Note: you can listen to this episode above or load it up in iTunes.

How One Humiliating Experience Gave Me a Wake Up Call That Helped Me Build a More Profitable Blog

D_Rowse-162Today, I talk about the humiliating wake up call that changed my life and my blog.

In This Episode

You can listen to today’s episode above or in iTunes or Stitcher (where we’d also LOVE to get your reviews on those platforms if you have a moment). Today I talk about:

  • My humiliating wake up call
  • 3 simple changes I’ve made to my life that have improved my blogging
  • The most powerful question you can ask yourself to improve your blog

Further Reading and Resources

 

 

Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view
How are you? Really? Are you already in the habit of asking yourself this question? What changes could you make to your life to support you in improving your blog?

I’d love to hear your experience. Let me know in the comments below, and share a link to your blog.

Good morning and welcome to episode 38 of the Problogger Podcast. It’s Monday morning here in Australia, and I’m getting into my week. Today, I want to talk about something that I think has the potential to transform your blogging and not only that it can transform many areas of your life. I want to tell you a little bit about my own personal journey for the last nine months. Before I do, I want to encourage you to check out today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/38, where I’ll give you some further reading, and also, you have the opportunity to leave a comment and let us know what you think about today’s show.

If you do enjoy today’s show, we’d love you to leave a review on iTunes. Also, there’s been some fantastic reviews coming in over the last couple of days. Quite a long one came in from Get Fit Now with Cheryl, who wrote in part—I’ll just read the first part—”I’ve watched my email and podcast list every day for the next episode of ProBlogger. If there’s a new episode, no matter what else I’m currently listening to, I switch to ProBlogger.” I really appreciate that Cheryl.

I got this one from Sharon, which I really enjoyed as well. This is from Sharon Bogan. “Darren Rowse’s strength is that he can take massive complex information and break it down into small actionable pieces of advice. None of it is rocket science, but it’s all doable and useful.” I love that comment because I think it actually illustrates a point that I try and get across in my teaching all the time. None of what I teach is rocket science. Most of it is quite logical, but the reality is, most people don’t apply the simple truth that is behind most successful blogs.

Most successful bloggers that I’ve come across don’t do amazingly cutting-edge things. They consistently produce useful content on a day-by-day basis. They interact with their readers. They get off their blogs and interact in other places on the web. Those three things build the foundations for a profitable blog. None of it is rocket science but it is all so important.

That leads me to today’s topic. Today, I want to pick up a theme that I talked about at the ProBlogger event just over a week ago. My opening keynote, my topic was Three Ways to Make Your Blog Shine. We had a party on Friday night and the theme was shine. Everyone was encouraged to come wearing something a little glittery or shimmery. I myself wore a Michael Jackson glove.

That was my touch of shine, but I picked up the theme of shining in my opening keynote because really, that’s what the point of the conference but also ProBlogger is about. We want to help bloggers to shine, their blogs to shine, to reach their potential in some way. In my keynote, I talked about three ways that you can do that. I just want to focus on one of them today in this podcast, because I don’t have an hour to talk to you as I did at the opening of the event. The first thing that I talked about was really not about blogging at all, but it was everything to do with blogging, and that’s what I want to touch on now.

The question I asked our attendees and the question I want to ask you is a question that we get asked all the time. It’s probably the most asked question today. The question is this, how are you? It was a strange question to start a blogging conference off with and it’s a strange question to ask in a blogging podcast in some ways because I’m not asking you how is your blog, I’m not asking you how is your business, I’m asking how are you. How are you? I really would like to know and I’d encourage you to leave a comment in today’s show notes.

I really even more so, encourage you to ask yourself the question, how are you? As I mentioned before, this is probably the most asked question in all of humanity today, because we asked it as a greeting, at least we do in Australia. Quite often the conversation goes, “Hey, how are you? Good. How are you? Good.” That’s the opening of most conversations that I have. While it’s the most asked question, it’s also probably the most glossed-over question as well.

“Yeah, I’m good. How are you,” and that’s the end of answering the question or many times we just say, “Yeah, I’m busy. How are you? Yeah, I’m busy. How are you?” and it goes back and forth and then you start talking about the weather or something else incidental. Today, I want to encourage you to not to gloss over the question to actually ponder, how are you going? How are you, internally going? The reason I asked this is because probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned in my own blogging this last nine or ten months has been that if I want my blog to shine, I need to not only work on blogging technique, and not only need to work on writing great content, or finding readers from my blog, or monetizing my blog.

