Transcription
Where the heck do I start? Especially if you're multi-passionate. If you have a ton of life experience and you have lots of interests and hobbies, you've got wisdom to share, but you really don't know how to share it or what exactly your audience needs from you. It's hard to make those kinds of calls intuitively.
And we want to create what we want to create and share with the world. And that's great. You can do that and you can talk about all the things that you're passionate about. And that's what I discovered. I'm good at helping people do. And that brings us to the first point. Who are you here to help? You're not going to be everybody's cup of tea. And you shouldn't try to be. Impostor syndrome and the stumbling blocks that we put in our own way are because we're focused on other people's people instead of our own people. And that's the first step in finding your topic and how to share your lived experiences. Who are your people?
The easiest way to find your people is to look at your life stage. Where are you at in life? Life is all about transitions. We're rarely at a stable place where no change is happening in our lives. This constant state of flux and change is how you discover your audience. And where you can serve best is always the people who are just a couple of steps behind you in whatever transition phase you're in.
It's always been my dream to not have to have a job, but I always had a job to fall back on. I always had my spouse's income to fall back on. I never had to really make it. When I got laid off, I was in a completely different life stage. I have been stuck in a life transition loop for a couple of years. I hit menopause, lost my job, my kids all left home, and I suddenly found myself in a new place where I didn't have any family or friends. And it was from there that I knew my starting point of who I could help. I wanted to speak to people facing the same insecurities that I am. Going into retirement with my life savings already gone due to the rising cost of living and unforeseen medical expense. I also knew that I wanted to help people whose careers had imploded and suddenly finding themselves adrift with nowhere to go.
Once I knew who I was talking to, then I needed to figure out the things that were easy for me to do but hard for other people to do. And that's kind of where you find your cross-section of the skills that you have to offer other people. But when I sat down to make that list, I started thinking about things like, "Oh, I can crochet." And I once kept a sourdough starter alive for like three whole months. And I make a pretty mean Texas kimchi and not a whole lot of people know how to do that. I can also do math in my head really easy, too. Like I get a number stuck in there and it never goes away. Aubrey Jenkins, I still know that your number is 2085163391 and I haven't talked to you since the seventh grade. But none of those skills are particularly useful for the people that I'm trying to help.
So I needed to reframe my question. It really should have been what's easy for me to do that's hard for my people to do. The people who are over 50 and just got their legs kicked out from underneath them. That's where I needed to start with making my list. And wow, man. I could really feel that relief, that stress come off of me as soon as I made that connection. It was like suddenly the crocheting disappeared and I was no longer thinking about the chili cook-off, but honing it in to how I can help you get started, doing the same thing that I'm doing, which is taking my experience and helping other people with it while growing an income on my own terms. Reframing it like this just really made it easier for my ADHD brain to wrap its head around.
So, here's my short list. I realized that I had four things that are easy for me and hard for the people that I'm trying to help: writing, making videos, researching and assimilating data quickly, and building AI tools to speed up the entire process without replacing you as the creative force. I don't really care anymore what anyone thinks. I'm here because I felt like this huge weight came off of me. Like, I know you can feel it through the screen. Ever since I went through menopause, I have to have lip gloss on or my lips stick to my teeth. It's like chronic cotton mouth. The relief of having clear focus on what I'm here to do and who I'm here to help. That's really the reason that I grew so fast. I was able to research all the pain points my audience and my readers are experiencing and being able to address those in my titles, my thumbnails, and my keywords.
There are tons of tools out there that you can use to do the kind of research I'm talking about. But I didn't have any money, so I had to figure it out a different way. I am going to be doing another workshop and I'm going to show you exactly how I took my list of the people that I'm helping and those four things that I know how to do and I put them into this AI and that's how I got my titles, my keywords, and the topics to talk about here on this channel and for my writing over on Substack. So, in this next workshop, I'm going to walk you through exactly what I did. There's a link in the description box and the pen comment below over to my Substack article about this workshop coming up and it is going to give you your homework. I want you to come up with a short list and drop it in the comments on that Substack post. I'm going to be selecting a handful to showcase in the workshop where I'm going to go and I'm going to put your stuff into my AI tools and you're going to get the same kind of information that I got to build my channel quickly with very little stress and in kind of just a slow tech kind of way. I've got a ton of workshops planned and you guys are going to be my case studies. We're going to solve your problems in live time and help you get your first income stream or your fifth income stream going with your lived experience. I'm Solo Shannon and we'll talk again soon. Bye y'all.