Creative Life in Motion: Be Real, Create
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How can you really grow and share your creative work on any platform, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, wherever it may be, and actually enjoy the ride without feeling this feeling of. You're doing it wrong, always nagging at the back of your brain everybody has a theory, a method, a system that all kind of sounds the same. And that there's this missing piece that
What am I doing wrong? I think what happens is we have this sense. That we're doing it wrong, and so we keep looking for the right answers, when in fact, it's the messy parts that allow us, it's the failures and the mistakes that allow us to grow and move on to that next bit. I'm gonna share with you all the mistakes that I made in [00:01:00] 2025. So far, so when I'm filming this Mid August and I had like this great plan at the beginning of the year,
Hey. Uh. Sorry to interrupt. This is editing Karen, and if you're watching this episode on YouTube, you might notice that I am not looking at the camera the entire time. I'm actually looking at the wrong camera. I thought I was recording in, but if I re-recorded this, I would kind of be conflicting with everything that this episode has to say. It's kind of serendipitous.
So we'll forgive that and. Let's move on.
Let's talk about that today on episode number. 64. If I'm wrong with that number, it's okay. You know that's a mistake. We're allowed to make mistakes. The Creative Life In Motion podcast. We don't wait until we reach our [00:02:00] goals to be happy.
We fall in love with who we are. Being on the way and creative work, write this down. Creative work is an inside job. It's not something that AI can write for us. I had like this great plan at the beginning of the year,
this is the year of finishing and I am here to share with you. All my mistakes, all my failures that I did not, because I don't want you to repeat these mistakes or failures. It's because I would like to take the curtain off like I promised, you know, peek behind the curtain of my creative life in motion.
And I think that mistakes and failures are actually celebration, and I'm gonna get to that a little bit later on in this episode. But what's really funny, oh, it's, it's not really funny. It's interesting when you come [00:03:00] out on YouTube and you create a video and you're really excited, you're sharing with people some process or something that you've adopted and you've planned to, and then you go back and rewatch that eight months later and you realized, oh, this was really good.
This was so good. And then you can literally pinpoint the part. That was so, so bad and was not the right move. And the way I like to frame this is that when you have some sort of plan or some sort of goal and get that. Into motion. You never know what it's going to feel like or what it's going to be like until it is actually in motion.
And that's because a lot of times when we set out to do something new, we've never been in that space before or we're trying to improve something that we haven't been able to do [00:04:00] well before and we're working hard on doing it well. So I created a video. I'll, let's see if I can link it up here. I'll make sure that I link it at the end of this episode as well.
And if you're listening on your earbuds, I'll make sure that the episode is linked below, it was a great video. It was planned with me, and I still have that plan to this. Stay because it's the guiding light. It's the guiding post that I can go back to, and it is a blueprint that I continue to use over and over again.
What has changed is the reality of living in the blueprint and knowing that it just wasn't. It wasn't a good fit. I didn't have the right amount of time scope. So whenever you're planning some sort of project, there's a couple of different movable layers, right? There's the scope of time that it takes the scope of money, and you [00:05:00] know, if you're doing something and you're not yet earning money from it, like my example is writing a book then.
The only thing that really can move is the time scope. So it doesn't mean that you need to turf the plan or that you can't do it, it just means that you need to document like the reality of, okay, this is where I fell off the cliff. There's no harm in that. It's actually a celebration because anytime that you hit a road bump, that means that you've succeeded at failing. And whenever you can succeed at failing, that means you can have a solution. You can go a different way, you know that you, you're not going to go that way, or you're gonna readjust right.
That's what we talk about on the Creative Life in Motion Show, and I might not have told you my name when we started. I'm Karen Wilson, and I'm your host. If I didn't tell you, I'm telling you now. [00:06:00] And you know what? That's okay.
This doesn't always have to be polished when we sit down. Let's move on to the rest of the story. Do you remember that there was like this person, I was like, years ago, I can't even remember their name, so I'm sorry if I don't remember your name, but he was on the radio all the time and.
There was like a morning show and he'd come on with his nice deep voice and he'd say, and now for the rest of the story, well, if you don't remember, then maybe it was just in, in my hometown where we lived. Maybe it wasn't like a global broadcast or maybe you're just not old enough. Okay, moving right along.
