Turn a Crisis into an Opportunity
All the posts that I write come from my experiences and my points of view regarding the subject in question. Today my post will be no different.
During this Pandemic have you stopped to think of what would you love to do, but until now you never had the time or courage to execute?
Today I will talk about how to turn a crisis into an opportunity. Because this is what I did. Yes, for a long time I had the will to start to write a blog/youtube channel about my experience as a mother, as an entrepreneur, like a woman but I was afraid to give the first step. But during the crisis, you start to rethink some aspects of your life. You see how life can be over in an instant and that our time on the earth is limited and sometimes short. So I decided, it's now or never. And the most amazing is that I didn't launch just a blog, I also created 2 youtube channels. All are connected, on the blog you see first the post and later I create the video about the same topic. I decided to divide my youtube into 2 channels since one is just about cooking healthy meals and the other is where I can talk about all the other subjects I love non-food-related.
Find your passion
This for me is the starting point, you need to look deep inside of yourself and listen to your heart and understand what is your passion. If we look back to our lives we will see all those things and moments that we felt really good doing or thinking of something. The topic which makes our heart race faster and no matter how tired we are we can still read, watch a video about it. Have you noticed for sure some moments when you are talking to someone about that topic and time flies and you can't stop and you know so much about it or you feel really eager to discover more? This has to be your passion. Once you discover it's time to move forward.
For me, it was a group of things, If I would highlight the keywords of my passion they would be - Healthy Lifestyle, communication/motivation, and Entrepreneurship. For those who don't know me well, I have a degree in Marketing and Communication which until now I never used in my professional life. But sooner or later this side of me had to come out. And it finally did.
I find myself embracing Instagram and Facebook not as social platforms to show my day-to-day life or post cats funny videos but as a major force to expand my communication skills together with my entrepreneurial ambitions. I want to create something for myself and help others achieve their goals as well.
Start with baby steps
Here is the key to success, if we try to do all that we want from the beginning we will fail and fail big.
I look back now and for a long period that I had these ideas but every time I started to think of the final product I would start to panic. Why? Because when you look to where you want to reach you see how high it is and you start to doubt your capacities. I always set to myself very high goals and this for a long time was stopping me from starting.
For example, just to reach where I am now, 1 blog and 2 Channels you need to:
Define the name of the blog, in my mind I was already like, "I need the perfect name", So until I discovered I was not able to move forward or decide anything else. But to find the name I need something else.
What am I going to talk about? - again you struggle, you need to decide, do I want to go to a very specific niche or be more open and more general?
After you decide, you go back to the name of the blog/channel - Now you need to see if the domain is available; if the channel name is not taken. So here you again get stuck for a while. Maybe you get a lucky strike and you get it fast, which was not my case.
After you get all these you have to decide which will be the platform in which you will host and create your blog - Here once more, I watched several videos of reviews of several different platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Blogger, etc... Finally, I decided to go with Squarespace, since I had already a good experience with them for the eCommerce platform of my Handmade baby brand - TheDuckies-DesignStore.com
After all these you have to choose the template, the color palette of your brand, create a logo.
As you can see we didn't start yet the blog and the posts, and we are far away from the Youtube channel definition. And this was what was stopping me for a long time to start. Because my brain would get scrambled and exhausted every time I started to think about the project.
I remember talking with my husband several times and both started to watch videos about how to make a blog, how to make a youtube channel, what camera to use, which lights, how to set up the lights ... as you can see this is a huge to-do list.
So when the pandemic arrived and by spending more time at home together, we started to make a plan and defining goals and milestones. And the key moment was when looking at the list decided, we need to break it down into small baby steps and start the project. And this was the only way, we made the list of all and prioritize it. But something very important, we also decided to go small and with time we would improve. Because, if you don't stop and define the different phases you will never end, every day you have a new idea or more info about the steps.
We use my iPhone 11 as the main camera, we have a key light that we used for our photos of our baby products or we use daylight since we have big windows at home, we bought a small lapel microphone that is mono, not even stereo. Why? because if we make the list of all we need we will be overwhelmed by the amount of money to invest and we would delay again the start.
So the key is baby steps stop with the excuses and just do it.
I will finish this topic with a quote:
“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dream Big
I know I rant for the last 652 words about go small, baby steps, and go easy - but we need to keep our goals high while dreaming. Or else, why dream?
We need to shoot for the stars to be able to keep chasing for greater things. I believe that dreams are just the gods showing us what they expect from us, and why we came to this earth. And the ones we have more recurrent are a glimpse of our future if we just dare to take the risk.
To dream is free, so why not take the bigger one, and the best part is that they are sugar-free so we don't get fat.
I want to keep dreaming because I truly believe in what – Christopher Reeve - said:
“So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.”
Sweet BIG dreams for you all.
Lots of Love