Those strategic things, they’re great to learn about, and basically what we’ll be talking about in this podcast ongoingly. If I really want my blog to shine, I also need to work on making myself shine as a person, as the person behind that blog. The well-being of my blogs is directly linked to the well-being of me. It’s not the only factor but it does play a part, so how are you?

It was late last year, I think it was November. I went to my doctor for my annual men’s health checkup. It was one of those things that as you get to a certain age, it’s probably a good thing to do. I started doing it as I approached 40 a few years ago. Basically, an annual men’s health checkup sounds nice, but it’s not, really; it’s a bit of a humiliating process. I’m sure there’s an equivalent for women, but basically, you go in and the doctor runs a whole heap of tests on you, and he pokes and prods you in ways that you can’t even imagine and don’t want to really think about.

He made me step up and down on steps for about three minutes and halfway through that test to assess my fitness. I fell off the step and couldn’t continue. He took my blood pressure and a whole heap of other things, blood tests and all kinds of stuff. I went for about 45 minutes and then usually at the end of the test, he sits you down and says, “Here’s something you can work on over the next 12 months to improve your health.” It went through the normal pattern. I did all the tests and was humiliated. He sat me down at the end and he said, “Here’s the list of things that you need to work on over the next 12 months.”

That was the first time he’d ever presented me with a list at the end of the checkup. It was confronting to hear that there was a list and then to see the things on the list. There was nothing on it that was life-threatening, at least not immediately life-threatening. It was important stuff, though, and it was stuff that I already knew.

There was my weight. My doctor told me I was about 15 kilograms or about 33 pounds overweight (for those of you who measure such things in pounds), and I knew that already. I’ve seen my belt, the notches letting out and I actually had had to buy a new belt recently, and I’d seen that I’d gone up a size in jeans and it had been a gradual process over 10 or so years. But then, there were other things on the list like my blood pressure being too high. The fact that I was vitamin D-deficient which means you have to go outside (apparently) to get some vitamin D. I don’t tend to do much of that.

My fitness was too low. These were the things he’d noticed. None of it was a surprise, as I say, because I’d noticed it, too. I went home from being presented with this list, and I was a bit down about it. I remember lying in bed at night over the next few nights and just thinking about, he’s right. I’ve seen these symptoms, too, and then I realized that there were other symptoms that he hadn’t seen. These were probably more symptoms to do with internal stuff, how I was thinking, and how I was acting.

There was a whole heap of these things that I could go through. Things like being a bit disillusioned with my work, being a bit more unmotivated, a little less motivated than in the past. My memory wasn’t as good as it had been. My focus in my work, my productivity was lower. All of these things I put down to the fact that I was maybe getting a bit older and I’ve written those things off. Maybe I’m not as creative as I used to. Maybe the ideas won’t flow as much as I used to. Maybe this is what happens when you get to middle age. I accepted these things as reality, but I realized that perhaps many of them were tied to my health and my well-being.

I decided I needed to make some changes. I realized that I had slipped up and that I’d let things go a little over the last 10 or so years, and it’s really easy to do. As I talked about this at the event last week, it was amazing how many people came up to me afterward and said, “I’ve slipped up in very similar ways.” For me, it was around having a family. Over the last 13 years, I’ve got married, and I’ve got kids and, kids particularly, they take more and more of your focus. It’s easy to focus on their health and their well-being, and then not work on some of these things as much for yourself.

And then there was having a business and for me having two businesses with ProBlogger and Digital Photography School, and the responsibilities that come along with that, to pay the bills, develop your team, and these types of things, which are all important things, but they do take your focus off you. For me, it was business and family. For other people, it will be different things. Not everyone is in the same situation as me, but I do find it’s a universal thing in many ways that we do tend to let ourselves go in different aspects of our lives as we focus upon other things.

Every now and again I think it’s good just to have a wake-up call. For me, it was a good wake-up call because it wasn’t an urgent thing, but this list that my doctor presented me with the other symptoms, I noticed, was enough for me to start getting my act together, and there are a few areas that I decided to work on.

I didn’t do it straight away, I’ll be honest. That actually probably took me a month or so before I started to make some changes after having this chat with my doctor. It took me a while to sit with it and to feel motivated to do something about it, but the first area I started to make some changes in was around movement exercise. The reality was that I was not doing any movement, or very little at all. I’d actually switched on the Health app on my iPhone when I got my new iPhone, I think it was in late last year, December. I don’t know why I switched it on but I’m glad I did because it began to track my movement.

