Episode 32: What To Do When You Feel Discouraged

Episode 32: What To Do When You Feel Discouraged

It’s normal to feel discouraged when things aren’t turning out the way you’d planned but that doesn’t mean it’s fun! But the thing is – if you quit and give up, you’re only creating more discouragement. Which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. So learning how to manage your mind is SO important.

In this episode I’m sharing:

– What creates the feeling of discouragement and how to get yourself out of that emotion

– Why it’s normal to feel discouraged when you start something new and how to manage your expectations without losing hope or aiming too low

– How setting effort-based goals, rather than results-based goals, can help you persist through the initial stages of something new

– Why gratitude is so powerful and simple ways to practice it

– And more!

If you’ve been feeling discouraged when it comes to growing your blog, make sure you find out more and sign up for my Grow Your Blog Workshop by clicking here.  Registration will close strictly at midnight (EDT) on Friday, 29 June 2018 and I’ll be teaching you everything you need to do to set your blog up for success (as well as how to deal with fear of judgement and perfectionism).

MENTIONED:

Episode 16: What To Expect When You Start A Creative Project

Episode 24: How I Use Affirmations + My Affirmation Routine

LISTEN TO THE EPISODE


Listen to the episode on the player above or anywhere you normally listen to podcasts – just find Episode 32 of The Smart Twenties Podcast!

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Today I'm going to be answering a question I get asked all the time and that's what to do when you feel disheartened and discouraged.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hi, and welcome to Episode 32 of the Smart Twenties’ podcast. My name is Sam Brown, and this is a podcast where I share personal growth, and life advice for women in their 20s. And today I’m going to be answering a question I get asked all the time and that’s what to do when you feel disheartened and discouraged. And I recently got this question regarding blogging, what to do when no one’s reading your blog and no one’s subscribing to your email list, no one’s liking your post, no one’s following you. But it also applies to, I think, just about anything new, particularly if you’re studying a new habit say you’re starting to eat more healthy or you’re starting to work out, there’s often that disparity between the expectations you had about what it would be like to start and the reality of starting, which is often that you don’t get immediate results.

And I just want to chat to a few things that I do and that I recommend you give a try if you’re feeling disheartened or discouraged, or if you anticipate that you might- maybe you’re starting something new and you’re worried that you’ll feel disheartened, these are things that can help you.

And I also just want to mention as well that the way that we often try to deal with the feeling of being disheartened or discouraged is to quit, and that’s actually- creates those feelings, if that makes sense. So if you are trying to avoid feeling discouraged, which is essentially like feeling disappointed in yourself, and I think there’s a flavor of… I think it’s really similar to self-doubt, feeling disheartened and discouraged. But often what we do, it’s really funny, is we actually give up to try and avoid that feeling to try and escape it, but by giving up, we create the feelings of disappointment and feeling discouraged because we’ve given up…

So, I just want to mention right at the top here that you are probably- if you’re just disheartened or discouraged about something, you’re probably contemplating giving up, quitting, abandoning it, but that will only create even more of what you’re already experiencing and you’ll only get very temporary relief from it. So I think that if you’re feeling disheartened or discouraged or that it’s about a blog and you have it, whatever it is, it really does pay to persist through it, especially since by trying to escape it you just create more of it and you don’t really end up avoiding it, you just get a different flavor of feeling that discouragement.

So the first thing I really wanted to mention, is that feeling disheartened doesn’t actually come from your circumstances, it doesn’t come from the fact that you haven’t gotten any results yet that you can’t see the payoff for your effort. It comes from a thought. And that’s why some people in a situation that you might get discouraged, don’t feel that way, it’s because they have a different thought about the situation.

So the feeling of being discouraged or disheartened, I think comes from thoughts like, ‘This isn’t going to work… I’m not good enough… it’s never going to happen for me… no one’s liking this… no one likes me,’ whatever it is for you. I think that it is very important to remember that you don’t actually need to change your circumstances in order not to feel disheartened, and what you need to change is the thoughts that you’re having, and of course, if your circumstances change, it’s easy to change that thought, but if people suddenly start following your blog, then it can be easy to change the thought that, ‘Oh, well, this actually could work…’

But it’s not necessarily the case either that if your circumstances change, you’re going to stop feeling disheartened. Because I know that every now and again, I still feel disheartened and discouraged and in relation to a lot of things, in relation to my blog and my business as well as in relation to different habits, all sorts of things and it really is that I’ve had an expectation and I haven’t met that expectation.

