The Super Secret Podcast Introduction

Hi Friends!

Few quick notes before we get to the full transcript:

If you’d like to read the Freelance Palace of Despair, the link is here: https://www.oberdinconsulting.com/campaigns/view-campaign/WGjQEpkk_0ea08DNYtya1CHcyL8ybm-fqNrrG2BPpmUSoQdNcHRQR7vkNr2C8i5INFCx8hDFjSjAgJKjYJJbeaU_f0jxNZi0

If you’d like to check out Auntee Rik, her website is here: Auntee Rik | Business Operations Systems Specialist

Transcript:

All right.

OK, I hope this is working. Hi everybody. It's Corey after a very long time. So welcome to the Super Secret Chaos Freelancer podcast for realsies. This is a little experiment that I'm running.

And admittedly, it's a little self-serving, so if you recall back in June, if you aren't new here and if you are new here back in June, I sent an e-mail saying that I was going to go on summer hiatus. And if I'm honest, I was planning on going on summer hiatus forever.

I was feeling very burnt out about creating an e-mail, even if it was once a month like it would literally weigh on me for weeks because I wanted to feel like I was contributing something to the conversation about working for yourself, and quite frankly, I put a lot of pressure on myself that I probably didn't need to. And as I was going through the summer, I was like, I'm going to pay attention to if I miss Chaos Freelancer.

And Surprise! I didn’t miss it at all, but what I missed was my friends and hearing back from them earlier this month. Well, it's only September 6th earlier this month, like mid-August, my kids went back to school, and I experienced something that happens literally every year and every year. I am shocked and surprised, and like, betrayed by it, which is, I entered into what I called in a newsletter back in September 22, 2022, the Freelance Palace of Despair, which is the time period where you hate everything. Nothing you do is good enough. You question like everything you've ever done in your whole career.

And you maybe start to think that you should just find a job somewhere and like go internal, but then also you're like, “nobody's gonna want me because I've been freelancing for 15 plus years.” So what can I do? I knew what was happening.

I wasn’t as surprised and betrayed, as I normally am, because I wrote a newsletter about it and a lot of times if I start going through something, I will go back through my old newsletters and be like has this happened before and it always has. So I read this newsletter that I wrote which I will link to in the show notes called Freelance Palace of Despair.

And it reminded me that this is really not a big thing. First of all, it's a phase, it's going to change. It's going to get better. There's nothing external that's happening to me that's causing it. It's literally me comparing myself to what other people are doing.

You know the old phrase. This is really embarrassing that I'm saying this, but you compare everyone else's outsides to your own insides. Well, annoyingly, that's what I'm doing. So I took a step back and I took stock of what was going on.

Well, and I also did something that I rarely do anymore, which was I posted a link to that newsletter on threads and said well, this is happening again. This is freaking great and I did not use the word freaking but you can use your imagination…so I posted it and all these people who I know and love were like, ohh me too. This is also a thing that I am going through and I thought to myself this is what I miss. This is the thing that I miss about Chaos Freelancer.

So I thought about how I used to write Chaos Freelancer and one of the things that I would do was that I would go for a walk and I would literally talk out loud and then I would come home and I would place the phone and my voice memo in front of a Word document and I would just do voice to text transcription and then I would edit it and then I would add gif to it and I would send it out. So I decided to skip the middle part and I've always wanted to test doing a podcast.

Just I haven't wanted to put the work or the effort into it to make it fancy or a thing, or even something that people might want to listen to, like I am just talking into the ether and I decided that I'm just going to try this for from now until the end of the year. And if you hate podcasts. And you're like, I don't want to do this. Don't worry.

We'll also be transcribing this for you in an e-mail. Also, if you like listening, please do. To start, I would love to hear from y'all and how you are doing because I feel like the demise of Twitter has really caused me to lose touch with a lot of freelance friends. I noticed that.

We kind of see LinkedIn not necessarily as a place to connect, but as a place to get clients, so the the banter isn't the same, some of us are on threads. Some of us are not. Some of us are trying to use Instagram a little more. Some of us are not, so it really feels like a lot of the people I used to be in contact with. I I just don't talk to you anymore. So first of all, I'd like to know.

How are you?

Are you also in the freelance palace of despair?

What are you doing to, like, get out of it or find your way out of it and then invite you to come along with me on this little journey? So what is this journey going to look like? So for the next 3:00-ish months, 4:00-ish months as we go in through December, I'm going to try to record a podcast.

Episode every two weeks.

And it's going to focus on all of the same topics you know and love from Chaos Freelancer. And it's going to have minimal editing and not like and there's not going to be a theme song. It's literally just going to be me and you. OK. So that's what's going to happen. And that's what you can expect. And we'll try to keep them between. 7 and 10 minutes. But as I'm sure you've already guessed, I really like to talk. So we're going to work on that. The last kind of bit of business is that I do want to acknowledge where this idea came from. I follow a systems professional named Auntee Rik on threads I discovered her own threads thanks to a friend of mine who shared her work (And for the friend is Bri, The Everyday Lawyer and if you follow Bri, you know her recommendations are usually incredible. And Auntee Rik has some great courses. If you are trying to get your kind of business systems up and running or feel like you have a system. So that's. That's kind of #1, but I joined her mailing list and about, I would say, Like 3 or 4 weeks after I joined, she transitioned to a secret podcast.

And her secret podcasts are like little voice memos. And as I was listening to one of them, I was like, wait a minute. Like, that's kind of what I want to do. Y ou know, I would love to do a podcast for Chaos Freelancer, but I don't want to go about it in the traditional way of like. I'm going to have seasons and I'm going to have show art and I'm going to have a theme song.

Cause I just I I am a perfectionist and if I I can either do things one of two ways, I either do it the right way and like follow all the rules and freak out and then never put it out or I do it my own way and I like just try it and see what happens. So that's what we're going to do this.

Time and to that note, it's a little bit like coming home because back in 2006, seven so almost 20 years ago, I had a podcast called My Way or the Highway. And the funniest part about all of this is I am currently recording and doing this on the same software I recorded and edited my original podcast on so little bit of the journey there a little bit of the inspiration and then a little bit of me kind of revisiting something I've done in the past. So if you're up for that and you want to see what happens, please follow along and I will include in your e-mail the link to how to follow the podcast using the Secret Podcast Feed, and also the link to the blog which will have the transcripts. So thank you so much.