A new journey begins! Welcome to the Mindful Content Creator Podcast.
In this first episode, I share what mindful content creation means to me, what this podcast is and isn’t, and my personal journey to mindful content creation. I have a feeling we all have similar journeys that led us to this point, where we are tired of the usual “rules” and formulas. You are not alone. The fact that those methods didn’t work doesn’t mean that you don’t have something important to say. It doesn’t mean that you’re lazy or you didn’t try hard enough. Most traditional methods just aren’t sustainable methods for people who want to create meaningful, intentional, impactful content. Period.
Let’s find a better way together!
Below is a transcript of the episode for your reference—please excuse grammatical errors!
Welcome to episode one of the Mindful Content Creator Podcast. I'm your host, Marcy Farrey, and today we'll spend a little bit of time talking about what mindful content creation is, a little intro to it, and then also my journey to mindful content creation.
So for me, mindful content creation is creating content with intention, creating in full alignment and creative flow, and in service of your greater message or story and the people who need to hear it.
Disclaimer, there is a bit of a woowoo or spiritual aspect to this, as I personally value being in alignment with my higher self and spirit.
And with some things I find it a little bit easier to explain what something isn't and that helps me clarify what it actually is. And so I did that with this podcast and I want to share that with you, starting with what it isn't.
* This is not a podcast to teach you how to make more content in less time, so you can make money while you sleep, are drinking champagne on a boat somewhere, et cetera.
* This is not a podcast to teach you how to get conversions or sales from your content. Basically, I'm not here to teach you how to make a sale or develop an ad campaign or anything like that.
* And finally, this is not a podcast to teach you marketing strategies that will further enable you to indulge in vanity metrics such as follows, clicks, likes, etc.
So why is all of this not this podcast? I mean, this sounds like some important stuff you might need to know from a business standpoint, right?
Well, it's not this podcast cuz there's plenty of that stuff already out there. And this podcast is more for the creative in you, not just the business person in you. When we focus on all of that business stuff, the creative self often gets left behind, and I think that's why all of us burn out so much on content creation as it is today.
And now to talk about what this podcast is:
* This is a podcast to explore how we can create content mindfully, in a way that is aligned with who we are and what we value.
* This is a podcast to discover how we can each create content joyfully and sustainably, in a way that works with our own creativity and not against it.
* This is a podcast to focus on how much impact we can have with our content, not on how much money we can bring in with it. Whether you have five followers or five million, this is about having the greatest impact possible on those individuals.
* And finally, this is a podcast where we focus on storytelling techniques, not sales. We'll explore the value of sharing our stories and how you can share stories from your own life in a way that is meaningful and impactful and in a way that feels good for you and your community.
So that's a little bit about what this podcast is and isn't. If you're someone who's looking more for those business tactics, there's a lot of great sources out there, a lot of people who are talking about these things already, and they're a great place to start. If you're a creative like me and you want to feel maybe a bit more fulfilled by the content creation process, you're wanting to really let your creativity come through in your creations and with the content that you put out there, then welcome. This is the place where we're going to explore that.
And so now I want to talk a little bit about my journey to mindful content creation. And my hope is that many of you will see some similar themes in your journey to this as well. Maybe not the exact same circumstances, but a lot of the same feelings or sentiments, if you will.
So growing up, I was always a reader. I always loved telling stories. I would write my own little picture books and things like that.
And so it came to a point where I think it was as early as even middle school where we started talking about careers and career paths and college and all of that fun stuff. And I realized that being a writer wasn't exactly the most practical or lucrative job. And a lot of the adults around me were saying, well writers, you know, it's very rare for writers to hit it big to the point that they can make enough money doing it for a living. They usually have to have some other type of job that maybe involves writing, but they're not always writing books.
And I originally came to the, the idea of being a journalist at a summer camp I was doing at Northwestern University, which is also where my sister went.