So it’s not necessarily that you’ll become successful or you’ll get the results you want and that feeling will just go away if you don’t do the personal development work and the mental work to change the way you think about things, then you might just keep having the same thoughts even if your situation changes.

So I just wanted to pinch in that as well because I think it is really important to acknowledge that feeling discouraged isn’t actually caused by a lack of results or anything like that. It’s just caused by the way that you’re thinking about a situation, and of course it’s really challenging to catch all of your thoughts, but you can do a lot to catch- not to catch your thoughts but to direct your mind to have more of the thoughts that you want. I spoke about this more in the episode that I did on how to use affirmations because that’s something that I really use to create new beliefs, but I think that knowing that it’s not coming from your circumstances can be really helpful, especially if you’re really struggling to change the circumstances to change the results.

So, it’s always important to remember that it’s your thoughts that are causing that feeling and that all you have to do is change the way you’re thinking about things. And I’m going to be giving you some different ways to change the way you’re thinking in this episode. But I think that often we are trying to look for that quick fix and when we feel discouraged, we want to get quick results in order to feel better. But that- if you still have the same thinking, then that isn’t actually going to work. So, I love actually doing the harder work and it is a lot more challenging, but I think that when everyone’s talking about how to feel motivated and all the stuff and just giving superficial ways to do it, then we always just end up back in the same situation.

But if you can change the way that you’re thinking about things, then you can actually change it in a really more permanent ongoing way. And I was actually thinking about this the other day in relation to money and that a lot of people think when I have more money and I’ve been having this thought, I’ve had this thought when I have more money, then I won’t be worried about money. And it’s actually really interesting because if you look at a lot of people who have money, a lot of them are even more worried about money. And if you have this lack mentality, then if you get it, if you get what you want, then you immediately become scared of losing it.

So if you have a scarcity mentality around money, that there’s not enough money, that you’re going to lose all your money- getting more money doesn’t actually fix that. And people who have that mentality and get money don’t go into an abundance mindset often from that instead they have a scarcity mentality in a different way, which is they’re scared of losing it.

So, originally they were scared of not having it and then they become scared of losing it. And this can be the same as well with any new thing, like you might be scared that you can’t stick to a habit, you’re scared that you might not be able to start a successful blog and then if you don’t change the way you’re thinking, you’ll get that success and then you’ll be scared of losing it and it doesn’t feel good to be scared of losing something.

So it is really important to do the work and to not just look for quick fixes. And hopefully some of the things I talk about in this episode are going to help you. But yeah, I just really wanted to share that because it’s so important to acknowledge that those feelings aren’t coming from your situation, they’re coming from your thoughts. So it’s the thoughts that need to change because if your situation changes, they might not necessarily influence your thoughts.

The second thing I want to talk about is reviewing your expectations. So when you’re really excited about something new, it’s really easy to convince yourself that everyone else is going to be equally as excited as you. I know that I have this, everything I create, basically, I’m like, ‘Oh this is going to be so good!’ And then some things are just really like- I don’t get the reception that I thought it would and it’s really easy in those moments to have those thoughts that create the feeling of being discouraged which is- I’m not good enough, this isn’t going to work out and then extrapolating that out into all sorts of different scenarios which we’re often very good at doing. We have one little thing that happens and then we extrapolate it out to be like, well then if it hasn’t happened now it’s never going to happen. And I think that really having the expectations around what the beginning will be like is really important.

And I did a whole episode on this as well a while ago about the first six months of a new creative project. So if you are doing something creative, it might help to go back and listen to that one. But I think that having this expectation of immediate results is something that… from marketing, we’d really get sold that results can happen very quickly and we really create this expectation around needing quick results, and especially if we’re going for something out of this place of self-doubt and insecurity, we want immediate results, so that we can feel better about ourselves and so that we can ease that doubt, but often, immediate results don’t happen.

And if they do, then often- like if it’s blogging and you get all of this immediate attention and sometimes it’s not even a good thing because you don’t yet know how to even handle it. But I think that it’s so important to just have a look if you’re feeling disheartened or discouraged to really have a look at the expectations that you have whether they are, I don’t want to say realistic, but whether that is actually useful to have those expectations.

And what I like to do sometimes is give myself a period of time that I’m going to try something without judging whether or not it’s worth pursuing. And I do this in circumstances where I think it might be really easy to get discouraged.

