Mid-Year Review - What have I done so far and how I'm resetting

“It's really hard to start over when something major happens in your life, believe me, I know! But it's also really difficult to start over and reset when nothing major is really happening. You become so comfortable and complacent that it's easy to just keep plodding along on the same path, and then before you know it, your whole life has passed you by and you didn't make a move.”

Welcome to day one of my reset and review series. This is going to be a big one because I'm going to be covering basically everything that I've done or the progress that I've made in the last six months. So it's July now, so that makes this my mid-year review & reset.

So during the first half of this year I discovered Notion. Honestly, I think Notion is saving my life right now. This tool is helping me so much now that I've kind of figured it out and set up a sort of system for myself.

Over the last couple weekends of June, I set up this whole system to organize all of my ideas and my notes and all the various things that I had written down, which was a lot! I'm still trying to collect things from various places- things that I wrote, ideas, and whole YouTube videos that I had written and didn't actually film, notes from my journals, and just everything.

So I'm trying to put everything into this one place so that I can find it and easily have it all organized and locatable, and I think that it’s just going to really, really help my productivity and reduce friction in my life in general.

I've kind of decided that that's going to be the theme of my next few videos and blog posts because I also have to do some serious decluttering as part of my reset.

It's really hard to start over when something major happens in your life, believe me, I know! But it's also really difficult to start over and reset when nothing major is really happening.
You become so comfortable and complacent that it's easy to just keep plodding along on the same path, and then before you know it, your whole life has passed you by and you didn't make a move.
And I don't want that to happen, so I'm challenging myself in multiple different ways to just keep the promises that I've made to myself and actually achieve the things that I really want to achieve, like writing my blog.

My whole life I wanted to be a writer, and I've always been a creative person, and now, building my website and designing all the parts of it myself has become a creative project that I've really fallen in love with.

Currently, I'm updating the site. I'm actually updating all of my social media and doing a full reset on everything there too. I spent a lot of time considering whether or not to continue my YouTube channel or to start a completely brand new one from scratch because my algorithm is a little messed up. So I'm hoping that by just starting to create more relevant content for my channel, I'll be able to reset that, and we'll go from there and see what happens.

But yeah, I almost scrapped my entire channel because part of the friction I was experiencing was that it wasn't aligning with me now, with all the personal development work that I've done on myself and the progress that I've made, even just in the last year since moving to my new apartment.

Update! I started a Second YouTube channel!

So many things have changed, and even though I've got health issues and things have been an up-and-down roller coaster, I feel like the future is looking brighter than ever. Sometimes it's hard to see beyond the day-to-day, just making it to the next paycheck or just surviving whatever season you're in, and you never get to actually stop and think about the future or actually achieving goals and things that you want to do.

As someone who has struggled with CPTSD, when you're stuck in complex trauma, it's really difficult to look beyond that, to zoom out and see the bigger picture. I feel like I have healed so dramatically over the last three years that even looking back just eight months ago, that's not the same person anymore. So that's why I felt that everything just needed to take a break, refocus, and completely reset.

So among the things that I've been working on, I started freelancing… by accident. Someone I know approached me in early April and asked me to help them start a YouTube channel and make videos. So that's something that I've been doing, and it's been really interesting, and it has helped me improve on my editing and filming skills and various other aspects of YouTube video production. I designed her channel graphics and I manage the back-end of everything, and she's been really happy about it, and her channel is taking off! I'm super proud of her! So I guess I have a client now, so that's new.

I've also been thinking about new digital products that I'm going to create, but I'm not going to talk about that here because something that I keep coming across is the idea that you shouldn’t talk about all of your plans and goals publicly or tell people about everything you're “going to” do. The theory is, that your brain takes that as if you've already done it, and then the motivation kind of disappears (or something like that 😅). But also, then there's pressure!

There's this book that I keep hearing about, and need to get my hands on, called "Show Your Work," and it's basically just about documenting your process and not focusing on trying to be the expert already, but showing how you get there, because everyone was a beginner at some point in time. We all have to start somewhere, right?

