Creative Entrepreneurs Mastermind

Roundtable Creator Chat With Jenny Lisk and Jess Pang From Creative Entrepreneurs Mastermind (#293)

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Our Guests Today: Jenny Lisk and Jess Pang

Jenny Lisk and Jess Li Pang – lovely chat about the joy and challenges of being a creator, and how you can welcome 2022 with open arms!

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Transcript

Day 13 of 30: Roundtable Live Discussions with Creators! – powered by Happy Scribe

Welcome to Feisworld Media. And I’m really thrilled to be joined by Jessica Lee Pang and also Jenny Lisk. And as you can see, I do highly encourage you to check out Jesse’s YouTube channel as well as Jenny’s new book, Future Widowbook.com. She also has a lovely podcast. We are here to basically have a live discussion. This is something that we do on a regular basis. In fact, for years, every other week lately, we’ve been chatting about once a month. So this is really precious time for us to put this forward. If you guys have any questions, there’s absolutely no stress. Just leave it in the chat box anywhere you are and we will answer them for you. So, with that said, would you guys mind introducing yourself really quickly to our audience?

Thank you.

Sure. Who do you want to go first?

Jenny, please.

Sorry. Okay. All right, so, yes, my name is Jenny Lisk and I’m in Seattle, Washington, and I run a podcast for widowed parents. It’s called The Widowed Parent Podcast. And I have a new book out this year called Future Widow. And as Face of the URLs in my name there. And also I do consulting with authors on publishing their books. Publishing and marketing, I should say.

Yeah, that’s lovely. We’re going to dive in about your business set up there. I think it’s really brilliant. It’s such a natural progression of who you are podcaster, writing a book and into consulting, and I can see that in speaking and evolve into the near future as well. But what about you, Jessica?

Hi, my name is Jessica Peng and I do a lot of different things, which is what can make my social media accounts a little bit interesting. But. Yeah. So I’m a UI UX designer. I’ve been doing that for the past ten years. In addition to that, my YouTube channel is all about gaming, so I do play games and through that I learn a lot about UI and UX and how I can apply them to other things in, like, the more kind of corporate setting in my day job. So that’s what my gaming channel is about. And I’m hoping to start a new YouTube channel for design related things called Unapologetic Design, where people can learn to be unapologetically themselves through design, through their whole entire career and what that looks like. So, yeah, it’ll be all about mentorship. It’ll be about what my experience is as a woman of color in the tech industry and how that’s been for me for the past decade.

Super cool. And we’re going to make yeah. Jenny, what’s up?

I was going to say, I know this is your channel, but there may be some people here who haven’t heard about your background. Can you introduce yourself as well?

Thank you for asking. In fact, a lot of people don’t know who I am or what I do. My name is Fay Wu and I run Faceroll.com as seen in the URL and my signature or name here. And I run a YouTube channel. That has been my primary focus and has driven somewhat significant revenue as well. And fancy angle changes there. Jess so I started my business in 2016, left my fulltime job, went cold turkey, even though two years prior to that, I started my podcast. So I had leads related to my business, but frankly, I didn’t quite know where everything was going to go. There was no real safety net there and really never looked back. Business just kind of there’s kind of ebb and flowed. But in general, I feel really lucky to have done that earlier on. And as a result, I ended up creating a lot of tutorials, some related to zoom to YouTube podcasting and running your business, as well as this 30 Day Life. That’s my primary focus since 2020, to teach people how to bring their ideas forward, how to build a successful business online, including consulting digital products, online courses, all that jazz.

So, yeah, really thrilled to be doing that.

Cool. And we should say we have a couple of other group members as well who weren’t able to join us today, but we do have a great group every other Saturday, so thank you for pulling us all together.

Oh, you’re very welcome. I do want to give him a shout out because Steven Thompson, who is an educator, a podcaster and author, is preparing some tests right now, unable to join us. Same with Tammy Zulerlow, who’s traveling at the moment and who’s also author speaker, podcaster. We started this journey. I feel like we’re really in the little hub, creative hub together since 2017. It is so special to see how we’ve all grown into our curtain roles and we’ll continue to kind of transition, transform, and I hope that when maybe we bring a bigger group back together, I hope Michael O’Brien will join us as well. Maybe in a January live stream session and we’ll see how that pans out.

Yeah, that’d be awesome. Yeah.

So I would love to take a moment for you guys to kind of reflect on maybe this past year in 2021. If some memories kind of get triggered from 2020, that’s totally fine too. But some of the things, observations you have learned about yourself and maybe about your business, we’ll start with whoever whoever take any order turns you see fit.