I think the most notable time I did this was when I was doing Bikram yoga this is maybe five years ago now. I was wanting to get into Bikram yoga, I had tried a couple of times to get into the habit and had just given up both times after the first week, and I thought I really have to approach this in a different way.

So what I did was, I said, pretty sure it was three months, which is quite a long period of time, but I said I’m going to do this to myself. I’m such a believer in keeping yourself accountable. Some people might suggest doing this with an accountability buddy, but I’ve just found accountability buddies don’t work unless they are someone who is also very self-motivated.

But I just have personally found that whenever I’ve had an accountability buddy, I often end up keeping them accountable and it’s harder to keep myself accountable because they offer me so many excuses like, ‘Oh you know we went yesterday’ and all that sort of thing.

I am all for paid accountability. I think paid accountability is very powerful, especially if it’s just one-way accountability. Anyway, that’s just side note. But what I did was, I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do this six times per week for three months’ and it wasn’t like I had heaps of time up my sleeve, I was studying full-time, and I was working definitely at least part time, but I tried to get into the habit by doing it three times per week, and I just found out when I was aiming for three times per week, and on Monday ‘Oh it’s only Monday. I’ve got six more days. I could do this…’ and then I kind of end up just leaving the three times to the weekend and when it was the weekend and it just wouldn’t happen.

So counterintuitively, I said, ‘Okay I need to aim for almost every day.’ So, the question changed from “will I go today” to “what time am I going to go today” which is so powerful and I said to myself, ‘I am going to do this for three months without judging whether I like Bikram yoga, without judging whether Bikram yoga is working. I’m just going to commit to showing up.’

My goal is just to show up for three months. I’m not going to be judging my flexibility, I’m not going to be judging whether or not I’m improving, I’m just going to show up for three months, six days per week, and after that three-month period, I will judge whether or not I want to keep going.

And I just found that so powerful. And of course, after three months of doing it six times a week, you can’t help but improve. So I got to the three months, I was so into it and I kept continuing on with that after then, but I just found it so incredibly powerful to separate out the process and the turning up from the judgment. Because when I was trying to judge whether or not it was working, it was so easy to get disheartened because especially something like Bikram yoga, you don’t get results quickly. And for me, the result from Bikram yoga was really the same feeling as when you’re meditating.

And I didn’t get that until a month in, like a month of practicing Bikram yoga because for me, at least it took that much time to really get familiar with it enough that I could kind of change the way I was thinking in class, but anyway, I think it is a great thing to try to just give yourself a certain amount of time that you’re going to try to do something and that you’re not going to judge it.

So whether maybe you’re into eating healthy, maybe you’re wanting to start a YouTube channel, maybe you’re wanting to, I don’t know, start running- whatever it is, it’s so powerful. It doesn’t have to be three months though three months is a great amount of time because you’re basically guaranteed to at least get some kind of pay off in three months, whereas if you do a month, then it’s less likely, especially for some sort of things, though most things probably I would say by a month, you can kind of get some kind of feel for it, but if it’s a creative thing, I would say at least three months, but giving yourself that time to just show up and commit to it without judging whether it’s working, is so amazing.

Just to continue on with the, yoga- even though I haven’t done Bikram now for think about two years, I just got completely Bikrammed out though I did really love it.

So one of the teachers in that was saying that- and it’s not something that she- not a saying that she created, but she was saying if you planted something, you wouldn’t constantly dig up the seed to see if it was growing. You just need to plant the seed and for a certain period of time, you just need to trust, you just need to have faith that it’s going to grow and you can’t constantly be judging or asking, ‘Are you growing yet? Are you going yet? Are you going yet?’ You just have to trust that it will grow if you water it, if you nourish it. That just has really stuck with me this idea that once you plant something, which is once you start something, you can’t constantly – it’s not helpful to constantly judge whether or not something is working immediately, and you do have to really have that trust and that faith that what you are doing, the effort that you are putting in will add up to something.

And the next thing I want to talk about, definitely relates to this, which is enjoying the process and focusing on effort rather than result. And this has been a huge game changer for me, this idea of focusing on effort rather than result, which is exactly what I just talked about actually with the yoga, I was focusing on the effort that I was going to put in, which was three months of six times per week, and I wasn’t focused on by three months- I need to be able to have my foot on my forehead, or something weird like that like it was this commitment to showing up and what you can do as well is reverse engineer, whatever result it is. So I’m not saying completely disregard the results you want to get, but if you can get your goal and then reverse engineer and think about- okay, well, if this is a goal, what’s the action that’s going to make that outcome inevitable?

