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Side Quests w/ Cheryl Woodhouse

Episode 2: Please don't monetize all your hobbies.

there we are we are live hello hello hello hello I am Briar Harvey this is the neurodiversity media Network today we're questing side questing with Cheryl Woodhouse okay y'all so I I gotta be honest this is one of my favorite shows because we literally set our agenda 30 seconds ago

and most of this is because of the things that we were talking about before I clicked live because that's just kind of how our brains work so we were talking about Tick Tock I was stalking someone I'm not gonna tell you who I was talking it could just be a surprise for all of you but I was stalking someone and I was looking at her 60 000 Tick Tock followers I've mentioned this before I'll say again I'm not on Tick Tock there are many reasons why I am not on Tick Tock China is one of them the second one is that I am not particularly short form says the girl with 10 podcasts like there is not a whole lot that I do or create or make that lends itself to one to three minute video Snippets and the thing about micro creation is that I find that it is mostly missing nuance and that is really for me the issue it most of my work really revolves around the grays and defining them and I don't think you do that in three minutes

I think this also goes back to what we talked about last week which is the common advice is to create content on the platforms where your ideal clients are hanging out but the better advice is to create content for the platforms where you hang out because if you don't consume the content you're going to be very bad at creating it that's correct like Tick Tock homework friend homework you know when people send you tick tocks and you have to watch them tick tocks YouTube shorts and I do I'll watch them all and again for me the the immediate reaction is oh my God this looks like a [ __ ] ton of work it is never oh hey I learned something from this because what do you learn in three minutes I mean I think probably when you're in your teens and early 20s three minutes of content is perfect for you to learn something new and to input it and take it in that doesn't work for me anymore at 40. is that being said there's there are some incredible creators I know that do give value within those one to three minutes usually there are stitches honestly they're people taking other people's videos and breaking them down so there's context already implied from the previous video but they do a great job of it they give you they plant seeds right that's the job of tick tock style content is to plant seeds to let people run off and kind of grow and digest on their own the problem and the reason we decided to talk about tech talk today was that they run off and they grow these seeds on their own they don't run back to you and grow these seeds in your courses your programs your offers your workshops your templates the things that you sell the reason you might be generating an audience in the first place with a few notable exceptions and a lot of people are really struggling with that I look at a lot of these creators with 60 000 Tick Tock followers and have to ask how are you monetizing that and the answer is often not at all

and I told Cheryl that it reminded me of Reddit

because Reddit is if you're not on Reddit uh feel free to like hop on over there and look at cat pictures find some good memes that is where a great majority of my memes come from I would not sell [ __ ] on Reddit and deliberately so would not even attempt to sell anything on Reddit Cheryl asked me a couple of weeks ago we were talking she's like where are your people I'm like Reddit she's like how do you sell to them you do not you do not sell to anyone on Reddit I've watched people like be eviscerated famous people eviscerated alive for attempting to sell something on Reddit you just don't sell on Reddit Tick Tock has the same kind of vibe not that you don't sell but that your audience is not necessarily going to be receptive to you trying to sell some audiences for sure a lot of them really and the because the content is one to three minutes the context of the relationship you're selling within is one to three minutes

right you might have some people who follow you for a long time but that's why viral products do so well on Tick Tock that's why things like lip balms where the creators are just making these amazing satisfying videos of them pouring all of these lip balms and scraping off the tops like everyone watches that like ASMR they they consume the content on a regular basis so yeah some of them next time they need lip balm they're going to remember that Tick Tock and they're gonna maybe go look them up and purchase it the idea of ASMR lip balm is another reason why why I am not on tick tock fair point but like viral products do well because the barrier to purchase is so low right viral products do well because they're 20 bucks 30 bucks 50 bucks those you know self-defense keychains did really well because oh they're so cute and I can have it shipped to my house for less than I would spend on a pizza so I'm gonna go ahead and purchase one now as an impulse purchase it's the impulsivity platform so of course the impulse purchases are going to do well the thoughtful purchases the ones that take you know a couple of weeks back and forth and maybe dealing with some head trash and all that other sort of stuff they're going to be a much harder cell on the impulsivity platform