I remember switching that app back on about six weeks later and realizing that it had been tracking my movement and my steps in particular. At first, I was a little bit indignant that Apple is tracking my movement, and then I realized there wasn’t a whole heap to track at all, because on an average day in February this year, I was walking about 1200 steps, and 1200 steps are not much at all. It’s pretty much what I take moving around the house on an average day. Moving from one end of the house to get the kids ready for school, go to my office, walk to the kitchen, have lunch, that stuff.

It’s not really even leaving the house at all. Twelve hundred steps were nothing, and it was quite confronting to see that there was actually this other app on my old phone (which was a Samsung) and Google had been tracking my movement on Google Maps. I remember one day a friend shooting me this link so I could see how far I’d moved. It was a privacy type thing and so I checked it out. I remember being quite confronted by that as well because there was nothing really to track there either.

Google had basically been plotting me walking around my house, and occasionally walking to the school, which was about 500 or 600 meters away to pick up my kids and for a whole month, I barely went beyond that. Movement was not something that was really a part of my day. The day I actually realized I was only walking 1200 steps, I decided to set myself a challenge to walk 10000 steps that particular day. I had friends who were doing the 10000 steps a day challenge, and so I decided, for one day, I could do it, so I went for a walk.

That walk changed my life in many ways, because I came back from that walk and took me about 45 minutes, 50 minutes to get close to 10000. I didn’t quite get there because I realized I’d do a few more steps around the house that night, but I came back from that walk after 45 minutes with ideas. I had the most productive afternoon that I’d had for a long time. I realized that simply by walking and spending less time working and more time walking and moving that the work I did afterward was more productive.

That triggered that I wanted to do this on a regular basis, so I set myself the goal of 10,000 steps a day, and I began to do it every day. Sometimes I’ve got a little bit obsessive about it, I’ll be honest. I remember there were a few nights where I was jogging around our living room trying to get my 10,000 steps up. Just the discipline and the rhythm of it really helped. Later on, I got a Fitbit and that actually helped even more because I was able to join competitions and be a bit more accountable to my 10,000-step goal.

Just by moving, a whole heap of good things came out of that. The other thing I did in terms of movement was starting to stand more. Many of you have probably seen the articles that have come out over the last few months, sitting is the new smoking. Our bodies are not designed to sit all day and yet we do it for a lot of hours and I realized that I was doing it pretty much all day apart from the walks I was taking.

I pretty much decided I needed to start standing up. Now, there’s a lot of great standup desks out there. I’m a bit tight with my money and so I got a cardboard box, and right now as I’m giving you this talk I’m standing in front of a cardboard box, which is sitting on top of my desk and my computer sitting on top of the box cost me about 30 cents. I’ve noticed that by standing more—I don’t do it all day, but I do it for at least a couple hours a day as I work—it helps me to become more focused and more productive with my time. It’s one of the factors that has brought about some change for me.

I’m probably going to actually invest in a stand-up desk. I found a good one in which you can sit on top of your desk. I can give you a link to it in the show notes. But just these two simple changes walking every day and standing have brought about real change. The other area that has had a probably even more of an impact for me is my diet.

I said at the start, none of this is rocket science. This is the stuff that we’re taught when we’re in primary school, elementary school. My 4 year old knows about diet and how it impacts your health, but if you’re anything like me it’s one of those areas that it’s easy to slip up on. My reality was that I was eating good food. We eat meat, we eat vegetables every day for dinner. I was eating a relatively healthy breakfast, and I was eating relatively healthy lunches.

Lunches were probably the area I slipped up the most but I was also eating extra stuff, and I was eating two lunches some days, like I’d have an early one, then I have a later one. I was snacking extra and many of the extra snacks were the unhealthy stuff. You know how it goes. Most of us fall into these patterns at different times. If I’m honest, probably the other aspect of it for me was emotional eating. When things didn’t go right, or when things didn’t go my way, or when something unexpected happened, I would cope with that by eating and most of those exceptions were not good food.

This is something that is very easy to fall into these poor habits with and it’s a gradual thing for me (at least it was). I realized over the last 12 months, I’ve gotten pretty bad in this particular area. I was actually starting to eat secretly and it wasn’t a good healthy way to go. So, I decided to make some changes in this area too. It wasn’t rocket science. What I did is I basically started to reduce my calories through a few things. Firstly, through the reduced frequency of eating—cutting out some of those extra snacks—reducing the portion sizes. I gradually started to eat more and more […].