And then when you have that action instead of constantly asking yourself whether you’re at the result yet, you just commit to focusing on the effort and focusing on the actions, say you wanted to lose weight- a certain number of kilos so that’s your result. And then you think about what would make that inevitable and you figure out whatever it is you need to be eating every day, and then instead of constantly examining whether or not you’ve lost enough weight and whether or not that goal is going to be achieved, you focus on showing up every day by eating what you need to eat to get your result.

And I’ve just found- because I’ve been in the fixed mindset for a lot of things and I have spoken about this before Carol Dweck’s Fixed Mindset and Growth Mindset and a lot of you were saying, we’re probably be in like me and in the middle I think, ‘I must be in the Growth Mindset because I loved personal development– that’s not what it’s about, but I’ve been very much in the fixed mindset for a lot of things, and I feel that I’m definitely moving out of it.

But the fixed mindset is this idea that essentially whether or not you’re good enough, smart enough, talented enough, all of that was decided at birth that self can be changed and everything you do is just a reflection of whether or not you’re good enough- it’s this kind of mindset that has us withholding action, it has us only doing things that we’re going to be good at, so you can never get any evidence that we’re not good enough, whereas if you’re in the growth mindset, you believe that all of those things- intelligence, talents, skill all of that can be developed. So when you fail, if you’re in that mindset, you don’t actually make it mean anything about yourself because you don’t believe that it means anything about you as a person, and it’s all just a skill to be learned.

So when I was in the fixed mindset, a lot of that is really focused on results because you’re constantly like… Am I going to be good enough? Because you don’t want any evidence that you’re not. So getting into this focus on effort, Doctor Dweck talked about how focusing on effort is a really great way to get into the growth mindset because you begin to view things as skills that can be developed, which is really important as well. Like say, you’re starting a blog, you might be tempted to think, I’m good at blogging, I’m not good at blogging, I’m good at writing, I’m not good at writing and all of that sort of thing, but if you can think, blogging is a skill that can be developed, writing is a skill that can be developed– the same thing with healthy eating. If you’re like, I’m good at eating healthy, I’m not good at eating healthy– it’s just a skill, eating certain kinds of food is just a skill, and you can develop that skill. But if you are constantly trying to… I don’t know- you can’t actually see what I’m doing, so I don’t need to actually do these hand movements, but what I’m trying to say is that if you’re in the fixed mindset, then you will have this habit of withholding effort, which is what I talked about before, when we feel disheartened often we just withhold effort by quitting and create that feeling anyway.

So it is so powerful to focus on effort rather than results. So, how often you’re going to show up and what are you going to do and to enjoy the process. And I can’t emphasize enjoying the process enough, it’s something that I’ve definitely been working on with my blog and my business and just my life in general, because it’s so easy to think when I’m successful, then I’ll feel happy. I’ll feel whatever it is you want to feel, and it’s just so powerful to realize that you can create those feelings for yourself now and by enjoying the process, it’s kind of what I was talking about with money before.

If you were always believing that happiness is on the other side of achievement, when that is coupled with a tendency to constantly move the goal post farther away, you never get that satisfaction because as soon as you achieve that goal, most of the time, we barely even acknowledge it and we’ve already, before we’ve achieved that goal, once we can see I’m going to achieve it, we set our sights on the next thing. And so it’s really that constant dissatisfaction. But if you can enjoy the process, enjoy developing this skill and I find that really happens when I’ve removed the judgment as I was talking about with the yoga and I’ve done it with working out and other kinds of things. When I removed the judgment of- is this worth it? Is this working? I get so much better results because it’s so much easier to be consistent when I’m not constantly judging them.

So instead of making goals around results, do your best to make goals around effort around commitment. And if you’re in a similar mindset to me or you have been in that fixed mindset which a lot of people are, I think that the fixed mindsets are definitely more common than the growth mindset. Then do your best to set yourself goals around effort and I’m not saying, again, I’m not saying disregard results, but if you can get that result that you want, think about the effort you need to put in to make that result inevitable, and then turn your focus away from that result and focus on the effort. It can do so much with helping you with discouragement and feeling disheartened.