I'm gonna tell you a little bit about what that episode was about. I was super excited to be able to say at the beginning of the year, 2025 is a year that I'm gonna finish what? I started two books in manuscript form [00:07:00] and my process was to publish both of them. Okay. That was, it's great. So I was stuck.
I was trying to figure out. How am I going to do this? Like I know how to write a book from scratch, but it feels like I'm so disconnected from this work. I needed to figure out a way to get back connected with the work that I had already done, and the first step was just getting into what it's like to be that persona.
So it's not like a fake it till you make it. I mean, I've done this before. I asked myself, Karen. What do writers do? Okay, writers write, and at the time I wasn't doing any writing. I had just gotten off the road from my one woman show, and I had, quite frankly, my whole everything was just a little scattered trying to figure out what I'm going to do with this next year of my life when it comes to creative [00:08:00] work.
And I really, really wanted to get these books finished. So being overwhelmed. I did what a lot of us are doing in 2025. I, I went to AI and I'm like, please, please give me a path on how I could, like I told it my problem and I said, give me a step-by-step solution on how to get back into this book. And it did and I was so excited.
And you know what? I put that into action and then I put this whole. Template into action of like, let's write a book. There was another one called Finish What You Start, and they're still really great. They still really work and I'm gonna tell you exactly where I fell off the cliff. I, so everything was, everything was great. I went back to the manuscript. And I, I did the first step. I recorded all my hours so I know exactly how long it took me and I was like [00:09:00] recording it, like what I felt like as a real adulting, I'm a real adult thing to do and a real professional thing to do to record all my time so I know exactly how much time and money writing a book and marketing it and then launching it and all of that would take, okay.
So you realize that's three projects in one. The first step is to get the thing written. The second step is to tell people about it, and the third step is to launch it. And they all overlap. So this is cool. I'm gonna do this right this time. I'm saying to myself, because the first book I did, I got the first part done and I got it published and all of that.
And then I didn't tell anybody. I just kind of ditched on the marketing. So this time I'm gonna do it right. I have it all done. So my plan was to share with you, and I said right there in that video, [00:10:00] share with you every step of the process. And I was sharing with you every step of the process. But the problem is I.
Did not trust in the system that I used to write my first book. I thought that there must be something better out there, so I consulted with ai, told me about Save the cat method, and then I, you know, wrote everything. That way I am like, okay, I am, this is fun. Like, and now I'm dissecting my manuscript and I'm putting back together and I'm a real writer now.
And I think I even said that in one of my follow-up videos, but I was wrong. What happened was I ended up with a mess. I ended up with. Something that didn't feel like my work anymore, I ended up disconnected. Uh, I, I didn't, you know, get AI to do [00:11:00] any writing for me. I'm very stubborn that way. I want all of that to come right from my noggin, but.
Somehow there was a disconnect. Somehow it feel felt unfinished. So I dove into testing the part of the book that has to do with walking. I started testing it in a program. Some of you might be in that program, some of you might have tried some of those tools, and I just like, I wanted, I wanted to share some of the work in the book before the book was launched because the people that decided.
That they're that, that they wanna try it. They don't know it yet, but I'm gonna give them the manuscript for free if they wanna be one of the beta readers. It's all part of being part of the process of a book. But I was disconnected from the book and I had these timelines that I was going to, and then I had my trip to Italy, and when I got back from Italy [00:12:00] in May, I was already behind.
And that was kind of like a moment in time where it's like, I wanna take some of this lifestyle back with me of like not being in a rush to do anything and really ensuring that I'm putting out quality. And by that time, this channel had taken off on its own. Everybody wanted, everybody liked the walking content.
It was showing me my analytics. And that's kind of bringing us to where we are today.
Now I need to back up a bit. And talk about the mistakes that I made,
Mistake number one was not following my own outline and thinking that there was a different [00:13:00] one out there that would help me get the job done better. And you know what? To be honest with you, for all the times that I tried writing books. And then I landed on this framework that I used to finally get my first book written and published.
Those other ones didn't work for me, so I found myself second guessing myself that there must be something better because there's always something better, and there's always a message in front of me saying, you're doing it wrong. If you would've done it like this, you would've had more success. More people would've bought.