I started to focus more on real food, so not processed food but more healthy food, the stuff that we’re taught to eat when we’re kids, and also watching for the triggers that were triggering the emotional eating, simply becoming more aware of them and then having some strategies in place so I could do something different in those times.

The other thing for me which I’ve talked about previously is I began to do some fasting, and this is something that I really would encourage you to talk to a health practitioner about before you begin to do it because intermittent fasting is something that can be really helpful to some people, but there are certainly some people who shouldn’t do it, depending on their own health conditions and stages of life that they’re at.

It’s something you can learn about and I can give you some links to it, but I really would encourage you to talk to someone about doing that. Diet and movement were the two big things that I began to change. There were other things as well, but even just those two things brought about some immediate change.

The thing that everyone notices when they meet me after the last nine months is that I’ve lost weight. That’s certainly been the most externally visible change. I’ve lost the 15 kilos that my doctor asked me to lose and a few more; I think I’m up to 17 now. It’s plateaued and I’m maintaining that and have maintained that for the last three months. That’s about 37 pounds, which is fairly significant. It’s not that much more than my 4-year-old child actually weighs, which freaks me out in some ways. That was the most external change, but then, there’s been a whole heap of others, and these are things that other people don’t see but I’ve noticed even more than my weight loss.

The increased fitness has been great. I still have some way to go on that. I need to work on my strength, but there are other things that have flowed, and these things have impacted my blogging; I’m getting better ideas. I feel like I’m more creative than I was. I feel like I have more stamina and energy to bring to my work. I feel like I’m more focused and more alert in my work as well. I’m more optimistic. I’m in a better mood and I bring that mood to my work and the work that I do. I feel like I’m more productive. I feel like the quality of my work is increasing as well.

While I didn’t do all these things to get better as a blogger, be more productive, and increase the quality of my work, it’s had this flow-on effect. Also other areas of my life, I’ve noticed it’s impacting my parenting. I noticed it’s impacting my friendships and other things that I do. It’s one of those things that has this ripple effect throughout your life.

I don’t know what the motivation is for you but I really would ask you the question, how are you going in these two areas, movement and diet. Of course, there’s a whole heap of other areas that have to do with health and well-being as well. There are the connections that we have, the relationships that we have, and this is something for me that I know I need to work more on. I’m an introvert. I tend to gravitate to online interactions with people because I can monitor them, I can turn them on and off, and I retreat into the online world.

I know many introverts have a tendency to do that, and sometimes that can have come at the expense of real-life interactions. I think it’s really important to think about how you’re going with the relationships that you have. For different ones of us, there will be different responses to that, but it’s a good question to ask. That may extend to things like your real-life interactions, you’re online. I think it’s important to have both particularly as bloggers to have online relationships with people who do get what we go through as bloggers, but it also extends to things like having mentors and having people who can ask you questions about your business.

Another aspect of well-being that I’ve been working on over the last few months, in particular, has been rest. Sleep is very important but I think rest goes beyond just sleep. It’s about having breaks in your day. I’ve been working in shorter batches. I tend to work for 45–60 minutes and then have 10–15 minutes off during my day. I find just by breaking up my day that way and doing other activities during the day, like going for a walk, having a drink, having a conversation with someone, I feel like I’m more focused when I am working.

In terms of rest, there’s also having time off, so having boundaries around when you don’t work. This is an area that I used to struggle a lot because I used to say I love my work. It gives me energy. The lines between when I was working and when I was resting blurred a lot. I didn’t really have any lines there. On one hand, as bloggers, we love what we do and we feel drawn into it, but it’s not a sustainable thing in the long term.

When we don’t have any boundaries between work and rest, it has an impact on those other areas of our life. Our family life, our relationships, and we also build habits that are hard to change later on, when we do need rest, when work isn’t perhaps as enjoyable as it once was. Establishing some boundaries is really important. 

The other thing for me in terms of rest this last year has been as a family, we took a month off early in the year to travel in the US and that was a really life-giving time for me. Here in Australia, we have long service leave, where a company gives you extended time-off after you’ve served the company for seven or ten years, depending on the company.

As a blogger, I have never had long service leave even, though. I’ve been blogging for 13 years now. So to have that month off, that extended break, really refreshed me and I found that helpful. 