So I had a tie to this school and it wasn't that far from where we lived. And they had, of course, an amazing journalism school. So the teacher there suggested that maybe journalism was a path I explore and I felt myself drawn to it cuz I realized, okay, maybe this is a way I can tell stories in a, in a meaningful way. So I got on this path in high school where I absolutely had to go to Northwestern for journalism cause it was the best journalism school in the country at the time.
And I felt like this had to be my path. This is what I was going to do. And I did make it there. I kind of flip flopped through college, figuring out exactly how I could pull off this whole journalist thing. I ended up going into the broadcast track because I realized I actually didn't like doing newspaper writing, and I remember speaking to my advisor one year when I was having trouble, when I was a freshman, and he basically told me that, you know, yeah, I could switch my major to creative writing and move to that program, but I better be prepared to watch all of my friends excel in their careers while I still worked as a waitress trying to write the next Great American novel.
So that obviously didn't have me feeling so great, especially at, you know, a school as competitive as Northwestern and as competitive as I had been in high school trying to get there. It just felt like that path would be a failure. Right. So I finished my degree, I became a journalist. I lived what I like to call that churn and burn content lifestyle where I was literally pushing stories out, day to day.
You know, I was a one man band news reporter, so I had to film all my own video. I had to film video of myself, which was always interesting. Back then we didn't have the, the fancy equipment we have now where you could actually see yourself on screen to see if you were in frame while you were filming yourself.
Couldn't do that. It was an interesting journey for sure. And I definitely burned out in TV news. I was quite miserable. It was not at all what I had expected, and I was that journalist who wanted to be doing the feature stories and going really in depth and, you know, spending more than 30 seconds on a major story.
I felt that most stories needed three minutes, and that's just not how, how that, um, that world works. Right. So eventually I moved on from that. I realized it was not for me. I went back to school for creative writing for a masters, finally doing what I had originally wanted to do, and that was wonderful. I do not regret doing graduate school.
I was so happy I got to spend that time writing. Of course, I came out of graduate school and once again faced what would I do for a living that would make money? I ended up in the corporate world. So that, that happens a lot to former journalists. We end up becoming corporate communications managers and that's exactly what I did.
And I should mention, actually, I had an internship in graduate school that sort of helped lead me on this path or helped me see things more, more clearly. And the internship, unfortunately, was unpaid and I wrote a lot of content for it.
It was a startup website. It was a blog. And I'll tell this story another time about the value of, you know, why we need to get paid for the content we create. But I gained a lot from it in the sense that I got to take, you know, some classes and I got to, you know, hear some speakers. And one of them was Andy Crestodina, who is one of the co-founders of Orbit Media in Chicago, and he was the first person to teach me about content marketing. And I realized content marketing was more of what I wanted to do. I wanted to be creating content that was really helpful and useful for people. And you know, for companies it can be really helpful to get their name out there, right? If done well.
And so I started going on this path with corporate where I thought, well, maybe I can be that content marketer for these corporations. And I was an internal communications manager primarily. So I wanted to be kind of that person, that internal reporter at a company, sharing the stories of the people there, sharing the stories of the customers, and really inspiring the employees, you know, to, to feel connected to the company.
So I did try to do this for a few years, and the appreciation for storytelling, it was there, but not completely. So there were always, higher priorities.
And they would ask me, well, what do you think we should do to, to get the message about, you know, this particular update or whatever it was for the, the employees. And I'd say, okay, well where's the story? You know, what stories can we tell? And they would all kind of look at me, all these people in these meetings and, and be like, that's a wonderful idea, but we don't really have time for that.
That's a nice to have, not a need to have. So please go back and, you know, write the newsletter and do the announcements as we asked you to. Right. So I always would have these hopes. I would go into these interviews for these jobs and I would talk about these opportunities they had to tell stories and they would say, wow, that sounds really great.
And it would get me the job. But once I got in the door, we would really wouldn't do any of that on, on rare occasions, I would get to do some of it, but it would basically never happen. And so I'd always be really disappointed that my job was mostly just tasks, right. So we come to, to now where I finally decided to leave these full-time jobs.