And the next thing I want to talk about is that feeling discouraged, which as I say before, I think, is very similar slash the same as self-doubt, that is a normal part of the process. It’s a normal part of changing your behavior. Whenever we try to change our behavior, our brain is like, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, we had a certain way of doing things, it was working well. Why are you doing something different?’

And at least in my experience, whenever I try to change anything- my brain can get really good, really convincing at keeping me in that old behavior, and I think that discouragement, self-doubt, whatever you want to call it, is a normal part of the process. If you are trying to change something. I always get it. And now whenever I’m starting something new, I just expect it and it makes it so much easier to get through it like if I’m trying to get, say at the moment actually, I have a couple of weeks off the gym and I’m just getting back into it at the moment. And this is a bit different because it is a very well-established habit for me, and it is quite easy to slip back into, but even so, I find my brain’s just like, ‘Oh you don’t need to do that today. Why don’t you just skip today? You can do it tomorrow why’d it make a difference’  I find actually that this is the biggest, cheekiest excuse that I can make with myself. And you guys can probably relate, will make a difference if you skip today. That one just really can be so convincing because it’s like… Yeah, it won’t make a difference if I just skipped today, especially, if it’s healthy eating or exercise, it’s easy to think one day doesn’t make a difference.

But lately, I’ve just been thinking of things like that, not in terms of the result, which I’m necessarily working towards, but also in terms of self-mastery. And if you’re a personal development nerd like me, the idea of self-mastery, might be appealing enough as well to help you- if you’re not into it, then I don’t know, you don’t need to try it, but I found that when I’ve been working towards things lately and that excuse comes up, which it often does, Oh it don’t matter if you didn’t get that done today, we’ll just do it tomorrow and then you use that excuse every day.

I have been saying to myself that, that’s not my focus and instead my focus is on self-mastery, and if I am then I can kind of judge whether or not I am doing. I don’t know if this is making sense, actually as I’m saying it, it’s still something I’m playing around with.  But I have been thinking of it in terms of… I want to master myself in a sense it- I want to be in control. I don’t want to act against my own will.

And that is a feeling that you might have a lot if you have the excuse- it won’t make a difference if you do it today and you listened to it. I think the thing of excuses is that they don’t actually ever go away. You just have to learn not to listen to them. And I think that, I know I used to, I just used to wait until my excuses were gone.

But I find that my excuses- my brain’s creative capacity to come up with reasons to stay comfortable, just are always there. I think it’s just part of being human. Your brain just wants to do what it’s already good at and will convince you to just keep doing what you’re doing, even if it’s not actually helping you. It just wants to be efficient, which is using the least amount of energy possible, which is doing the things that’s already good at doing.

So just a side note, if you’ve been waiting for your excuses to go- I don’t know that they ever will. And I’m definitely in the habit of waking up early. It’s a habit I’ve been in for maybe definitely at least five years, but every morning, every single morning, I hear in my head, ‘Just five more minutes it won’t matter if you wake up an hour later, it won’t matter if you wake up two hours later, you were too tired to wake up this morning’ and all these excuses and they just never go away. I’ve just learned to not react to them. So I think it’s very helpful not to react to your excuses.

Definitely takes practice, but it is a skill that can be learned. But I just wanted to mention that in case you think, ‘Maybe I don’t have any excuses and it’s super easy” I think as well, the initial excitement of something new of healthy eating, exercise, whatever, especially when it hasn’t been long enough that you can get a lack of results yet, if that makes sense. So say for example, I use healthy eating as the example. If you’ve started healthy eating, eating healthy and you have been doing it for two days, you’re probably not yet expecting to really see a difference and whatever your beliefs around that, you’ll have a different number of days, but say you believe that by five days, you should see a difference, if you got to five days and you haven’t seen a difference, then that’s when you start feeling discouraged. Not because of your circumstances because you’re now having the thought, ‘This is not worth it, this isn’t going to work, I’m never going to be able to do it’ just having that self-doubt. And I just think that if you can really review your expectations like I was talking about before and just make sure that you’re not expecting really quick results.

And I’m not sure exactly where I was going at this point, now that I’m halfway into it, but what I’m trying to say is to remember that it’s normal to feel that discouragement, self-doubt when you start something, your brain is going to be trying to trick you back into your old habits, and you just need to persist with it long enough that your brain’s like, ‘Okay, I’ve been doing this now for a little while, so I’m just going to get good at doing this new thing.’ And so the new thing becomes easy than the old thing.