so why is Tick Tock different from Instagram

I would think the depth of relationship comes into play more on Instagram

it does seem longer term there I I also suck at Instagram let me be very clear about that so I I can't offer in advice there

but I do think the depth of the relationship on Instagram has a lot to do with the difference between reels and tick tocks and how they're seen and how you can sell on those platforms because there's not just one to three minute videos on Instagram also people consume differently on Instagram Tick Tock I I am an occasional user of the platform I usually end up on reels instead of tick tock right and when I go on my reels and I see a topic that I like I don't click on the hashtags and go explore the hashtags I don't let the algorithm show me more on my for you page I click on the Creator and I digest every single one of their reels and I scroll through them and if they're interesting I follow them and then I see more of them Instagram is more focused around the Creator than the topic Tick Tock is more focused on the topic than the Creator which is why they need different strategies but also why Instagram can still sell higher ticket items and longer ticket services and offers and things that require more decision making than hey this is an impulse purchase I'm going for it and I think that leads us to where you wanted to go pretty tidally because what works on Tick Tock is the hyper niche right it has to because you're selling one [ __ ] impulse purchase yeah it's these um these chocolates that the sex chocolates can we say that on this live stream can we say that word okay good

I am not a consumer of this product but I saw a really great case study on LinkedIn about this product the other day where they actually interviewed founder of this company about his Tick Tock strategy okay and my mind okay now I know nothing you have to tell me about this because I know nothing about what you're talking about start at the stop so there's these chocolates that went viral on Tick Tock and they do a great deal in sales okay but the the point of the chocolate I guess they're kind of like an aphrodisiac or something like that and you know people are seeing them on Tick Tock they're purchasing they're an Impulse level purchase decision so it's really easy item for tick tock to sell The Genius of the strategy for this that really blew my mind wasn't the fact that they went viral by creating a great deal of content on one account or using hashtag strategies or any of the stuff that we're told to do instead they put out like a hundred videos a day across 30 different accounts they paid 30 creators to create three videos a day that feature their product which means they put out a hundred videos a day that include their product across the platform over the course of a month that's 3 000 videos that include their product on the platform and basically what they said is if you know going viral is a one in a thousand shot let's do it three times in a month and about the dead they did more than that they have many many many many videos that have over a million views because what happens is this becomes everywhere right it's seen as pervasive it's all over the platform you can't get away from it because they have all of these creators creating content on the same thing every single day and they're not paying any of these individual creators like full-time salaries or anything ridiculous they're paying them for post and it's a nominal amount but instead of trying to find the needle in the haystack we just built more haystacks right like I feel like this was pioneered I don't know 10 years it's not been that long eight years ago Kim K with skems right and we're talking about all these micro influencers who do not have huge audiences but if you have 50 000 people and again it's tick tock it's so easy to get 60 000 subscribers 80 000 subscribers on Tic Tac that is not a difficult ask when you have that many micro creators Shilling your products people are gonna see it yeah and again because as you mentioned so many of them have audiences of 60 80 100 000 people they're not monetizing at all they're going to be happy to get 10 bucks a post from this weird Chocolate Company three times a day

of influencing on different networks right and you're not wrong I've seen so as a podcast host I have a network that we subscribe to that gives us advertising opportunities all of these are based on your for podcasts it's a little weird it's listens not downloads it's [ __ ] a nightmare but this is true on a lot of platforms and the metrics that we are looking for are what determine pay and that is wildly variable podcasts are worth more than Instagram Instagram is worth more than Facebook Facebook is worth more than Tick Tock and by degrees here because it's about the conversion your what's I I mean what's the conversion rate on Tick Tock less than a tenth of a percent it would have to be that low nobody's making no idea I don't even know if anyone's collected any stats on that to be honest with you oh I'm sure the Communist Chinese party is maybe it was in that balloon and we popped it now I'll never know and now we'll never know I know it the king of the Heap here has got to be YouTube Right In terms in terms of content sponsorship the king of the Heap is YouTube and the reason the king of the Heap is YouTube is that the statistics matter are basically watches watch time and subscribers it's the size of your audience and how engaged they are with your content those are the things that matter an individual influencers get six figure retainers for promoting products of one video a month on their channels if they have the appropriate size and engagement With Their audience and again Watch time is more important than subscriber number We Care much more about how long people are interacting with your content on YouTube than we do about whether or not they click that subscribe button yes and in 2023 this is a percentage game not so much a minutes game yes there is a floor on this if you're doing nothing but 30 second videos and people watch all of them it doesn't matter much but you can no longer game the algorithm by doing hour-long videos and trying to keep everyone on it you need to have watch time as a percentage you cannot get someone to the halfway point of your video and go oh well that's 30 minutes that's way longer than 100 of a 10 minute video so I win no it's percentage from start to finish and I think that it gets really dangerous when we are