I became a freelancer and I started working with solopreneurs and helping them, you know, create their content.
I help people write web pages, social posts, I edit podcasts, I edit videos. All of those good things I, I kind of have my hand in, in all the different pieces of content that you can have. And all of it counts. You know, content is not just social media, you know, content is speeches that you give, the podcasts you create, really any interaction that you have with your community, with your clients, with your customers.
There's all content, you know, in that. We're creating something, we're creating a story, and we're sharing messages about who we are and what we do. So all of that matters. And in the process of helping all of these individuals, I saw a lot of common themes, a lot of common issues.
So some of these include, you know, many people came to me because they just don't really wanna create their own content anymore. They're burned out on it. They've tried to keep up with it. They feel like they just can't, they can't churn out at the pace they want to. They get stuck coming up with ideas.
All of that. And then some came to me really because they just needed encouragement and inspiration. Someone to brainstorm with, get reassurance that what they really wanna share is, is worthy of being shared. And so I realize that a lot of us are kind of getting caught up in these formulas of what we're told content creation should be. And then of course we expect instant results. And we're disappointed when that doesn't happen. And we've been conditioned that way because we never see the work that really goes into building and sustaining a following to building a real community. And we're gonna go into this more in future episodes, but you know, so many of us, I'm included, have tried many different formulas, followed all these different experts, but eventually you kind of just fall off the path and you feel like it just didn't work for you. And then you feel like something's wrong with you because it didn't work. Maybe I should have tried harder. Maybe I just need to try different method.
But at some point you just get sick of doing that. You get sick of chasing the vanity metrics. You get sick of trying to make all this money like so-and-so did because they followed this method and you know it, it's just a sure path to burnout.
And maybe you feel the same way, but I got into this, into content creation, because I wanted to have an impact. Because I believe I have important messages and stories that I need to share, that there are people who need to hear them.
I believe these messages are for my community and will reach them when they need them most. And with something like that, I don't wanna quit. I don't wanna quit because someone told me that I had to follow this formula and it didn't work for me. So I was sitting here and I thought, you know what if I just throw all of these formulas, all these things I've been told out the window, and just start creating in a way that feels good to me.
So if I'm already not getting results, what difference does it make? Creation is better than stagnation, right? And I'm happiest when I create.
So that's kind of where this idea of mindful content creation came from.
And yeah, I know this might sound a little fluffy, a little woo woo, maybe like it's not that practical. It's a little too up in the clouds, but you know what, that's what is gonna be on this podcast. So if that's not for you, that's totally okay. Like I said, there are so many other experts who do the practical business side stuff.
But if you're a creative like me, you're feeling a little lost, you're feeling a little burnt out, and you really just wanna create meaningful stuff, then you're in the right place cuz we're gonna explore this together.
And look, I don't have all the answers. But what I want is for you to find a unique path that works for you to discover what mindful content creation is for you. I don't want you to follow exactly what I do. The point here is for you to go deeper and find what is gonna work for you, what's gonna help you create that content that makes an impact.
And then let's see what happens from there.
I want us to go on a journey together to find a more aligned, sustainable way to create content as human beings for other human beings, because we want to build a community, not just win over customers.
And I believe this is truly possible, but we need each other as a community in and of ourselves to support each other on this path.
It's not the easiest one we could choose and veering off the path into those one size fits all formulas that have us churning out content until something hits is, you know, a real temptation. And most of us need to bring in money from what we're making, and that's cuz we're trying to make a living doing what we love.
And there's no shame in that, but we can find our own way to do this that doesn't involve what we might consider selling out. Right? I have hope for a better way, and if you are here, I think you do too.
So with all of that said, I look forward to taking this journey with you. Next time we'll get into a little bit more about what mindful content creation can look like for you as a creator. I'll see you next time and thanks for listening.
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