Huh, well, that tune of going down the right out the wrong outline track, uh, it really threw my book for a loop. And then, so when I was doing the, the edits and all of this is documented on my channel, you can, you can watch this all unravel. It's, you know, it, it [00:14:00] is what it is. You, you make mistakes along the way, and I've always promised, like, I'm gonna share with you everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, the, the spots that are, you know, not fun.
But if, if you're moving forward, you're winning. That's all there is to it. Second mistake that I made was actually thinking that I wasn't a real writer if I wasn't using Microsoft Word. So I moved everything over to Microsoft Word, and it still gives me that, an icky vibe, an icky feeling. And the reason why it gives me an icky feeling, I think it must be because high school wasn't really my jam, and it kind of reminds me of high school, although we didn't have.
Microsoft Word in high school. Oh. Oh. This is me remembering on the fly. It must've been when I went back to school. [00:15:00] I went back to school when I was, um. Uh, mid twenties and I, and I was in my English class. In fact, Eng, my English teacher said, I, you know, I plan to see some of your publications and I'll look out for them.
He wrote that on one of my assignments, and I remember we had to learn in the computers, and I'm an adult learner here, we had to go and, and start handing in our assignments on the computers. And in Microsoft Word and, and it was just so foreign to me. I was like, pen to paper girl. And I was like, you gotta wait for the printer.
You gotta hope that it's really good or else you gotta go and re-edit and save it on floppy disc. And it was just so clunky to me. It just has that, and, and I felt like such a failure. It made me feel as though. I wasn't able to be free with my writing.
I didn't take typing in school, so it's like a [00:16:00] hunt and pack, right? And, and I had to transfer everything that I had written by hand onto this computer. And that was part of the assignments, always not my favorite parts. He didn't make us do all assignments like that. But the ones he did made me feel the ick, you know?
So that's maybe why I don't like Microsoft. Word to this day, I don't know, but if I can recognize that it's something that blocks me, then, then why? Why? Why expose myself to that every time and block block me from writing Because I don't have a good energetic feeling in that space. Right? Environment is everything.
So, you know, if there's some sort of block that you have in creative, I, I encourage you to explore where that's coming from, rewrite your story and reorganize your environment so that you can get over that block. [00:17:00] Okay. The next mistake that I made was, I felt as though it was like this YouTube channel here, right?
I felt as though. I was being rewarded when I stayed in the box of what I was categorized as in YouTube, so that being, um, weight loss. I never wanted to talk about weight loss ever. I never wanted that to be a thing unless it has to do with mental weight. Right. So you'll always hear me saying Walking is good for creativity, for, you know, mental health.
But you know what, that doesn't really take off. And when you're in a fitness box. You know, people like it to a certain extent. And then it's, I'm not gonna talk about walking forever, like it's part of the puzzle. It's not the whole puzzle. It's part of who I am and what Creative life in motion is. It's not the whole thing.
So every time I do a [00:18:00] video on walking, I'm rewarded by YouTube because it knows my audience and it throws it out. And every time I do a video like this on creativity. Or, or a, a podcast episode like this on creativity or something, you know, that has to do with mindset. It doesn't do as well. And so I decided that I was gonna create a whole new channel just for the writing journey.
And I did that. I took all my writing videos off of this channel and I put them on another channel. Big mistake. Then guess what? Karen is splitting herself. Karen is splitting her attention, her workload, her her thoughts, her planning processes, and now dividing her into two different people. Right? No, no, no, no, no.
This is YouTube. This is creative life in motion. [00:19:00] This is not. Like algorithm tube, right? So I've always said to other creators, and I've always say this, keep the U in YouTube. So I ended up bringing everything back to this channel and putting that second channel on sunset, so that second channel links over here.
As a creative person, you have to really sit in the thing, like what I'm sharing in creative work. If it doesn't feel good a year from now, like if you imagine yourself and the topic that you're talking about.
And you imagine what that looks like and feels like a year from now if you are still doing that and two years from now. And if you wanna be known for that, I think that that's how we need to like really think and plan around the, the content that we make as creatives. [00:20:00] Because here's the thing is like AI is changing the game for everything so.
I think what's happening now is we're seeing a lot of the gurus. They're talking about how. It's interest media is not necessarily SEO, and that's a huge benefit for anybody that has more than one topic that they wanna talk about. Because what's happening now is we're not only being brought up in.
