Unmasking Myself: 5 years on YouTube & processing burnout
Embracing self-growth feels uncomfortable right now. Sitting with that is hard. I'm in the learner seat again in so many ways.
As I struggle a little with my identity post-psychology and wrestle / sit with with my experience of burnout, I've also put myself in a fun position of learning again.
I've been on YouTube for five years now. The YouTube homepage informed me that it was my five-year birthday. Although I haven't been creating videos for that entire time, I probably spent about a year just kind of logged in, envisioning what my videos might look like.
It has been a long time with a lot of experimentation and moving around with the types of videos that I've produced and been interested in. The learning curve I have been on in terms of understanding how to produce my own videos has been steep. I just ticked over 8,000 subscribers on that fifth birthday too, which was satisfying but not quite where I want to be.
I have a coach now with a service called VidIQ, who I “speak with” in bite-sized chunks on a daily basis. She's based on the west coast of the USA, and I'm here in Wellington, New Zealand. This presents its challenges when you can only send messages on video that are 90 seconds long or 750 characters, and you can only send three of those messages and then have to wait until you get a response from your coach. It’s asynchronous. Time zone problems, like I said.
I've been doing this for about three weeks now, and it has actually been an interesting exercise in understanding and developing my value proposition. Looking at Patrick Hanlon's ideas of primal branding and starting to think about how that applies to me and what I want to do on YouTube has been enlightening.
Alongside all of this, it's the run-up to Christmas with all that that brings. End of school, end of term, new beginnings for our eldest daughter as she moves on to high school, and also a break. But also, a new government is being put in place in the next few days, I suspect. It's an interesting time with many geopolitical challenges out there and yet to come. It’s still hard to manage the overwhelm of everything happening while I have so little adaptive capacity for change.
I hope you're well out there. Take care.
ps if you are interested in buying tech gifts gifts for loved ones overseas that won’t break the bank, I did make this video as a little guide.