neglecting the lagging metrics here which is not watch time or follower account at all it's your conversion rate yeah and that's the number one thing most people ignore on every platform and one of the things that really surprises people when they get into any of my programs or into my world I'm like I don't care if you want to build an audience of ten thousand hundred thousand a million people that's great I'm gonna help you get more clients so I'm gonna help you make more money any of the vanity metrics that show up as a result are just that they're vanity metrics they're vanity matrixes we just spent a solid week going over analytics in my social media course and the number one thing I emphasize was that lurkers are buyers so reach matters more than pretty much anything foreign

[Music] really State what the conversion rate is on lurkers if you have no metrics for them so that makes all of this crap shoot which makes me feel better because I was feeling a little inferior about my numbers based on these 60 000 Tick Tock followers but that doesn't matter at all you made more off of your tiny audience than they did off of their massive one so actually per person in your audience you are doing far better and that's the metric that matters right I'm currently creating a report to share with some people about you know the business model that I use when we're scaling agencies and we're growing businesses like that and I I did some math and I would say that every single market research interview that I've done averaged out over time worth about two thousand dollars each to my bottom line so I know every time I do a market research interview it's going to probably lead to that much more business over time in aggregate as an average not very many people can say that so doing more interviews or getting more followers or doing more of the thing for someone who doesn't know how to turn that into money doesn't really mean anything [Music]

my clients is upwards of fifty thousand dollars that I might convert one or two people from Tick Tock from that but it seems less likely yeah I mean I'm sure that those people are on there but it's the context of the situation and it's very much Niche dependent right the context of the situation on Tick Tock as a platform is that you are doing something impulsive you're scrolling through you have attention for one to three minutes absolute tops so making an impulsive purchase decision that you're going to forget about in one to three minutes tops is probably fine on that platform but then you try and sell fractional CMO services on a platform like Tick Tock first of all nobody who's buying those Services is in that thought process when they're consuming Tick Tock content like no but that's not where they go for that okay so even if you do manage to hook someone who's in a decision-making role that could possibly procure your services you're having to overcome so much education and transformation of that relationship that there's no possible way you could do it in one to three minutes you would have to do it in 100 to 300 minutes which means they would have to consume all of your content which is a very very big ask it really is if the platform is designed for one to three minutes for me to navigate to your page and watch all of your content it's not gonna happen and I think this is where we get into so

when it comes to niches Cheryl how important is a niche foreign

you're gonna hate my answer it depends it always depends it always depends so the thing that bugs me about niches is that people the people who get hung up on niches the absolute most are the people who need to worry about it the absolute least right it's the people who won't start because they need to pick a niche first and so they don't start and then they never do anything or they finally pick a niche and they don't get an immediate like Landslide response like they were expecting so they jump to another Niche thinking that the niche was the problem and I have had a lot more success for my clients and for myself and watching other people and what they do just having people do [ __ ] and then see who resonates with it and then go in that direction and let a niche kind of organically evolve then picking something and trying to cram yourself and your clients into that particular spot especially when starting out you know and I feel like I am quite possibly the best case study you could ever have for this because never in my wildest imagination what I would have imagined five years ago even that I would be here talking about neurodivergence all day was not on my radar it was certainly a reality of my daily existence everything that I had to do five years ago in terms of my life was based around mine and my children's neurodivergence but it was not how I was making money five years ago I was making money building funnels