The other area of well-being that I want to touch on—this is the last one I want to touch on today—is something called filling your cup. That’s how I refer to it anyway, filling your cup. I want to ask you today, are you filling your cup?

I’ve got this idea from Michael Hyatt at Social Media Marketing World this year. I think he touched on this in his talk, and he asked the question, “Are you filling your cup?” I realized that it was another area of my well-being that I’d let slip. What I’m talking about here is, as bloggers, we’re blogging a lot, we’re outputting, we’re writing, we’re creating content, and to create great content, to output in a great way we need good input, so filling your cup is about learning. It’s about getting inspiration.

When I started blogging back in 2002, I was reading so many books. I used to read a book a week, at least. I used to read over 300 blogs in my RSS reader. I was going to conferences. I was meeting with mentors. I was intentionally spending time learning about technology and about blogging, but also the things I was writing about and just other stuff that interested me. I was addicted to learning and I was getting a lot of input, and I think that had a lot to do with the quality of the output that I was doing, but this is one of those areas that it’s very easy to slip up in.

As your life gets busy in different ways, it’s very easy to take time from when you were learning and put it into other activities. I realized I wasn’t getting the input that I used to get. That had come for a variety of reasons. One, I was busy, but two, when you’ve been blogging about the same topic for 10 years, it’s very easy to become a bit complacent and to begin to believe what other people say about you. “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s a guru or he’s an expert.” You begin to believe that and stay in the comfort zone of what you are doing.

It’s worked before I’ll continue to do it, and you stop learning the new things that are happening in your industry. I realized I’ve become a little bit stale in some of my writing, I wasn’t as cutting-edge, perhaps, as I once was. I put a lot of that down to the fact that I wasn’t reading as much as I used to, I wasn’t getting the input that I used to get in, I wasn’t getting the inspiration that perhaps I had as well, so I decided to make some changes in this particular area of my well-being as well.

For me, it was a number of things. One, I was now walking every day for 45 minutes, at least every day. I had this opportunity to listen to podcasts and to listen to audiobooks. For the first time in my life, I began to listen to podcasts, and that was one of the reasons I started these podcasts, but for the first time of my life, I started to listen to audiobooks as well. I found that that was really helpful. Now I don’t listen, get input in every walk I take. I think it’s also important to have rest, have space, and to have time to think about certainly two or three times a week when I walk on now getting input in that way.

I started to read blogs again. I have a number of blogs, not only in the niches that I’m writing about, also for podcasts. I actually listen to podcasts to do with health, comedy, business, and entrepreneurship, but many aspects of life. Even though you might not be learning about your particular topic or area of expertise, just learning something seems to trigger a part of your brain that wakes it up and helps you a lot.

I’ve started going to conferences not only to speak but also to learn. Social Media Marketing this year where I went to speak, I actually spent most of my time there in sessions on topics that I didn’t know about, rather than going to see the stuff I already knew about, which is tempting to do because you want to connect with those speakers. I spent more time in the podcasting sessions, I spent more time learning about visual marketing, and things that I hadn’t really been learning about before.

The other thing for me is that I started to seek out mentors. This is one of those areas that as you become well known in an industry, you can feel a bit awkward about seeking a mentor, because everyone thinks that you already know enough, but the reality is it’s really helpful to have mentors, so I’ve started to seek out those relationships.

Some of the people that I’m hanging out with now don’t know that they’re my mentors. I haven’t really labeled the relationship in that way. It’s about interacting with people who know about things that you don’t know about, but also who achieve and who push boundaries and ask questions that are good for you to hear. I think it’s really good to have those friendships but also mentor-mentee type relationships as well.

Another thing I’ve started to do more is to seek out inspiration. In the early days of my blogging, I used to listen or watch videos that I found inspiring particularly when TED Talk started coming out. I used to start every day with a TED talk, and a lot of those talks had nothing to do with my topics of interest. Simply by starting the day in a more inspired state, I think it helps you to flow into the rest of your day, in a more positive way.

The last thing in terms of filling my cup that I think has changed for me this year is that I have started to seek experiences that make me laugh. I realized that I used to laugh a lot more than I do today. It sounds bizarre, but I think it’s true, and so some of the podcasts that I’m listening to now are comedy podcasts. I think simply by injecting a little bit of laughter, a little bit of humor into the day—actually, again, I’ve read some studies somewhere—releases some endorphins in your brain. Someone out there will tell me what that is. It actually impacts your optimism and impacts the way you look at life if you’ve laughed, and I think it’s a really important thing to do as well.