What else have I been doing? Well, I went back to work at my landscaping job in the spring. I've been working on my health and trying to remain active even on my days off, when I'm working at home on my laptop, or when the weather is bad, or I just don't have the energy to get out of the house.

So I bought myself an exercise bike, and I love it. It's awesome and it makes it so much easier for me to actually stay active and not decondition. I really should have bought it way earlier, when I was off work for the winter so that I could have better kept myself fit over the off-season, because the weather really, really sucked. (I live in Canada... enough said😅)

I felt pretty awful after my POTS diagnosis in October, and I thought that resting and recovering over the winter would make me feel better, but I discovered that actually, I decondition rather quickly if I don't keep myself active all the time. As long as I don't push myself beyond my limits too far, the activity at work actually helps to a degree. But on my days off, if I don't keep myself moving, my whole body just stiffens up, and my energy levels drop, my blood pressure drops, and It's just not fun.

On top of that, my son was in his first year of high school after homeschooling for 9 years and kept bringing home all kinds of viruses and illnesses so we’ve both been sick so much over the last 10 months… So that's been interesting.

I'm also really working on eating better, so that's another thing I’ve been doing. I've started trying to eat a more low-carb diet. So if you have any low-carb recipe ideas for me, please visit me on YouTube or Instagram and drop them in the comments. I will be forever grateful!

Basically, all I'm doing with that right now is I've changed the way I grocery shop, and I've stopped eating a lot of processed foods. For the most part, I'm just buying fruits, vegetables, and meats. So far, it seems to be helping because I'm having a lot fewer blood sugar drops, which was a major problem that was causing a lot of my POTS symptoms and fainting which was not fun at all.

I also want to talk about building high-value skills, because that's kind of been my whole focus with creating my website and starting the blog and now restarting my YouTube channel. But I'll get into that more in depth in another post.

However, I just want to stress the importance of building your skill set, especially now that we have AI taking over a lot of areas of people's jobs and all kinds of things. I think it's really important that we create some kind of stability for ourselves by building on our skills.

My whole goal is to eventually be able to be completely self-reliant and not have to depend on my “day job” or being in one location. I'd really like to travel, so I think it's important to build those skills and learn as much as you possibly can.

You can learn a lot by reading lots of books, watching educational YouTube videos, and just honing your skills and practicing creating things as much as possible, because I really do believe that good things come to those who create.
The more you create, the more you attract into your life because you're putting that energy out there.

Some of those high-value skills are writing, copywriting, graphic design, public speaking… which was never a thing that I ever thought I would do!
I literally threw up in a trash can in grade seven after doing a speech in front of my class of about 28 kids, because I was so anxious. So this (making YouTube videos) is weird. But maybe that's growth!

What are other high-value skills?
Digital marketing and digital product creation! Because digital products are one of the best ways to create passive income.

I'll make a whole list, but for now, that's all I wanted to mention.

If you want to start your own website or if you want a tutorial on how to create a “link in bio” for free like the one I have, leave me a comment. I would love to make a tutorial in the future. But you can also get started right now and create your own systeme.io account. That's the platform that I use to make my website and blog and sell digital products on, and I absolutely love it because it's completely customizable and it's super easy to use. It's a lot of fun!

So if you guys want to start your own website or blog or sell digital products, here is my link. It is an affiliate link, so if you click on it and end up setting up a paid account in the future, then I will receive a small commission at no additional cost to you, and your support is super appreciated. (Full Disclosure)

I can't wait to come back and talk to you guys again soon. This has been my first review, progress report, whatever-you-want-to-call-it update.

We're just resetting and reducing friction as much as possible in every area of life, and I'm going to talk more about that in my next post, so stay tuned.
Bye guys, thanks for hanging out with me here in my little corner of the internet. I'll talk to you later!

Source: YouTube video transcript - Watch it here!