and then I shifted a little bit and started and then the pandemic came and then all of a sudden I find myself here now with a [ __ ] podcast Network talking about neurodivergence all day but that is absolutely not what I set out to be and what would have happened if you insisted on sticking with your stupid funnel Niche this whole time

all of the other right this is the thing this is why context is important this is why it depends because me I started off on this current Journey where I am now you know I'm like I the agency thing is not working for my lifestyle I want to have a bigger impact blah blah buying into the Kool-Aid of all the you know the course creators itself courses about creating courses like I'm gonna do that right and everything's gonna be better spoiler alert it's not the grass is not greener on either side of the fence you gotta water it and that makes your grass green period end a story but I'm sitting there like I'm going to create a course on sales and mindset because like that's what I'm good at and we're going to talk about like how to build packages and stuff and how to sell things and I'm going to make it for coaches and course creators and Consultants because those are the people that need it and so I started putting them stuff out there and that wasn't really what resonated so I started narrowing right okay you guys want to get clients and you really want to keep them for a long time okay I can teach you how to do that so I started talking about my experiences doing those things and I got some people into a course and holy hand all of them had ADHD shock ah that works this is a coincidence I'm just gonna keep talking about that's what I said and the way that I do things and it's entirely an accident that literally everyone who resonates with my messaging about my personal experience has neurodivergence of some sort that's correct and then I fell flat on my face into the point and realized hey nope that is not an accident they keep coming and they keep thanking me for talking about my experience and it's starting to become a central point so I gave up being this vague sales and mindset expert and apparently somehow accidentally became the poster child for freelancing with ADHD and I'm doing okay at it I think we're doing good and we're being honest and we're sharing our story and we're sharing things and that's why your Niche is not some weird industry Silo dividing line or some demographic information that you pulled out of a hat and decided would be able to afford you and that's what I think so when we talk about niching that's what we're really not saying a niche is not a demographic that you hope to sell to correct it is your unique combination of skills and and um experiences wow I forgot that word your unique combination of skills and experiences and the people that will resonate with those things that is your niche the number one advice that successful YouTubers give out about how to be successful on YouTube is not pick a super narrow Niche it's pick a super wide one and bring your point of view to it it's your combination of skills and experiences that makes your Niche unique well and YouTube is a good example here just like it is with selling the best advice you'll get about YouTube is go and create all the things and see what lands and then when you find the thing that lands dig down I mean Mr Beast

I can't I can't watch it it's I can't it's terrible I cannot watch it that man gets a million followers a week a million the size of his individual YouTube channel eclipses the number of people that pay for the New York Times the New York Post and the Washington Post combined y'all Mr Beast has a bigger audience at this point in time than the Legacy Media does and that's a really important lesson for you to learn here because what's Mr beast making money off of at that's it there's no product at the end of that nope he has convinced him to do that though damn right I mean can you imagine if Mr Beast had an offer at the end of those epic whatever again I don't know I don't watch but can you imagine if he had an offer yeah even even if no one old bought it a million new followers a week somebody's going to come in and buy something yeah this is the opportunity you have now to create and build something sustainable and the size of your audience matters less than your audience's willingness to stick around till the very end yeah absolutely but also what's Mr BEAST's niche please explain to me where in the niche worksheet you got in that crappy course Mr Beast has outlined the demographics and values and ideal client Avatar of his followers okay because he doesn't have a niche in the way we're all trying to make ourselves fit in that stupid little box in the first place I mean unless his Niche is 12 year old boys but it's not is yeah there are adults that watch it and there are younger children that watch it and there are people who watch it out of sheer morbid curiosity and try and study it to recreate it and there are so many different avatars in his audience but he didn't set off with a niche in the first place if you actually look back at his older content he started off just making stuff that he wanted to make and then he found a formula that worked to start going a little bit viral and he doubled down on it and that was it his Niche is his combination of skills and experiences and people follow him for him and that's it I mean and let's let's be real

