I (Isaac) had a great chat with Anika Horn, host of Ecosystems For Change in Season 3 Ep 2.
You can find it here.
We talked about boundaries, burnout and how to start creating content in a sustainable way.

Here are some of the themes we discussed:

Everyone wants you to have a boundary, until that boundary apply to them.
If the rule is “you can have boundaries unless I they inconvenience me”, that’s not a boundary.
Boundaries are, almost by definition, based in disappointment.
When are you willing to disappoint someone?
When are you content to not give them everything they’d hoped for?
e.g. not staying back at work, declining an invitation, being out of someone’s price range, not magically living up to their impossible standards.

You have a choice between disappointing other people or disappointing yourself.
Without boundaries, you are the one who gets disappointed.
This gets celebrated as self-sacrifice, but it’s not sustainable.
Disappointing yourself is what leads to burnout - it kills the joy that sustains you in your work.

You can decide to concede defeat.
An effective way to uphold a boundary without losing your momentum is to concede defeat.
I’ve had projects in the past where I haven’t been what the client had hoped I would be.
We got two months into the work, I wasn’t the good little robot they actually wanted, so I didn’t bill them for any of the work I’d done so far.
They saved a decent amount of money, I walked away with an in-tact relationship, and the energy to take on two more clients for the same amount of battery.
I take the loss, and quickly move on to a win.
And the truth of it - it’s my fault for not spotting the issue in advance.

Other people’s opinions of you are none of your business.
You can’t control them, nor influence them as much as you’d like.
Think of it the other way - the people you dislike can’t make you like them, you own your opinion.
You control your actions, they control their opinions.
The moment you become responsible for making everyone like you, is the moment you begin to compromise on who you are.

If you want to start making content, do it in secret.
By making a few months of progress in silence, you learn what you enjoy making before other people can assign it a label (and set expectations).
If you build a collection or gallery of work, edit it together, then drip feed it to your audience, you won’t freeze up or lose momentum.

Enjoy the episode, and enjoy the other guests in the series - Anika is an excellent host.