is necessary to creativity when you are always online scrolling and seeing what other people are doing it is impossible to set authentic
goals for yourself because you're so wrapped up on what everyone else is doing and that's influencing the way that you think and the way that you should be doing things whereas if you actually took time off to rest your body because your body is literally your temple but you also take time off to think thoughtfully about what you want to create or maybe you live your life and then realize whoa I have way more content ideas if you actually did that you would come back out so much more powerful so much more authentic and so
much more unique there's something that I keep thinking about and that is like nowadays being a Creator is so popular but if I actually look if anyone is truly creative I don't think so when I go on my Instagram it's like the same it's the same Trends it's the same type of content it's just a different person doing it but I really genuinely believe that if people took a break if people took a step back we would see way more unique content out there we would see everyone's creative Geniuses because they are actually taking time
off to pour into themselves to pour into their families to pour into their relationships to pour into their life and there's one thing that I read from the book The creative way or not the creative way the artist what's this book the artist's way one thing from reading this book is she talks about how if you want to work on your art you need to work on your life and back then I did not have a life my life was my content my life was my business and I always was desperate for new content ideas
I was looking at my competitors I was always other focused because I wasn't withdrawing enough and I wasn't taking enough breaks to refill to recharge and to tap into my cretive genius and what I've learned now coming back from my sabatical is the moment that I started hanging out with my friends again reflecting like Daily Reflection just writing the things the thoughts that are in my mind I've been able to think about more ideas that I wouldn't have thought about before and that's because I'm working on my life and as a result of working on
my life it is positively influencing my art and positively influencing the content that I create I want you to know that the personal is universal Carl Jung said this and basically what it means is whatever is most deep and personal and vulnerable within you is actually a feeling that everybody feels I get a lot of questions sometimes of like oh like how can you be so vulnerable or like oh I feel like you're so authentic and and the truth is because I recognize that whatever is my deepest fear or my deepest insecurity is likely what
a lot of people are feeling too but nobody's actually saying it and the truth truth is is that when you try to paint a perfect picture of yourself perfect version of yourself everything is all hunky dory it's perfect in your life and you're not being vulnerable and you're not sharing what you're really going through or how you really feel about a situation then again you're increasing the likelihood of actually alienating people naturally it's normal for a lot of people to be inconsistent in this journey to be afraid the more vulnerable and the more raw and
real and quote unquote authentic that you show up as the harder this journey gets trust me like when I was doing howto content and trying to be an expert and trying to be a teacher that content was pretty easy to create because it literally has nothing to do with me it's literally just like me sharing five strategies five tactics whatever and it's just me reading off of my script and sharing the step-by-step of how to do something it's not content like this or some of my most recent content where I'm genuinely sharing like hey this
is the story this is the experience that I went through it was really shitty I was really scared and if you're someone who has subscribed to my newsletter the Creator Journal you're going to see even more of that but anyways what I'm trying to say is there is power in being vulnerable there is power in sharing the things that you may be afraid to share because by sharing those things you're showing people that you're human and you're also speaking to a feeling or thought that most likely everyone has gone through through in their lives even
if someone hasn't walked the exact same path you have and they aren't exactly like you and didn't go through the exact same situation we are human we all feel feelings of Doubt of sadness of frustration fear of rejection all those things and I feel like content and being a Creator and creating a personal brand and building a genuine authentic Community comes from vulnerability now I once had someone write to me is like hey I really love the way that you share your stories you're showing me how it's possible to do it without sounding victim is
and I agree sometimes the internet is not the place to use it as your constant soap box and basically trauma dumping on your audience but there is a way to do it where you are still speaking to the emotions that you're feeling the stories and the experiences that you've gone through that you've also processed through and now you're guiding people through those stories through that vulnerability and you're showing them hey this is the stuff that I've dealt with that I'm dealing with and this is what I'm thinking of doing in the future this is what
I've done this is my plan I feel like when you actually position your stories in that way it also adds that layer of value and it adds that layer of like oh okay that's how she's dealing with this situation and so that inspires me on dealing with the similar situation that she's going through but apply into my life I want you to reposition something in your mind that I wish I did 5 years ago and that is understanding that you don't have content ideas you have thoughts you have stories you have lessons and you have
experiences even for me when I'm thinking about what to talk about in my videos or what to write in my newsletters over on my notion I don't label it content ideas I label it stories thoughts experiences lessons and that's allowed me to think outside of the box and not necessarily think about what can I create that other people would like and instead think about what happened to me this week or what happened to me this past year or like what am I learning right now that I find really interesting or what did I wish I
knew 5 years ago which is why I created this video and so anyways guys I hope by sharing these 10 lessons that I've learned through the Last 5 Years of building a personal brand online building a multiple seven figure business and then having to burn it down anyways and then coming back and realizing a different way and a different approach to doing content and if you are someone who wants to continue following along my journey and accessing a lot of the lessons and stories that I've accumulated so far and that I am accumulating right now
then make sure you subscribe to the Creator Journal newsletter that's where I really pour my heart and soul out and share some stories that I don't necessarily share on YouTube but anyways thank you so much for watching I appreciate you guys I hope this was helpful to you and I will see you in the next video