Jess, you want to go?

Sure. My tendency is to always talk. So one of the things that I’m learning about myself this year is there’s that whole saying where you know, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason, you should listen twice as much as you speak. So I definitely am learning this year to listen and to be an active listener. And I found that there’s a lot of people with a lot of things to share, and they may not be the most extrovert. They may not be very confident quite yet. And so giving space and a safe space for people to have that opportunity and listen to those that may have otherwise maybe not have spoken up because sometimes I can be a little bit of like a little extrovert presence in the room. I’m so excited to tell everybody everything. But I think in general, more than ever in regards to content creation, consistency is hard. In general, in life, consistency is hard. And I think that there’s just always this need to have this push to keep creating content and to really play to the algorithm and I’m going to be a broken record. Like with a lot of other influencers, you can’t let it get to you.

Like mental health is very important and if you’re not feeling your best, then it’s okay to take a break. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been learning, really trying to pace myself and understand where my boundaries are and where’s the magic sweet spot for content creation.

Love what you said there. What do you think, Jenny?

Well, this year for me has been probably number one about launching my book. I got hold of up here because it’s just so exciting. And I’ve got the hardcover version now, see, so it’s got like dust jacket and everything but so I spent last year finishing the writing and preparing for publication and so this year has been all about marketing and so learning and thinking about strategic ways to get the word out to reach my audience. And Jess was talking about content creation. That’s been something I’ve been trying to think about too, especially in terms of how to be smarter about content creation. So like, I’ve got a whole book here of 500 words of content. How can I use pieces of that in social media or in videos or there are some standalone pieces that could become the basis of a post or even an article. Right. I think when I was first getting started as a content creator, I felt like every single piece of content had to be freshly created, but I was losing. They say if you post something once on a social media channel and only a small percentage of your audience sees it.

Right. So I’ve been trying to get better about posting things across channels and I finally set up a queue with a scheduling tool. I’ve got over 100 episodes of my podcast now and I’ve got a whole bunch of written pieces and I’ve got a whole bunch of quote cards that have pulled the reviews from my book. I’m I like have a lot of content here. I need to get more strategic and smarter about using that content and to reach, to reach out. We have more people with my message and all that. So I finally set up the social media scheduling tool and I’ve kind of liking it to the crockpot. I don’t know if you’ve ever like you fixed dinner before you leave in the morning, you do something in the cockpit and then you come home and you’re like, wow, who cooked dinner for me? Right? Well, it’s like that. I spent a bunch of time, I picked the right tool, I thought about my content, I set it up and then I’m like, wow, who’s been posting on social media for me? Right? It’s like the crocodile is posting on social media for me.

And it’s great because I’m getting content that I’m not having to every single time sit down and take time away from something else critical. Of course I’m posting fresh stuff too, but it kind of supplements it because I realized that I do have a lot of good content that is evergreen.

What tool you mentioned with social media publishing? What are you using?

So I started using Sendable and the reason that I picked it, what I really liked about it was that it’s got this little creation, like a box, like you said, create a new post or a new tweet or whatever. And so you can kind of type out your or paste in your main thing you want to say, but then you pick the channels you want it to go to and it gets a little tab for each one. And so then you can just go and you can go to the Instagram one and add some hashtags or go to the LinkedIn one and take out all the emojis that you used on your Instagram one, right? So you can kind of just tweak each one without having to do it from scratch. And so that, I thought was a really nice feature and I was really because I looked at Hootsuite too, because I know a lot of people really like that one and they didn’t have that feature and I was really surprised. It seems like a really handy tool. Yeah, I see you put a link in there. Do you use Sendable as well?

Yeah, actually I think we talked about Sendable. What’s really special. I included a link that is an affiliate link. By the way. I love the company. It’s actually a British company and the reason why I discovered them was because I was previously paying and using Magora Pulse. Which was really good.

Too.

But the price just jumped up to. I think. $80 a month.

Which. By the way.

I’m being very honest here. It does every little bit. It really adds up for a content creator over time. And what I also love about Sunday is the feature to basically repurpose your content and be able to reschedule the same piece of content to be published at different times. And that is very powerful, right?

