A Newsletter From Counterweight Creative
About Building An Audience Around Work That Matters

Hi everyone, I hope you and your families are safe, healthy, remaining positive, and maybe even inspired and creative while your life and routines have been flipped on end.
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I'm hunkered down in Edinburgh, Scotland for the time being and have been feeling both reflective and creatively energized. That's actually what I want to share a bit about with you in this new and revitalized newsletter.
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Focus On What Fuels You

It's been a long time (over a year) since I last wrote a weekly newsletter about podcasting or anything else.
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I like writing, and actually write and publish something every day. But the newsletter always felt like something I should be doing rather than something I wanted to be doing. Rather than being the type of writing that filled my tank, it usually drained it. I'm guessing you can relate.
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We all hear that we should be building an email list for our podcasts and businesses, we should be doing more Facebook Lives, we should be posting daily on Instagram along with a hundred other things.
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The thing is, especially if it's only us doing the work, we can't possibly do all the things. Eventually, trying to do everything leads us to burn out and give up on creating anything at all, and that's a tragedy.
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Around the same time I stopped my last podcasting newsletter, I made a decision. I stopped reading books, I stopped listening to podcasts, I stopped reading blogs, and I removed all social media from my phone.
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I went on a complete content diet and focused only on doing the things I had been putting off.
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These were things I knew would help my business. But they weren't nearly as sexy as the dozen new hacks, strategies, and frameworks presented to me on a daily basis in the content I was consuming.
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The result of my decision to shut out the noise was that I was able to turn inward and focus on what was right for me and my business at the time. It turns out that this was also what was right for my team, and in turn, our clients.
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It was also instrumental in helping me find my creative fire again and actually get excited about creating, experimenting, and showing up bigger in the world.

Our culture is always eager to give us another thing to add to our to-do lists. It's always eager to make us feel guilty for not following along with the rest of the crowd, be that a crowd of podcasters, marketers, business owners, creators, or just, well... people.
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The thing about guilt is that it can't be forced on us without our permission. We must receive and accept guilt in order to feel it, and we can just as easily choose not to.
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Instead of accepting guilt over what others think we should be doing, we can choose to focus on only doing what fuels us, what excites us, what inspires us to do even more.
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Sometimes that might be taking a break, turning inward and isolating yourself from the noise of the outside world.
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If that's what you need to do to show up bigger in the future, do it without guilt, without shame, and don't let anyone tell you you're wrong to do so.

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Cool Sh*t I've Been Digging

• ​This video by Primacoustic shows how big a difference acoustically treating your room can really make.
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• I'm a big fan of long-distance cycle touring. In 2014 a friend and I did a 2500km tour from Norway to Croatia over 3 months. Central Asia has been the top of my travel bucket list for a while, so this short documentary of cycle touring through Kyrgystan has me all kinds of excited.
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• I've fallen completely head over heels, fan-boy in love with... a jeans company. Their brand story documentary is incredible storytelling and might make you fall in love with them too.
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• I listened to two episodes of Levar Burton Reads this week that felt incredibly poignant given our current global situation. As Worlds Collide and Staying Behind​
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• It's been a long time since I've taken as many notes while listening to a podcast as I did while listening to James Clear's episode of Creative Elements, one of my new favourite shows. If you're looking to make a living as a creator of any kind, definitely check out this show.
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• I'm a MASSIVE fan of everything ConvertKit does. To me, they embody at the highest level the positive impact a company can have in the world through their generosity, empathy, and leadership. It's no surprise then, that I'm loving their new daily show, The Future Belongs To Creators.
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• We had an awesome client launch this week! Shauna VanBogart and her incredible show Just Being hit #31 on Apple Podcast's Entrepreneurship chart! Apparently the show even made it's way into the ears of Gwyneth Paltrow on the recommendation of a friend. That's pretty rad.
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• For any pop-punk fans out there, I haven't listened to an album on repeat as much as I have been with This Too Won't Pass by Can't Swim in a loooong time.
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• I wrote a blog post this week, 5 Ways to Fix Your Podcast's Discoverability Problem that I'm really happy with. I'll likely add to that post over time as I feel like each section could have been 4x as long...

It feels good to be feeling creative again friends. Thanks for doing the work you do, even when times are hard like they are for many in our communities right now. You're an inspiration to me, and probably to many others as well.
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Keep it up.

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That's all for this week. Talk soon y'all.

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