Google search, but we're also being brought up in AI under the umbrella topic.
So the biggest problem that I did was trying to force myself to be in the box
the more I felt myself boxed into the niche, the less excited that I was to make videos, every day matters. Every day that I am not doing what I'm meant to do matters [00:21:00] every day that I am doing what I want to do matters. Because time is a gift we can never take for granted. So instead of being stuck in the. Yuck at rhymes. Stuck in the yuck. I decided, Hey. Hey, Karen. Yes. I had a conversation with myself.
What I didn't have in my plan was the fact that it took me 20 years of life experiences and failed attempts before I finally sat down and got my first book written within 90 days. And I've only been working on these two books for. A couple of years and what I realized is that they're both part of this book and, and then there's another part [00:22:00] and that's why the universe, God, who, whoever has put me on pause so that, because these things that are accents to the book.
Had to, had to be there before I could finish it. And if you resonate with that, I wanna, I wanna hear, I wanna hear from you. We do not get to, to decide the outcome. And sometimes we don't get to decide the timeline when it comes to things that we're creating that have not been in the world before. So if you're, if you have a YouTube channel and you've been working on it off and on for 15 years, but you still have a vision like me.
Of what it's going to be. Consistency is your best [00:23:00] friend. You don't, and, and right now there's never been a better time. This channel this, it's not gonna turn into YouTube or social media growth strategy.
Let's be clear with that. There's plenty of other people that do that. What I'm here for is your creative work support is getting the creative work done because there's nothing that will speak more than being able to. Express your creative work in whatever way that that looks like. If you're not doing that part, part of your health is missing.
If you need to hear that again, you can rewind it. I'm not gonna say it again. We're not in high school.
If you keep chasing what you think other people want from you, you're gonna end up procrastinating. You're gonna end up burnt out, you're gonna [00:24:00] end up uninterested in anything that you do. I think there's a mix. It's important to know the experience that you help people with. Because a lot of times we're so close to it, we don't even see it.
But I guarantee you, you continue showing up authentically as you are and not like as this persona that you think you should be. You know, sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. Sometimes the persona that you are being is not somebody else's persona, but it's the person. That you see in that future self.
Give you back to the example when I asked that question. I'm a writer. What do writers do? Okay, so if you are a YouTuber, what do YouTubers do? What? What do you [00:25:00] have to do if you are a course creator? What do course creators do? What do they do when they wake up? What do they do?
Like they're not sitting, scrolling, and looking for. Other people's ideas, unless they're procrastinating or not allowing their trueness to come out. 'cause that's what creative work is. It is an inside job and the di the only difference between you and the people that you feel like have made it in the space that you wanna be in is the fact that they're showing up.
They're showing up and they're doing what needs to be done. I was just watching, um, I mentioned Taylor Swift a lot, but I was just watching, uh, or listening to an interview that was, that she did when she was 14 and. It was like she was, they were asking her questions like, do you wanna be famous? And she's like, oh, I just want to [00:26:00] like, I just wanna play my music.
And whatever happens, happens now, you know? She was probably thinking, yeah, she'd like to be famous. And I think she did say that, but the fact that she knew at 14 that she was either going to be in music or if she wasn't in music, she was gonna be a writer. And she was very, very clear. Okay, this is, this is what I'm gonna do.
And obviously she's shown up day after day after day after day, and she does what that persona does. So if you wanna be a writer, you have to write every day. If you want to be healthier and fit, you have to move your body every day and feed your body with things that support the cellular growth. If you want to have a good mindset.
Guess what? It comes with action. The more you continue to do the things that you tell yourself that you're going to do every [00:27:00] single day. The more excited you're gonna get about it, the more momentum from inside that you're going to get. It's not until we turn off that inside switch and we start listening to all the other people marketing their solution to you with a scared tactic that you are doing it wrong.
The only thing that you are doing wrong is not doing it. Do you follow? I'm sure you do.
You want your audience to know that you're alive, you're connected, you're rooted, you. Practice what you're sharing. You're authentic. People are throwing that word around left, right, and center. But still, all these videos are coming up polished and planned.