Yeah. They’ve got queues and I hadn’t really ever I’d heard of people using tools like this, right? And people had told me, you need to do that, but I never really put it on my list to dig into. So once I started looking at the queue feature is very awesome, right? And you can pick the times of day. There’s even a thing where you can pick up if I want to post this on Tuesday. And can you tell me what the optimal time would be? And it suggests a certain time. You can change it, of course, if you have a specific time you want, but I think that’s a handy feature. But I really like this option to tweak the message by platform because you don’t necessarily want to post exactly the same thing right. On each channel. I mean, there can be a lot of similar things, but for example, the emojis, like Instagram, you got a lot of emojis, right? My cute little whatever. But on LinkedIn, I’m like maybe one smiley face, but, like, cut the rest of the emojis, you know?

Yeah. Also, you want to tailor the same or similar messages based on the platform anyway. People interact with Twitter or on Twitter is drastically different than LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Well, and the Twitter one has to be shortened, of course.

Yeah, exactly. So that reminds me of a question that I like to talk about, which is getting help. It’s one thing for you to curate and everything, but just out of curiosity for you, Jess and Jenny, how have you ever seeked out help for managing your social media or doing any part of your running any part of your business? What are your thoughts on that? We’ll start with maybe Jess.

Sure. In terms of finding help for my social media, I’m not at a point currently to start hiring somebody else to do things for my channel. I think that right now it’s more of still so much of a solo show. And I think in terms of finding help, well, I mean, that’s the whole thing with Faye. And I’ll never forget when I first met Fay on Facebook and she wrote this blurb about what it meant to be a content or creative, rather a creative entrepreneur back then. And I was just like, wow, that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to know what that is and learn what that is. And I think that was one of the things that I did to really help me still pursue this, even though because it’s really hard when you’re this solo content creator. And I’m in Boston primarily right now, I’m in Seattle, but in either case, I haven’t really met a bunch of content creators. You know, in La. There, I think, a dime a dozen. But when you have a community, I think that’s when you can really feel like you can accomplish a lot more and people can hold you accountable.

So I think for me, that was my way of finding help, trying to seek others like me so that we can kind of commiserate and share resources and support one another.

I like that I just want to.

Comment briefly the fact that a lot of content creators, when they first get started, they have trouble even calling themselves creators. They’re like just a hobby. I’m not trying to make you hear this, all this, I’m not trying to make money from it. And I used to say that too. And also you’re thinking like, until I make the first penny. No, no, until I make the first purely from a creative work, I don’t deserve to get help. I don’t want nothing that’s you Jess, but a lot of people trying to negotiate with themselves to see, like, at what point does it make sense for me to hire help? And because only fancy people can get help and that costs thousands of dollars and we can debunk that because none of that is actually true. But it’s also true at the beginning for me, it’s about experimenting what this is like. So you’re at a point where a lot of people really resonate with what you just said, but what you also pointed out in terms of community, that’s huge, even though that’s not so much as getting held us and fake. Could you write this blog post for me, Jenny?

Could you write part of that book for me? It’s not so much about that. It’s about being in the same hub together and feeling supported and feeling understood. So thank you for sharing that. Jenny, thoughts on getting help?

Well, it’s funny that you mentioned this, and this may need to be something you guys can help me brainstorm in the next session or some other time I put on my list to brainstorm a list of things the VA might be able to help me with because I know I have too many things on my plate and I know many people use a VA. I know you do. Other people, theoretically they could help, but I put on my list to brainstorm things and then even that task got deferred because other things came up. But I’m really struggling with like I’m not sure if they could help me with social media exactly, because most of my social media content is around grief and widowed parenting and a lot of it is telling my story. And so they can’t tell my story. Right. If my post is a quote from my book and I’m going to write a reflection that is related to that quote of something and share something, it’s a personal share and I can’t really delegate that. And if I tried to tell them what to write, it would take me just as long to tell them, right?

So I struggle with that part. And also part of social media for me is building relationships with listeners or readers or other professionals or other widowed parents. And if somebody can have somebody interacting as me with them, that doesn’t really do anything. So that’s why for me, using the Sendable tool, scheduling tool, I’m like okay? And I think I’m paying $26 a month or something for whatever plan I’m on. So that is an expense that I’m like. This will help me, right? This is step one in saving time by getting help, quote unquote. In this case, it’s AI kind of help or not AI executive, but like a technical solution that will help me, right? And so along those lines, I’ve been exploring using Zapier more other things that I can automate. Even if so far I’m still on the free Zapier plan. Because I think you can do like a couple of things set up like a certain number of automation for free. But if you want more, then you have to pay. So I’m thinking, well, alright, at some point it’s going to be worth it for me to pay for their paid plan.