s right with his and the [ __ ] lettering right he didn't but he practically invented YouTuber face like right

face so bad so bad it's like a 253 version of duck face yes it really is and for someone who is perennially awkward like there's nothing about that that appeals to me in any way like my YouTuber face is forever and ever gonna be bad bad my eyes are gonna be crossed I'm gonna look like I'm sneezing like it it will not be good so

what Mr Beast did do is he monetized his Hobby

and he's talked about that again I don't really I don't watch his videos I don't care much about the dude but he has talked about how it's not fun anymore yeah I mean which cry right when you're making millions of dollars a video in ad Revenue it's not fun anymore how sad for you yeah and this is another issue that happens a lot in entrepreneurship the number of people I know who have attempted to monetize their Hobbies is high yep Who start doing a new art thing A friend of mine started making filled cookies over she posted some pics like there's so much

I read the post there were five people on that post asking her when she was going to start selling them

now there's nothing inherently wrong with making something and selling it but there is something wrong and and this feels uniquely North American in the you're good at it therefore you must capitalize on it well I think it's that's intricately intertwined with the idea that things don't have value unless they have economic value and so Hobbies don't have value to the rest of society if you're keeping them to yourself

right but they only have value to you and it's not valuable to anyone else it's not valuable to capitalism it's not valuable to patriarchy it's not valuable to the colonies so stop doing it optimize your time for the work week unless you can sell them and then it becomes valuable to capitalism and then it becomes valuable to patriarchy and then it becomes valuable to the colonies and there's value in it for others and then it's acceptable to want to do your hobby but it also sucks the life out of it because doing your hobby is really about doing your hobby all day long it's about doing it when you don't feel like it it's about doing accounting related to it it's about dealing with Logistics and compliance and labeling related to it it's never just about doing what you love and conversely

actualized as women

when you are looking at the laundry list of things that you must do and you don't have enough time the hobbies are the first thing to go they are the thing that we give up because they don't benefit anyone else yeah they don't benefit our children or our spouses we're not making money off of them who needs this well you do yeah so it's almost like it's it's an act of protest and Rebellion it is

I think I think we should talk more about not monetizing our Hobbies very much on purpose and taking the time to do them anyway as a giant middle finger to the need to provide value to other people out of it every ounce of everything that we do

so what are you doing lately that's not monetized oh I have too much I am actually very very good at this I know you are and there's a reason I asked because not many when I ask people what their hobbies are I get so there's there's range but typically it's this wide-eyed stare of oh [ __ ] I'm supposed to have hobbies too you're gonna add something else to my plate to do and that's not what a hobby is supposed to feel like at all no and sometimes it can feel like that and it's okay if it feels like that as long as you recognize it and work to change it right well and there's a difference between the enjoyment of a thing because you enjoy it and the not enjoyment of a thing while you are still learning right we don't talk a lot so hot is my guitar right there that thing right and and mute such a great example of this because music requires talent to an extent most music is really about skill and you develop skill by practicing endlessly over and over and the practice is it's definitely not enjoyable for other people but oftentimes it's also not enjoyable for you like there's work there well and I think that's the key distinction with music and why it's been one of the harder ones for me to continue picking up is that when I fail at painting or watercolor or I stopped doing Diamond art for like a week no one notices if I put a diamond in the wrong spot I just peel off and no one cares when I'm failing at Guitar I am failing loudly everyone knows that everyone knows myself and anyone in earshot is well aware of my skill level when I'm trying to get better and that's part of what makes it hard which to come full circle is actually kind of what makes social media hard for a lot of people because you're worried that when you're not doing it well you're doing it poorly loudly and everyone knows and failing in public is it's a it's a really difficult thing for a lot of people I when I talk about this my podcasts doing it all live there are a lot of people who are like nope can't won't have to be able to go back and Rewind and edit out the places that I misspoke and for me it's easier because I I can't because I can't edit it out I just have to do it and accept it as is whether it's good or bad or otherwise yep here I am YOLO live with it right right

right but I feel I feel some real lessons to be learned here for us about the value in the practice of the thing and especially for entrepreneurs that's hard because [Music] we get paid based on the demonstration of our skills so for me to develop a skill that doesn't seem related and that I am bad at is very difficult to reconcile and honestly I think that's part of what I enjoy about hobbies and what has given me a lot of value from Hobbies not that they need to have value but they've made me very good at failing quietly which makes it hurt less when I fail loud