But yeah, I think that instead of trying to escape discouragement by quitting, it’s so powerful to allow it to be there, and to just keep operating with it there and to do all these other things as well. But if it comes up, to not make it mean anything, if you make discouragement mean that- maybe it wouldn’t work, that’s when it’s so easy to quit, but if you make discouragement mean, this is me growing, this is me on the path to something new, then it is that much easier to keep going, and it’s just totally normal to have that at least in my experience, to have that doubt and discomfort after you start something new… And that’s what I was going to say.

Oh, I figured out what I was talking about before- say when you’re eating healthy, if you have a lot of excitement around that, you’re very optimistic then that can sort of- not overcome the excuses but the excuses will die away because you’ll be so motivated, and if you’re in that initial period where you’re very optimistic and this is what I was talking about, the number of days, you might have your expectation for to get results, say you think after five days, you should see a result. So for the first four days, you’re very optimistic and you don’t have any evidence to the contrary that it’s not going to work, but if you have in your belief system that after five days you should be seeing some difference or it’s not working- and I’ve just pulled that number totally out of the air, then on day five, if you’re not seeing a difference, then the optimism starts to die down, the excuses come in and like, ‘Oh it’s not worth it, anyway!’ but the time is going to pass anyway, which is that lovely Earl Nightingale quote. And I just think it’s fascinating that we give up on things to avoid discouragement and then we feel even more discouraged because we’ve given up… So please do not give up.

And the fifth thing, I wanted to talk about is just gratitude and I’ve spoken about this quite a bit in different places, but gratitude really takes you out of focusing on what you don’t have and focusing on what you do.

And I’ve spoken about it before that Steve and I, every night before bed, we say three good things about the day. And one thing we’re grateful for, and I really believe that habit has changed my life in so many ways. I am always like my brain is now just trained after we’ve been doing it for four years now. My brain is trained to look for the good in things because I know that I’m going to be reporting back to Steve.

It also requires me right before bed, which is such a great time to do it, to really reflect on my day, through a lens of positivity, through a lens of- look at all the amazing things that I have, and I just find myself feeling grateful throughout the day, just because I’ve trained my brain that way doesn’t mean I never have any negative emotion of course I do, but it really makes a difference to focus on what you have rather than what you don’t have. It can be, really little things that make a difference.

Like last night, the thing I said I was grateful for was for our health and having clean water and a warm bed. And I also, when I was at work last night, I work at a hospital, and the tea people give the patients coffee and tea were coming around and I was like, isn’t it amazing that we’ve lived in a country where it’s a public hospital, so it’s all free, and they just get tea and coffee like it’s a cafe- I don’t know, I was just like, It’s just really… I’m just grateful for it. So I think that having gratitude is something that you can turn to when you’re feeling discouraged and disheartened can change everything if you will allow it.

It’s very easy to be negative about things, especially when you’re feeling discouraged, you will be tending to look at things through that lens and looking for more evidence of why you should be discouraged. But if you can focus on the things you’re grateful for, and one of those things can be that you’re learning how to master yourself, one of those things can be that… you’re enjoying the process, you don’t have to have that validation, you don’t have to be grateful for the things other people are doing for you, you don’t need to be like grateful that people are reading your blog and all of that. I always find it more powerful to be grateful for myself and to be grateful for just the things that I have in life, and yes I love- it’s great to feel grateful for other people too. But if you’re not in a place where you can feel that or where you’re going to allow yourself to feel that, it’s really powerful to just start thinking small like that you’re grateful that you have the capacity to listen to a podcast episode, which a lot of people in the world don’t.

Those are different things to think about if you’ve been feeling disheartened and discouraged. And I really wanted to talk about this because I got that question from one of you guys about what to do when you’re feeling disheartened, when you had this expectation about the kind of response you’d be getting and you’re not getting it.

I also want to mention, I am doing a Grow Your Blog workshop, so I did this Start Your Blog workshop a couple of weeks ago. Thank you to all of you who were there and who watched the replay since I’m in the bloggers Facebook group. It was so much fun to do it. And I’m still looking forward to the Grow Your Blog workshop. So the Start Your Blog workshop was what it sounds like it was about starting the blog.

This next one is about how to grow your blog. So part of what I will be talking about is more about this… how to deal with this disheartenment and feeling discouraged when you have no page views, or there is no one listening because I have a lot of experience with how to get through that because I was there for about four years.