If that helps me automate things, that then saves time in my day or offloads things right, to a technological solution. I mean, I’m already using things like a scheduling tool, right? Like I use schedule one, which is I can’t believe how many, like I try to get on other people’s podcasts and how many times and they’re like, okay, what can you do Tuesday? Or tell me, give me some time. And I’m like, oh, my God. Really? Can’t you just give me a scheduling tool where I can pick a time? Right? So that kind of stuff I’m trying to embrace that kind of quote unquote help, which isn’t an assistant, but it is ways of offloading work onto other things. And along these lines, I did experiment. I needed to research a bunch of podcasts to pitch to be on, right? And I know I can do that myself. It’s not hard, but I knew it would take me a lot of time. And somewhere I came across a guy on fiverr and he’s got like you can have them give you a list of ten shows or 25 shows or 100 shows for different price points.

So I’m like 100 shows. It was like $70. That is $70 well spent. So I did a thoughtful that these are the types of shows I want to be on and give them some good criteria and then send him off to go. And so this is like a one off kind of thing, but it is actually one of the reasons I wanted to do it was to experiment with having somebody help me. In this case, a one off kind of help as opposed to an ongoing thing. But this is something I’m like, I can delegate that. I don’t need to spend a bunch of hours compiling a spreadsheet of 100 shows when I can throw money at this guy in fiverr and have him do it.

I think when it comes to delegations in general, we as creators, we have different personalities slightly, we’re very different belief systems. For me, for instance, like the way I look at all the things that I’m doing is I have to conduct the outreach if I want to reach out to someone I really want to put on my show. I always do that by myself. I want every word to be written by me. And it’s funny, and I’m not sure how you guys feel about it because a lot of podcasters actually outsource that element of it. I want not only for it to sound like me, I want it to be me. And the other that I do is negotiation with brands, brand deals. When a brand finally reaches out, or especially a very qualified one, I mean, the ones are obviously spams. I just filter that through. Nobody needs to, like, ask me questions. Do you think this band yeah, it is. So, you know, for me to respond back to that, to be able to negotiate, how much I want to chat about it, that’s completely up to me. That’s just me. I think for us to look at the long list of things and make that decision, is really important.

And if you find yourself trying to say yes to everything, probably means that that’s inaccurate, that’s probably too much for you to do. What are your thoughts on that?

One thing that’s interesting, and I think it depends on where you want to take this channel, your channels, how you want to present yourself on social media, if you want to remain an individual or expand to an entity of some sort. So I call it the you factor. Right? So it’s what makes your channel you uniquely you. Your voice, your tone, kind of what you’re saying. Jenny and I think it’s true that in some ways, only we can really understand what that is on a fundamental level. But one case study I want to bring in is that I have this amazing dance instructor. His name is Chris Sue. Harlem For Dance Staffie. And so a long time ago. He’s been doing this for probably over seven years, I think. And he was a whole just solo show. He was like, this is me, it’s just me. I don’t know if I can really trust anybody else. And then here I come along. And then I’m just like, oh, I got a camera. Let me film class for you. And then it went from me doing that to now he’s had like four or five. We’re called teaching assistants, but we do a myriad of things.

So there’s something to be said about, even though, like, it can be difficult to offload some of that new factor of, like, your perspective. More often than not, there are people who just love what you do the way that you love it, and they’ll have the passion in that. So I do agree that some other more menial type of tasks you can go to fiverr for, that super easy. But there is a thought of having this community. So now that he has found his pool of community, who love dance the way he loves it, who love him and his energy and who want to support that and understand that on a fundamental level, we take over for a lot of his social media. We take over. And he does pay this other company in Indonesia to push out this whole schedule of different, varying types of posts on all over his social media. However, I come in and I extend the ufactor, and I say, hey, this tone of voice, not quite it, because those people aren’t a part of the community, but me being a part of the community. And just like I’m passionate about this.

I know his tone of voice. This isn’t quite it. Let me tweak it. And so together with that, we’re able to expand and divide the work. And so he can focus on what he’s so great at creating choreography that people love, having this beautiful energy that lights up a room and infects people in the most lovely, amazing way. And so when thinking about whether or not you can or want to expand that Ufactor to a community of people, look towards a community, build that community, and then all of a sudden, that one touch point you have, because we are ultimately, the bottleneck has opened up, and we can start affecting the lives of many other people. But that’s just one perspective. No right or wrong. It’s really just where you want to take your brand and where you want to go.

What are some ways that you think you use assistance or think other people could based on things you’ve learned?