I also think with music in particular the moment when you get that note right so for me it's all vocal I can't play anything and I my rheumatoid arthritic hands will not tolerate it I sing let me be very clear I am a chorus girl because I am a tenor so like there's no career on the big stage for me singing however one of my goals for this year was to join a local performance choir I am relearning and I say relearning because I did at one point in time know how to sight read but only the upper bar and now that I am a tenor I have to relearn the lower staff and I'm like oh I don't know what notes are here I can look at them and go oh that's it but it doesn't hit in my head and so this process involves I have an app I that I use that gamifies it but mostly it's singing the same things over and over and over and over and over again and nobody likes it but I do it in my basement with the door closed nobody has to hear it mostly but me but let me tell you that moment when you get it right

is so good and that feeling translates to your work is the thing when I have correctly executed on a hobby

I get to take that self-esteem boost and take it with me where I go right yep yep yeah and again just the practice at failing the practice of learning with no Stakes right I I famously treat my hobbies a lot like a library and less like a list like it's not it's not a to-do list it's what do I feel like doing today right I have like four different Fiber Arts I can knit I can crochet I can cross stitch and I'm learning embroidery I have um obviously Diamond painting was a new one I picked up last year I haven't even finished one yet but I still love it that doesn't make me any less good at it because I don't do it every day listen The Unfinished project like everything The Unfinished project yes the whole library of Unfinished projects and There's real value in being able to flip between things yep I don't have to say this is the thing that I'm going to do today even if it doesn't hit right I can I started doing jigsaw puzzles digitally recently because I didn't because I don't have a place for big jigsaw puzzles and I also don't have a place to store the jigsaw puzzles when they are completed and I don't want to get rid of them um so now I'm doing them all digitally and I've found that like I'll get bored or I'll have to leave a puzzle in between going through my list of half completed things is really interesting exercise there's all these pictures there which one calls to me right now and that's the joy of having a library of hobbies yeah what's I'm trying right now um I did 75 hard once I successfully completed it that was an incredible exercise in figuring out how the hell to do something for 75 days um I took very little with me other than the knowledge that I actually can do something consistently for 75 days if the right circumstances are in place but it's also not a time for me to do that right now because I have other priorities one of the really really valuable habits that came out of that was reading 10 pages a day 10 pages is a small enough amount where I can just like move my bookmark back 10 pages and read to it and then if I'm done I can call it a day and instead of all the books staring at me nagging at me going come on Cheryl you bought me and you promised to read me before you would get to all the other ones on your wish list you can just work towards it but I don't have one book on my nightstand I have one book and my Kindle with like 100 books so I I can read 10 pages but it doesn't have to be 10 pages that suck it could be the 10 pages that are calling to me today right there's I must say I found real value in that exercise as someone who and I'm sure you were too a reader as a child like I I read until my eyes were cross-eyed and my thumbs hurt because I'd been holding a book in my hand for right that's so true ah I'm sorry I had to highlight this comment because I know this is hilarious this is fabulous what is the opposite what is it uh too short no value I don't know

it's tick tock that's that's the opposite of tldr it's tick tock like I think that we in the digital age have really lost sight of how our attention spans have shortened because even with my Kindle sometimes I'll flip through books right because they're all right there I don't even have to I don't even have to stay in the book that I am reading if it gets too hard or too mentally challenging I just go find a different book to read exactly this whole I think it's a neurotypical thing this like drive to completion you have to finish something before you start something new okay maybe they do I don't I can have 15 things mid project and as long as I don't feel ashamed of not completing something I can pick it back up again and keep going and keep getting value from it and keep giving value to it

