🔶 Six months in: On losing your way and reconnecting to your motivation

I've been writing a newsletter for six months.

It brings me great joy every week, but the other day I confessed something to my readers: lately, I've been feeling a little uneasy because I worried that the newsletter's growth had stalled.

New signups started being less frequent:

The open rates took a little dip (while still hovering around a solid 60%):

And I've not been able to find a second sponsor after the amazing first experience with House of Kaizen.

The stalling was also an internal feeling: the pile of ideas I wanted to test, and additional products I wanted to offer, kept growing – and with it the frustration of not finding enough time for any of them.

So I blocked an entire day on my calendar to analyse the situation and set a plan for the coming months:

Luckily, I didn't have to do it all by myself. The week before, Matt Cronin of House of Kaizen helped me apply their framework to my own business, to ensure that the needs of my audience and the value my product creates for them are aligned.

We reviewed every stage of the subscriber journey, to understand where there were opportunities for improvement (TL;DR: everywhere).

This was incredibly useful, but I also felt quite overwhelmed: here I was staring at a long list of even more opportunities to improve my newsletter, but where to start? I already didn't have enough time before.

Here's where the rules of good storytelling would expect me to say something along the lines of "...and that's when the light bulb went off". But it never works that way – at least not for me.

Rather than a light that suddenly turned on, I had to sit with the overwhelm and discomfort for a while before an important realisation slowly started to emerge:

I was worrying about the wrong things; chasing a definition of success that someone else defined for me and that I didn't really believe in.