Yeah, for sure. First of all, I’ve had such great luck on Upwork.com. I cannot even praise that enough. So I’m going to just drop a quick link. So I would say that exactly like Jeff said. Now I have three people working with me. Herman these people work with me on a regular basis as opposed to my documentary film crew. I adore them to pieces. They’re not, like, with me in this moment. They were specific to that project. So, Herman, Anna Rose herman is my strategist editor, you know, my soul mate. I mean, literally, it’s crazy because you.

Find these people, and then you love.

Them, and they love you. They love your work. So now there’s an extension of your work, people who get it and people who love it, and in a way, that made the brand so much better. They see things that I don’t see myself. And Anna is my content manager, who really not only helps me offload the face world work, I also have this sort of this wing of client work. I love and adore my clients. I choose them. They choose me. But there are a lot of things that are not entirely passive. In fact, it’s very, very active work. And Anna has really been able to offload stuff there. And I can’t get into the specifics because recently we as a team revisited the system to say, how can we be more efficient? So Rose is based in the Philippines and she helps really manage the social share part of it. So after, let’s say, Herman edited the content. So I produce, I IDA, I’m the camera, I’m in front of the camera. Herman then edit everything and is very familiar with what I’m trying to do because he ideas and strategize with me as opposed to me just pushing this thing over is like, good luck with his dropbox link.

And Anna, on the other hand, really helps me write really high quality content, helps me upload all my videos, including title, keyword, research, thumbnail design, so I don’t have to worry about that. Everything’s on schedule, I’m done. And then Rose can take everything that’s been produced and be able to repurpose and reshare without having to write everything from scratch. And I think I try to put people in a position where they thrive the most. And I always have conversations maybe we can talk about that too, is I have conversations with people to understand who they are as people. They’re not an assistant, they’re not a human resource. To me, they’re people. I focus on what they want to learn, what they’re good at, and I repeat that conversation. So I know that how they want to grow, how else they want to grow with my brand, if phase will no longer serve them, they want to go elsewhere. I’m fully supportive of that too, which hasn’t happened yet. So those are some things.

Cool. Yeah. I got to think about this topic somewhere. I feel like I think somebody mentioned drowning. Sometimes I feel like I am right. I got so many things that I want to do, so many ideas, so many initiatives. Balls in the air. Right? But figuring out which parts to hand off is tricky.

You need good people. And Jess, I know that you work in a startup environment that’s very, very telling. And you’ve obviously worked in more than one company too, so the dynamics is really important. And I’ve certainly worked with people that didn’t work out so well and not really for the reasons that we often think. As in, oh, is this person not intelligent enough? Or is this person not really highly technical, not good at what they’re doing? Maybe some percentage of that. But I gotta say, the number one quality that I often find is that, passion aside and all that, you have to be reliable. You have to deliver what you promise to deliver. And if you can’t, I need to know. Like, I am someone who is like, if you can’t make it, if you can’t publish at this time, I just need to know and I will jump on it. So having that level of trust and reliability is really critical. Otherwise it actually creates more work for you as the creator instead of. Getting help to offload anything. Yeah, just what have you seen in environments that you’ve been in or like even in the dance studio?

It’s the same thing. The instructor doesn’t show up, then you have 30 students standing there waiting, right?

Yeah. Showing up is the best thing that you can do for others and yourself. Showing up for yourself, I think overall is one of the hardest things to do, but one of the most important things. And it’s amazing what showing up will do. That reliability factor. Luckily, I haven’t had too many instructors that weren’t consistent in the workplace. I’ve seen very many things, I kid you not. There are people who have lied about having a heart attack. There are people who just disappear for a few weeks and then you’re just like and this is not even just at the startup. This is actually at a company that makes several million dollars in revenue and we all signed the contract. And it’s pretty crazy and it’s pretty wild and I have to wonder what goes on in their head when they do that. People who have lied about climbing Mount Everest more than once, it was a public meeting of people who have lied about running five KS in like an impossible amount of time. The stories I have are pretty wild. And so if you think that you’re a person that doesn’t show up for people or you doubt any of that, listen to any of the stories I just said and ask yourself if you’ve done any of those things, because it’s crazy.