And keep the you and YouTube keep you and your creative world. [00:28:00] Just keep doing it like your life depends on it, because it does. Give yourself permission to be messy. My very, very, very, very, very first podcast episode. Okay, it's still there. You can still go back and listen. I did all the things right. I followed Pat Flynn's course on how to launch a podcast, did all the things, did my cover art. It was called Bring on Balance. This, this podcast name has been changed three times.
Did anybody scream at me for changing the name? No. I was so nervous about changing the name. But anyways, that episode I explain about, I talk about how I have all these different interests, and Pat Flynn was the first person that ever came out onto a stage and he described himself as a generalist. A generalist, that sounds so exciting because [00:29:00] that means I don't need to pick one thing.
I just need to move. I just need to start. I just need to experiment and keep going and keep failing. Forward failure. I know it sounds like kind of like a negative word and that word is thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean? It means that you tested something out and your audience didn't like respond.
However, that's just in this moment. You don't know what's gonna happen two, three years down the road when somebody stumbles onto something you created and you could save a life. And you don't know that because you're going out onto the internet, right, with whatever creative you are. Or you're going into libraries.
If you're writing books, you're going on coffee tables, you're going in garage sales. If you're creating something, your art is ending up somewhere that is not in your control, [00:30:00] but it still matters. It still matters. You have to show the layers. And in that podcast, I think there's about seven or eight minutes of dead air at the end, and I didn't, I didn't go back and trim it. I mean, really, it's messy. It's messy, but I did it. Right. And this podcast has come and gone. Like I've, I've put it away sometimes and then I bring it back up because
I'm not immune to self-doubt. I'm not immune to thinking, oh, I don't know if this is helping people, because what's the measuring stick? You, you, you gotta have a measuring stick. And the best way as a creative person, because it's an inside job of a measuring stick, is allowing other people to see your work.
It doesn't matter if it's one or 40 or 4,000 or [00:31:00] 40,000, you'll never get to 40,000 if you don't start with one. And that one person is going to get the best damn experience of you because you're showing up and never say, where is everybody? You say, oh wow. You know, let's get to work. 'cause you treat that one person the same as you would if you had 40,000 people in front of you.
They. Turn on their shoe, put on their shoes. They showed up to whatever you are giving. They showed up for you. They listened to you. They had you in their space, and you impacted them with your life or with something that you are putting out. You don't get to predict how fast it moves. You have to do it, and that's the movement.[00:32:00]
And you get to get better and better and better.
So be messy permission, put out your rough draft. You're not gonna get better until you start showing your stuff. You just aren't.
I wanna repeat the fact that I'm not telling you all these mistakes because I think you shouldn't make them. Or for fear that don't make these mistakes. It is because I wanna share with you that I make mistakes. That's it. I'm human.
We're making this creative stuff, and mistakes are not really always mistakes. Sometimes they're setbacks. Sometimes they pull us back. Sometimes they're redirects, right? You can't be afraid of them or else you won't grow. And if you don't grow, you won't become a better creative. Life in motion.
It takes growth. Most people that have written their first book, they don't like their [00:33:00] first book. Most people that have like a, a massive following on YouTube or Instagram or Facebook, they don't like their first one or two or three years. There is very few overnight sensations. Okay. It just doesn't happen.
You do not see the work that goes into it before they show up, before they become viral. They may have been sitting on this idea and procrast to planning for 20 years before they turn the record camera on, and then they've had so much practice not doing it that they show up and they're polished and they're ready to go.
It's the same 20 years either way you, you choose right.
So here's what I learned.
The problem isn't the niche or the polish. The problem is losing your voice in the chase for perfection. Keep it real and keep it you and trust the process.
Leave a comment if you are shaking off old patterns. If [00:34:00] you two are seeing the. The opportunity in this shift and change in the way that we find information online and you're just shedding all the stuff and keeping it real because you know, here's another thing, right? The more real you are, the more connection people are gonna feel through that screen.
When you leave a comment or when you send me an email, I'm the one responding and I love those. So reach out and connect with me. I have all of the information below in the description, wherever you're listening or viewing this, of ways that we can work together beyond.
Um, I have playlist after playlist. . I'm gonna link up that plan with me because that is a really good way to use AI as a guiding pillar. Just don't fall down the rabbit holes that I did or do. Maybe it'll work for you. Let me know how that goes and I'll [00:35:00] see you in the next episode.
Bye for now and thanks for hanging out.