There’s a whole heap of other areas of well-being that we could talk about today. I’ve talked about movement, diet, rest, connections, relationships, and filling your cup. We could also talk about mental health, perhaps your spirituality, and other areas of your life as well. But I want to put the question out there today, how are you? Again, this is a strange thing to ask on a podcast about blogging but I think it’s so important. There are a number of reasons that I wanted to put this out there at our event recently, but also on this podcast.

As bloggers, most of us are working by ourselves most of the time. I sit in my office most of every day, working alone, and so I don’t have a boss. I don’t have colleagues around me asking me questions around these things, or noticing perhaps the habits that I have, that aren’t good habits, or just having conversations about this stuff. I want to put it out there because many of us don’t have this accountability in their life. Don’t have people watching how we live our lives. So I think it’s important to ask that question.

Most of us also as bloggers are putting ourselves out there a lot. We’re talking about our opinions, and we’re putting them onto the web, we’re telling about our lives, and we’re putting our photos out there, and putting videos of ourselves, and we’re creating content that reveals something about ourselves. As we do that we get feedback, and people react to that, and some of the reactions are really positive, but some of them can at times be attacking, hateful, and bring us down.

If we’re not in a healthy place, we’re not going to be in a good place to respond to that, and it takes its toll over time. The other aspect for me is that, if we want to help our readers and we want to help our readers to reach their potential in different ways, then we need to be in a good place as well.

I use the analogy of the oxygen mask talk that we hear when we get on a plane. They say, “An oxygen mask will appear from above you, if there’s an emergency, put it on yourself before helping those around you,” and the idea there is simply that if you don’t put it on yourself first, you’re not going to be in a position to be able to help anyone. The same is true with blogging. If we want to help our readers we need to be in a healthy place, too.

The last reason I bring this topic up is that over the last 12 months, but also over the last 12 years, I’ve noticed a number of bloggers, at times really get into trouble with their blogs, and some of them fall from grace quite spectacularly. Even in the last 12 months here in Australia, there’ve been bloggers who’ve been on television who made big mistakes with their blogs in different ways and who’ve been found out doing the wrong things.

I’ve talked to other bloggers who very privately have gone through similar stuff or they’ve not been able to sustain their blogs. In many cases, the reason the bloggers either mess up or can’t sustain what they do is not really about their blog at all. It’s because they’re not well, in one way or another. I sometimes wonder whether some of the bloggers who I’ve seen fall, some of the bloggers who’ve been found out doing the wrong thing and acting perhaps in unethical ways, and some of the bloggers who have not been able to sustain their blogs in different ways. Some of that has been to do with this stuff. 

I want to ask you the question today, how are you going? How’s your health? How’s your well-being? How’s your movement? How’s your exercise? How’s your diet? How’s your rest? How are your relationships? Are you filling your cup? As you asked that question, actually start to pay attention to the areas that perhaps you feel a bit uncomfortable, perhaps that you’re reacting against these, even as I’m talking about these things, and ask yourself other things that you can do to make some changes.

Now, most of the changes that I made that brought about real change, were actually quite small changes that were tweaks, that were different allocations of the way I was spending my time. Even though small changes can have a massive impact over the long term, 10 or 15 minutes a day doing something different around your relationships or around movement can have a long term sustainable impact upon your life but also your business and blogs.

The last thing I’ll say is that if anything I’ve talked about today has triggered something in you that you need to make a change, and I hope it does in some ways, although part of me hopes that you don’t need a change in these areas, too, because you’ve got it all together, but if you do need a time of change in your life in any of these areas, can I encourage you to talk to someone about that? You don’t have to tackle those things alone. You can talk to people online about that, I’d be more than happy to interact with you on social media or via email on it.

Also, I really encourage you to find someone in your real life that you can talk to about it. Particularly, someone who has some training in these areas, so a health practitioner in some way. You don’t need to tackle these things alone. To seek help, to seek support, to seek accountability is actually a sign (I think) of strength rather than of weakness, so I’d really encourage you to do that.

You can find today’s show notes at problogger.com/podcast/38. I’ll have some further reading there. Again, I’m not an expert in this stuff and I’m still on my journey with it, but I’m more than happy to chat with you there on social media as well. I’m also at [email protected] if you want to shoot me a quick note. I look forward to chatting with you in the next episode, episode 39 of the Problogger Podcast.

How did you go with today’s challenge?

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