But it’s more often than not what we’re faced with. Finding good people, reliable people, is a lot harder than we think. And when we find them, like, shout out to all of my mentees. And for showing up every week or every other week, whenever we schedule these things, for showing up and being ready and being just open, for bearing with me in the moments where things aren’t going well because of what’s happened in the past few years. Reliability, huge factor, skills you can learn. You don’t have to go to school. Like you just got to show up. I started dancing six years ago. I couldn’t really dance. I didn’t have this goal to get good at dance. I just kept going. I went and then 1 hour became two became three and four became 20. And then all of a sudden now I’m on teams with people who are on professional dance teams and they’re looking at me like, yeah, you belong here. And so showing up even when the goal isn’t, I’m going to get good, just show up and it’s okay if it’s not like you’re having the best day, just show up.

They’re very true, very telling. I love the message there. And Jenny, I want to pitch that question back to you about the part about not just showing up for others. Please do. It makes a world of difference but showing up for yourself is sometimes really hard. And obviously through your books, through Knowing you, I think we know that you’ve lived through a fair amount of challenges in life and you’re raising two young kids by yourself. And could you maybe talk to us about that, about showing up for yourself or your work as opposed to showing up for everybody else, which is a tendency, unfortunately, a lot of women are focusing on always putting themselves last.

Yeah, that’s a good question. I think in terms of my work, I think I just feel so passionate that being a widowed parent is hard. And if I can share my experience and if I can through the podcast, I interview people who can help with information, ideas, inspiration, and I just, you know, I really felt strongly like there’s a gap here and I can do something about this, and so I should. And so it’s that kind of motivation, I guess, that keeps me going. It’s hard, right, though, like, there been the podcast been going for three years now, so there’s been so many times I’m like, why am I doing this anyway? Really? Is anybody listening? Is anybody getting anything out of it? Right? And what I’ve done actually, I don’t know if I have it here. I printed out some like I copy pasted because I hear from listeners, whether it’s a review on itunes or whether they email me directly or a comment on Instagram. And the best ones, the people that have said, wow, your podcast has really made a difference, or your book, I read it and I learned X, and here’s why it’s made a difference to me.

I’ve collected a few of those and put them in a Word document and printed it, and then I laminated it and I put it next to my desk. I think it moved here because I rearranged a few things. And when I would say, why am I doing this podcast anyway? I’d pull it out and read the comments and be like, okay, yeah, that’s why I’m doing it, right? And they’ll keep going, so that’s important. And I think as far as, like, showing up for yourself, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is get more sleep, actually, early in the pandemic. I started doing this before we had vaccines, before we had it was early on and everything felt super risky all the time, going to the grocery store, right? And I was like, you know what, there’s not a lot I can do, but I can make sure that I get some extra sleep because it’s going to keep getting sick. Not necessarily, but it might make a difference at some point. Like, my body is stronger and more rested instead of weaker and tireder. It can’t be bad, right? And it might end up helping me.

And so I made a deliberate choice to try to start catching up on some sleep deficits and I think that’s been really helpful.

I love sleep, truly. I am a grown woman, yet I still, I mean, for me, 8 hours of sleep makes a huge difference. And I can feel that in my body, my psyche. I mean, it just frankly, exactly like you said. I mean, I know some people are unable to I have friends who have really severe insomnia, so I know it’s not a given, but I realize that I’m lucky enough to be able to sleep. I want to just find ways for myself to rest more and to really sleep in. And it makes a huge difference in concentration. It doesn’t matter what kind of makeup you put on, if you’re exhausted, you’re utterly just burnt out. Yeah, it doesn’t work.

Yeah, everything is easier if you’re not sleep deprived. Even like the last couple of days here. I got a tennis shot a couple of days ago because it was time for another tetanus shot. And what I remembered about a tetanus shot was your arm obsore. So I was prepared for that. But I didn’t realize I had to Google the side effects because I actually felt just kind of crappy, like just kind of achy and kind of tired. And I was like, jeez, am I getting sick? Oh, no. Right. But then I Googled, I was like, maybe it was a tennis shot. And sure enough, it was. But point being, if you’re just feeling kind of lousy, I didn’t do my live streams the last couple of days because I just didn’t feel I mean, did I feel horrible? No, but it was like the energy was reduced for not getting enough sleep or in this case, tennis shot side effects. Right. It’s just harder to, like you said, to create content if you’re tired.

Very true, very true. I want to definitely I know that we have about five to 10 minutes left, and I want to talk about burnout real quick. That is a very popular topic and seems to be getting more popular. Just already touched upon that briefly. But Johnny, before we forget, could you say a few things about your Twelve Days of Christmas and where people can watch that or the remaining episodes you have lined up?

