I am currently putting together a big writing project. It’s a non-fiction book proposal and, late last year, I invested in Beth Kempton’s Book Proposal Masterclass which shows how serious I am about this project.
I’ve done lots of exploratory work on this proposal as I worked through the lessons and exercises in the course. But the course has now finished, we’ve had a break for Christmas, and I’ve come back to work feeling overwhelmed at the scale of the project before me.
I know it’s all in my mind. After all, I’ve already done a lot of the work. But the project is stretching out inside my head with no finish line in sight.
So I needed to organise the project in a tangible way in order to stop my mind panicking and running riot (and hopefully put a stop to having anxiety dreams about taking my Spanish oral exam!)
The first thing I did was some journaling. Just to empty my mind. And funnily enough my mind wasn’t fretting about this project but about YouTube. So I wrote it all down and immediately felt calmer. It left space too, to allow me to think about the project.
I then took my personal and family diary which holds my to-do lists for stuff around the house and made sure I had time to do those tasks I would otherwise do to procrastinate.
Now the mind is free and the diary is sorted I could do the work on the project. I divided it up using a double page spread in my notebook as well as using the post it organisational system. The final part was to create folders in Scrivener.
You can see all of this in more detail in my latest video:
Over the weekend I sent out a newsletter which opened with a short anecdote about my YouTube channel. The subject of the newsletter wasn’t actually about YouTube at all but I received an email back from one of my lovely subscribers asking what had happened with my YouTube journey. She said: It feels almost like we followed you on your journey then when you arrived at the Emerald City, you left us outside the gates.
I completely agreed. I’d stopped talking about YouTube once I reached monetisation. I’d shared a lot of what I was going through including my analytics and how close I was getting on my Instagram Stories - but then just didn’t carry that narrative on.
My YouTube journey has dominated my life for a year. I was thinking about it a lot; anxious that I would not reach the relevant requirements and then, when I did, I was worried about being rejected and monetisation would not be allowed for my channel.
So I thought I’d explore why I stopped talking about my YouTube channel in this blog post, as well as looking at my YouTube journey so far.