Can you speak to me a little bit more about what the process was of like when you felt, when you were initially felt like, okay, I'm starting to feel burnt out. What did you do and how did you kind of keep things going with like the day job and working for your clients and all those things while also protecting your own mental health? Yeah, that's an important thing. I think that a lot of podcasters are going to, they miss out on it.
This episode, I think people are going to look at it and they're going to go, oh, I don't need to learn about that. But it's actually one of the most important things that I think podcasters or any content creator is going to encounter is the straight up like grind and feeding the machine and feeding the beast. And it needs to really be looked at because it can really cause a lot of physical and mental damage to you.
And me being someone who in the past used to do things at the extreme and it'll be like, ah, it's going to be okay. Now that I'm older, it has now caught up to me. And just because I was younger, didn't mean that I couldn't handle it. I could, but it did catch up to me later down the line. So to answer the question about what did I do and how did I kind of like take those steps forward to take steps back?
You know, in the beginning, when I first started this whole journey, if someone would have told me to, well, they did tell me because I took a course in and I actually had a coach about it. Uh, they said, set up the elements of your business to where the moments in which you get burned out can kind of just run on their own and you can acquire leads. You can acquire, you can build whatever content that you need. Um, not saying that content can be automated.
It can be at points in time, but it turns out to me crap content, but just setting up those initial pieces, my business, setting up my email list. I'm sure, you know, we have, you know, you've talked about email lists on this, on this podcast before, you know, and the importance of having an email list and harvesting those leads. So in my mind, my coach had told me, uh, you need to put this into your head.
Um, doesn't matter if you're a business owner or a podcaster, a YouTuber, a blog or whatever, set up something like an email list so that you can automate it and have it coming, you know, have people coming to you and, you know, you're still looking for business, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to be completely active. So for me, that's what ended up happening. I had an email list. It was con it's still constantly growing every single day grows every single day.
Um, I communicate with those people every now and again, but, um, for me, uh, I had that aspect and then I had the aspect of content creation. And the content creation was the, that was the thing that was really kind of just, uh, burning me out. And I was strictly creating YouTube content, knowing that with YouTube content, I could, I could really, uh, boil it down into different pieces of micro content, right?
So I could say video, and then I could take the audio, turn it into a podcast if I wanted to, and then I could take that, transcribe it, turn it into a blog, take that trend, you know, the typical things that you hear. But for me doing all those things without the funds, without the money was like overwhelming, you know, and to this day, it's still kind of overwhelming because I like things done a specific way.
And so, um, I ended up kind of just taking a step back because the content creation became so overblown. It became so, um, uh, you know, hefty on my end. And I was like, I can't do this. And I'm creating more content that is bad than I'm creating content that is good. And I think that's important. It's like watching your favorite TV show. It's first season would be awesome. And then they go to the second season. It's awesome.
Then by the time you, you're hoping by, if they get to season five, it's still a great show, but you've seen some shows where by the time you get to season four, they just really are not that good because it's like, they're just really trying to reach for too much. And, you know, to use an old phrase, you know, they just jumped the shark in the shows. And I didn't want to do that with my content.
I didn't want to jump the shark and just say like, here are the five reasons why podcasters need, uh, be socks, you know, podcasts don't even know about like specific socks. Like I know what I need for specific socks, but that's content that I think that they just don't, it's not really that's being searched. It's not being, you know, it draws curiosity, but then they look at it and they go, no, that's not good.
So I just took a step back and, um, slowly just kind of took a step back and slowly just kind of took a step back. I notified my subscribers, told them, Hey, you know, I'm taking a break. This is, this is something that I have to do. And, uh, that was a year ago now. And so that, that is, that is what I've needed. I've needed like a solid year to really kind of recover.