Yes. Today, tonight I’m going to do day twelve. Excuse me. I’m sorry. Ten. It’s supposed to be day twelve today. If I had done the last two days when I wasn’t feeling well and skipped it. So I’ve got tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, and what I’ve been doing. I made a parody, Words to the Twelve Days of Christmas Song, which are gift ideas, specifically gift ideas for grieving people in your life. But many of the gift ideas would apply to other people, to anybody. And so each day I’m building on it. Right. Adding one. So the first day, on the first day of Christmas, my good friend sent to me a signed copy of Future widow, right. And then the second day of Christmas, etc, etc. And so I’ve added things. And so, yeah, all my social channels at Liskjenny Liskjenny, live streaming each night with updates on that. So tonight? Today.

What time?

Oh, whenever I feel like it. There’s no set time for live streaming? No, there’s no set time. I’m just going with the flow, you know, I guess when you just got to roll things, it depends on what time other things happen. It’s in the evening, but also even these live streams, the video gets saved to my feet anyway. Facebook and YouTube. And Twitter. My personal page or my personal profile and my page? Both. I’ve been having trouble and maybe you have a solution to this, getting on the Instagram. I know you can’t connect this. Well, maybe there’s some workaround, but I haven’t been able to connect it to the Instagram. But I used to be able to save the video and then upload it to IGTV as just not live anymore, but still. And then the first 30 seconds or whatever goes on the feed, but I think they changed something because I haven’t been able to do that.

IGTV is just probably no more, but I feel like it’s somehow sort of in the past and whereas the IG or Instagram reels are getting more popular, that is, more along the line of the one to three minute mark or under 1 minute being the most popular, like YouTube shorts and TikTok. So somehow the longer IGTV like when I uploaded my full length videos, 810 minutes, nobody’s watching that on Instagram, so they want you to scroll through more. But to answer your question, my most rudimentary way of going live on all I love Restream, which is what we’re using right now. So I’m going live on Facebook groups pages. One missing destination is instagram. And during my 30 day live, I actually know there’s a lot of people tuning in Instagram. So all I do is I literally find this Magnus thing on top of my computer. I just literally snap it right there and I go live. And that works for a single person because through this microphone here and I’m literally just using the native mic here that works. The reason why we’re not the three of us are not on Instagram. That requires all of us to be wearing a headset.

We’re wearing the speaker because then it will create this echo chamber.

So you’re basically just setting up your phone next to your computer and you’re kind of like manually going live in both places at the same time. Yeah, I can do that. I’ve got a tripod here. I could set it up next to.

Totally next to the so I think that’s the easiest way. Have I done it before with Restream and a combination of Restream, yellow duck, and OBS? Yes. So I did that a little while back, last year for the dance complex. So we went live like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitch and their Instagram with yellow duck. I don’t know if that’s still working. It might be deprecated, who knows? Things change.

Yellow duck.

OBS. OBS.

I was using OBS to connect to Restream. So I wasn’t using like the Restream studio. I was using OBS studio and then using that in combination with Restream to multicast everywhere that we needed to be at.

How are you getting it too? Because Restream doesn’t go to Instagram, does it?

Not with yellow duck. It is a possibility. A yellow duck, okay, it’s a third party. But like I said, might be deprecated, might be Mac. Only have no idea. Just know that at the time it works.

Because I was doing a bunch of live streaming, like this time last year for Children’s Grief Awareness Month, and I was doing it on all the other platforms. But then saving the video and uploading the video to Instagram, it seemed fine. People were watching it right on the profile. You got the first 30 seconds and even if they didn’t watch all of it, they saw part of it. But I tried on the desktop, I tried to upload the video to Instagram last week and it actually said Success posted. But then I’m going to Instagram and I’m looking all over for it and I can’t find it. It’s not on my profile, is not under my videos. It’s not like that. So I can’t figure out if it actually got posted and it’s hiding somewhere or it’s kind of crazy.

Yeah, I think. But to face point, it is true that Instagram Tik Tok is the hot new chip on the block and everyone wants to dress like her or them. That’s kind of the biggest thing right now. YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, which go on to Facebook, those are being pushed out right now, as the rumors have it, by the algorithm gods. So I definitely think that you can still do that. But Live wasn’t even Live on TikTok, wasn’t pushed as much. Now the algorithm changed in late November for TikTok. So the Live wasn’t as popular now as it was before Instagram on TikTok, but Instagram as well. I feel like Instagram follows suit because everybody really is on that TikTok trend. If we look at the adoption like hyperbole or some graph of TikTok, TikTok is in that perfect stride of like, hey, it’s still a little bit not as mainstream, but it’s really getting there soon and then something else will come along and replace it. I do want to circle back to phase thing about Burnout because I will tell you, I’m the queen of Burnout. Not proudly, but the first time I probably burned out was when I was 16.

