“Today I’m going to help you reverse-engineer your dream life for 2025.”

That’s how I started my most recent YouTube video, which is all about how to set your goals for 2025.

2 weeks later, I was sobbing uncontrollably in bed,

Feeling like a hypocrite with all my goals in shambles.

(An embarrassing story I’ll share if you keep reading.)

Get to the root cause

Ask yourself why you feel burnt out at least 5 times.

For me, I kept thinking about everything I had to do -

While I stayed on schedule most of the time,

I ended up breaking down in a random hotel room in Japan…

Because I thought I had “too much work.”

(I almost wanted to quit making content and just “get a normal job” because of this.)

But then I asked myself why I felt so overwhelmed.

It turns out, the problem wasn’t feeling overwhelmed.

It was me telling myself I was a failure for not knowing how to do something (rip my accounting and bookkeeping).

So the root cause was self-confidence, not the number of tasks I had to do.

And this was exacerbated by comparing myself to others.

I felt behind all my employed friends,

Whose companies helped with their retirement funds.

When I identified the problem (comparison leading to negative self-talk which drains my energy), it became easier to solve it.

Re-align with your goals and values

Usually, burnout happens when you keep doing things that drain your energy.

To get back on track, I reminded myself of my values: growth and kindness.

And my Life North Star Metric is to positively impact as many people as I can.

I realized I have a higher chance of doing that with my own content business than if I just got a “normal” job.

And that gave me the energy I needed,

Reminding me why I love doing what I do.

Create a list of actions to do today, tomorrow, and later

I like to keep my tasks simple, because I can’t plan too far into the future 😅 

So I wrote:

Today

• Seek support from a community (people were pretty nice 🥺)

Tomorrow

• Catch up on things that give me energy (editing fun videos…I’m excited about a sponsor video coming out even though filming it was pain)

Later

• Figure out accounting/tax stuff :(

That’s all for today! Thanks for reading ❤️ 

Kindly,

Jennifer

P.S. this is a bit of what I teach in my life tracking course - I’ll start the next cohort in December! But I wanted to share these insights today so you can hopefully make use of them even if you don’t purchase the course.