Challenges I’m Facing Today
Description
Hi everyone! Today I thought I’d do something different and share some of the challenges I’ve been facing in my business. I just want to share some of the things that have been weighing me down, and why I haven’t been sharing as much on the blog in the recent years.
In this episode, I cover
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Challenges I’m Facing Today [Transcript]
Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast. The show that’s all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. Now, your host, Celestine Chua!
Celestine Chua: Hey everybody! Welcome back to The Personal Excellence Podcast. So today I thought I would do a different type of topic. Usually, I cover a topic on personal growth and I share tips on that. Today I thought I would do some personal sharing, and I’d like to talk about some of the challenges I’ve been facing in my business. I thought it would be good to share some of the things that have been weighing me down.
I did feel that I haven’t been able to do deep personal sharing on my site for maybe at least the past couple of years. As you listen, perhaps you may understand why.
Challenges I’ve Been Facing
#1. Feeling that my work doesn’t matter
The first challenge that I’ve been facing, and I think some of you guys may have noticed this, is that the web is so cluttered today. There are just so many, you know, businesses? It’s cluttered in a very commercial way, and I guess this is what happens when the main driving point of a society, the main agent that people need to work towards, is money.
I’m not trying to build any negativity around money because I think money is important and it is a good neutral tool for us to objectify value. I’m not of the camp of people who go, “Money is evil,” but I also don’t see money as the “end all and be all” of life, or that it accurately indicates the value that people are giving to the world. Money as a tool definitely has its issues.
So when the main agent that people work for in the world is money, naturally when you have a clean starting ground (such as the internet in the 1990s), it will get dominated by very commercialized activities after some time. And oftentimes it reaches a tipping point, and beyond that point, you get diminishing returns.
So I started PE in 2008, and way before that I started my first website in 1998. The Web was in its infancy with very very few people online. I’ve seen the internet and how it has evolved in the past two decades. Today, the internet is hugely commercialized — almost everything is linked to paying or buying or money. Advertisements are everywhere.
While everything has its role and its place, I do feel that the internet today is extremely cluttered with businesses for every single thing, along with “me-too” businesses. It’s gotten to the point where there are so many life coaches and coaches online now, that sometimes I do wonder, Oh okay. Err. So where do I fit in? And how does my work matter?
When I started PE in 2008, the reason I started it in the form of a life coaching business online was because there wasn’t necessarily something like this. At that point, yes, the industry was already competitive. There were many personal development blogs. But I felt there was space for me to add unique value after assessing the landscape.
Now it’s 2018. If I were to start everything from scratch with no legacy of my work in the past 10 years, based on how the landscape is today, I would do things differently. Maybe I would start a multi-coach platform, like a platform that gathers coaches from all around the world or that consolidates the best minds to help others grow. This is just something I’m making up; it’s not something I’ve been thinking about. What I’m trying to say is, if I were to start something from scratch, I’d think, What is the most unique value I can give? And the biggest change I make in the world?
So for me, over the years what made the most sense is for me to keep building my legacy and make changes in people’s lives through my platform, articles, etc. And I’m very satisfied by that. But right now, I’m seeing like a gazillion of coaching businesses and life coaches. They’re just everywhere and I’m sure everyone is adding their unique value. But it does make me feel like my work doesn’t really matter anymore. Like, Why am I doing this? And can my energy be better used elsewhere instead?
So this is just something that comes to my mind every now and then. Because of how cluttered the Internet is today, and because I feel a lot of the “make money online” or “start your online business” businesses negatively encourage mass numbers of people to just jump into the industry without really having the motivation to truly help people at the core, if it makes sense to you.
#2. Lack of privacy
The second challenge that I’ve been facing would be privacy. I don’t know if you guys know, but I’m actually a very private person. I share all my personal stories on PE because I see that as a necessity. It’s not because I like to talk about these personal things. If there wasn’t this driving force to help others, I wouldn’t even talk about any of those things at all because I value my privacy a lot.
So when I started in 2008, obviously nobody knew me. I was just a random person. Over the years, as my blog grew bigger, as I developed clientele, etc., I did feel that I lost quite a lot of my privacy.
… And… this sounds depressing but it’s not. It’s not that depressing, okay? But I did definitely feel like I lost a lot of my privacy. And it’s like the world is blending together.
Imagine you have different friends, like friend A, friend B, friend C, friend D. So maybe you will say certain things to a friend because that’s your special relationship with friend A. And then you say certain things to friend B th
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