I went to a college prep school. I got pneumonia. I was having hallucinations because I had a fever of 105. I had to be wheeled to the airplane. I was leaving somewhere because the doctors didn’t know that. They just said I had a cold, and that was wrong. I was in Vegas tripping with my 105 degree headache, fever, and yeah, they had to wheel me to the airplane because they couldn’t walk. But shortly before that trip, school meant everything to me. It was the deciding factor of whether or not I’d be successful, which is this, like, myth that you believe a lot in elementary school and high school when you’re put into a private school where everyone thinks and is probably and has been gone to Harvard, is going to Harvard, Ivy Leagues, all of that stuff. They got the extracurriculars. They’ve done like a bajillion hours of community service. They’re like top of their class XYZ. And that’s when it hit me. I had been staying up over and over again, night after night after night, just sacrificing sleep, sacrificing health, and, you know, I really paid for it and it sucked. And did that make me learn my lesson?

Absolutely not. I have burned out a million times before, and I’m probably still, like, in the throes of doing that again, especially working in the startup kind of world. So in order to avoid burnout, it requires a lot of just self awareness because burnout happens and starts to happen way before I think you even really start to feel it. And way before I think you really start to understand it. I’ve been watching a lot of TikToks about burnout and what kind of some of the symptoms are. Yeah, ticktocks. Just like my therapy at this point.

But I’m a burnout on TikTok.

I know. Oh, no. I never heard I don’t know. So that’s a whole other thing. You’re being a disassociative. It’s a dissociative experience and like a distraction that is kind of included in burnout pattern that you see. So a lot of it, I think, comes down to, like I said, just knowing yourself and really setting boundaries. A lot of people who have first started their corporate jobs, like, never be more loyal to a company than it is to you. It is not your end all, be all. I learned that the hard way. I was at a place where people said, your family, and that didn’t work out for me very well. It’s setting your boundaries and knowing that there will always be work to do. But what do you want out of this life? Where do you want to go? What’s most important to you? Find those core and key values and really stick to them. It’s not your responsibility to make other people feel comfortable at the sake and sacrifice of your mental health. I say this not because I’m good at it. I say this because I aspire to live it.

Yeah, I mean, Jenny, if you don’t mind, I just want to add that I was born into a family, like, who gave me everything I needed. Then my life took a turn 180 when I went to live with my grandparents and I became a complete people pleaser. It was something that I had to do, was the protection I needed. So a lot of my adult life still today, I try to kind of reverse that. And what you said last about it’s not my job to make other people comfortable, make them do what they need to do. There need to be boundaries. But I’ll also say that during the pandemic, what I’ve learned the past year was I decided that life is going really well. This is the best I’ve ever felt about my life. And I decided to sign up for therapy anyway. And I even said to my therapist, I don’t know what to talk to you about. I feel like life is pretty good right now. He’s like, and then I figure, you know, what? Do we brush our teeth when our teeth are ready to fall out? Like, simply do we sleep?

Because it’s something that we’ve done already yesterday. This is all part of maintenance. So whether it’s therapy, meditation, I love meditating late at night before I go to sleep. I love using insight timer and finding that routine for yourself. Like Jess said, it’s very important. Don’t wait until you have 105 degree fever. Kind of make it into your everyday. And if there are certain days that you’re like, I did all this, I still don’t feel my very best. That’s okay. Just breathe deeply. Knowing that this is your natural body chemistry, some days you’re going to feel shitty. So that’s my learnings. What about you, Jenny? How do you draw your boundaries and keep your wellness in check?

Oh, I don’t know.

The life change is going to I.

Know I probably need I need to get more sleep tonight so I can answer this question better sometimes.

Yeah, I like that. I think it is really important. We just have to all find a way, just like how we find help to run our business, to find a way to keep that in check. But I want to thank everybody for joining me today and for watching. Wherever you are, I will monitor comments even after the show. So ask me any questions about this particular episode of this live stream or any of the previous ones. If you have any questions about finding virtual assistants, I figure out a system. Happy to share with you, happy to refer you to people I trust and adore. So with that said, thank you ladies for joining me today and I really hope to do this again in January. That’s super fun. So with that said, I’m going to take us offline, but please, you guys, don’t go anywhere. Bye.

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