I think we really gotta get away from everything having a monetary value yeah and for entrepreneurs in particular this is heart and we do actually get to wrap up my list today because we're going to talk about Outsourcing because this is a thing if you subscribe to traditional info knowledge about entrepreneurship at a certain level somebody's going to tell you about the difference between ten dollar tasks and a thousand dollar tasks right and you are only supposed to do those thousand dollar tasks Cheryl if you are doing ten dollar tasks you have not properly optimized your business cool and and a dollar amount on reading

or to pay to pay you for reading a book how much would you say that would be ten dollars right that I mean nobody's paying you a thousand dollars an hour just to read a book not even close not even never mind the fact there's not actually an unlimited supply of thousand dollar tasks for people in earlier stages of their business that's for actual celebrity so you know there's that when I'm done here I'm going to go spend the remainder of my work time uploading this video to sub stack into notion those are ten dollar tasks if ever There Were Ten Dollar tasks could I Outsource them absolutely if I had the budget for them I probably would so you know just in case you're curious It's neurodiversitymedia network.substack.com and you can go and subscribe page subscribers get additional podcasts but they also help to fund my ten dollar an hour task person to upload all of these videos for me until then I'm doing my own ten dollar tasks there's value in knowing what they are there's value in knowing how long it takes there's value in knowing the process so that when I do finally Outsource it it's clearly defined

this is different though from Outsourcing all of the areas of my life

yeah and today we are celebrating the fact that Cheryl finally got some help around the house

what six months eight months somewhere in that range we've been working on setting up everything to make that possible yeah including massive Lifestyle Changes oh huge lifestyle I mean when we had this conversation of I need somebody to help around the house you were still living in the army yeah we were still going to be traveling all the time no there are no RV cleaners there are only house cleaners and they certainly don't just like hitch their car up to your RV and follow you to wherever you're going to be next so it wasn't in the realm of possibility at that time now we're in a house the budget is adjusted things have shifted and it's happening but it literally changed almost everything in my day-to-day life to make it happen so that I could now free up those two hours every Thursday now 10 hour tasks by the way those two hours on Thursday yeah what did you actually gain

the mental load that immediately disappeared knowing I no longer had to manage that task not even the doing of the task okay like yeah cleaning bathrooms is not fun but I'm a mom I've seen worse

I mean that's the one bodily fluid I won't do but have at it um but like it it's not the doing of the task it was the mental load I no longer have to plan my week around making sure I have two hours on Thursday to reset the house so that I'm not stressing about it all weekend which is the reason I do it on Thursday in the first place someone else gets to make sure they show up they have their to-do list they use my supplies all I got to do is make sure I still have Windex and I can just go about my Merry way and know that it's done unloading the mental load of a task the end-to-end responsibility of a task to someone else it frees up far more time than two hours a week ever could

and I think that this is the lesson here this week it's the emotional value of your time not the monetary value of your time it's how does your time feel whether it's tick tock whether it's your hobbies whether it's a work product

if you don't love it if it doesn't make you feel good then you should get rid of it how do you do that figure out how to do that not figure out how to monetize your hobbies not figure out how to love social media that you don't love those that none of those things are what we're saying here how do you love 90 of your time that's the work and I think it really is about that [ __ ] you to capitalism and patriarchy and saying this is what I'm here to do

it's not to clean the toilets no and honestly I've said this quote so many times in the last year and this is this is what I'm striving for like this is the next decade of my life that I'm working on becoming this but I saw a meme that I cannot find to save my life once that said I've never met a relaxed woman and I went oh snap okay [ __ ] that's my mission that's the goal to be a relaxed woman I want to be as chill as a southern husband on Super Bowl Sunday every day of my life God that sounds delightful doesn't it endless snacks my favorite thing on the TV friends all around me and my biggest problem that my team might not win this time she's let's go for it and on that note y'all go forth and be Southern High Super Bowl Sunday if you need help doing it you know where to find us we're happy to talk you through and yeah all right all right y'all this has been another episode of side quests where we just kind of you know go from one place to another to another this is fun I'm always real glad we will tldr it next time

thanks for being here and we will see you all again soon bye

Neurodiversity Media Network
Neurodiversity Media Network
Authors
Briar Harvey