So I’m going to be talking about that. I’m going to be sharing how to deal with fear of criticism, a fear of judgment, which is something that a lot of you guys have a fear of in which I definitely did as well. Also how to deal with perfectionism, which is really the tendency to withhold effort, to procrastinate, to want things to be perfect, to avoid a feeling- usually of shame that we would put on ourselves if we failed or received any negative judgment or anything like that.

So I’m going to be talking about that as well as a lot more technical stuff, like the strategies that I have used to grow my blog and my blog didn’t actually have any growth really for about the first two years, and I just spent a lot of time trying to figure it all out on my own and trying to just- I don’t know, I was so in my own way. And then eventually I was like, ‘Hey I’m really going to start taking this seriously, I’m going to invest in myself, and I’m going to actually try these things anyway’ I found a lot of things through trial and error as well. And I’m going to adapt them to what works now because things changed in the internet world.

But I’m going to be giving you the strategies and different things that I do that have really made the biggest difference, especially if you haven’t got much time to work on your blog, I’m just going to be showing the things that will have the biggest impact because I know from experience when you’re looking at Pinterest or wherever it is, you’re getting your advice from the number of suggestions for what to do is so overwhelming, it’s so hard to know what is that or what’s going to actually make a difference. And if you don’t have 40 hours, obviously every week to work on blogging, which most people don’t, it can be really hard to get momentum.

So I’m just going to be sharing or teaching in the workshop, the different strategies that I have used to grow my blog. I’m also going to be talking about how to balance blogging with a full-time job or full-time study, and just all the stuff that happens, or I guess the mental anguish that happens in the first few months of blogging, if you haven’t started a blog yet, by the way, definitely still sign up for this one because it’s going to be all the stuff you need to do once you started your blog. If you’ve already said a blog and you’ve abandoned it, which a few of you emailed me and told me that you did, definitely do this workshop.

And if you are thinking, maybe you can figure all this out on your own- it’s only $9. I am teaching- I wish I could have had this stuff for $9 when I was starting. And it’s a live workshop after a few months after I’m going to be re-releasing it and it’s going to be more than $9, so if you want to do it, registration is going to close strictly at midnight Eastern Daylight Savings Time like the U.S.- Eastern Daylight Savings time and on the 29th of June and I would love you to join me for it, it’s going to be so good. I’m really just going to be sharing all of the things in this two-hour workshop. All of the things that have really made the biggest difference to me with growing my blog to where it is today.

I’m just so excited to be doing it. I’m so excited to see all of your new blogs as well that you have been sending me. And I know that there are a lot of you in the Smart Twenties’ bloggers Facebook group that have really started leaning on each other for support and sharing your ideas and giving each other feedback. And I am so happy to see that. So if you have been looking for a community as well, who are doing something similar, it does make a big difference.

So you can sign up by going to smart-twenties.com/workshop, you can also find all the information there about when the live workshop will be, if you’re going to be busy for the live workshop, which is going to be on the first of July, which is a Sunday at 7:00 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time, which if you’re in the US or the UK, it’s going to be some time on Saturday the 30th of June.

If you’re busy, if you’ve already got plans, you get the replay recording, so you’re not going to miss the workshop and you still have access to all the other things, there’s going to be workbook to go with the workshop, and there’s also going to be tutorials on how to set up your email list and all of that sort of thing, all the technical stuff, I always have been putting in lots of extras like I did for the Start Your Blog workshop where I shared where to get blog photos from and how to choose a theme and all these theme suggestions, I’m going to be doing something similar with the Grow Your Blog workshop, so I would love you to join me for it.

It’s going to make a huge difference if you’ve been struggling to grow your blog, if you’ve been feeling disheartened or discouraged. And yeah, I just love to see you there. So smart-twenties.com/workshop is where you can find it and sign up. Make sure you do sign up before the deadline if you’re interested because I got quite a few emails after the last one from people who had missed a deadline asking if I could just re-open it and I said no, because I had said it would be strictly closing, so that’s what I did.

So if you want to sign up, I won’t be reopening it after it’s closed and make sure you go and sign up before midnight Eastern Daylight Savings Time on the 29th of June. And I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode, I hope you found it helpful. You can go and read the transcript for and everything at smart-twenties.com/episode32 and I will talk to you next time, bye!

Author: Sam Brown