Transcript
A (0:01)
The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Hello. Hello.
B (0:21)
Thank you for tuning in and welcome to The, I don't know, 280something episode of Balance Black Girl, but technically the first official episode of she's so Lucky. Yes, I have been teasing the rebrand. The rebrand is here officially today with the podcast's new name, new look and feel, and I wanted to come pop in solo to talk more about that.
A (0:48)
So my first episode of this year.
B (0:51)
Was all about how to rebrand yourself for 2025, and I was doing a little bit of foreshadowing when I released that episode, because even though in that episode I was talking more so about rebranding yourself in the sense of adopting new habits and stepping into a higher version of yourself, I knew at that time that this rebrand on the podcast was coming. So there was definitely a little bit of foreshadowing there. It was kind of, I don't know, art imitating life, life imitating art. I don't know which. Which way that expression goes. Kind of works both ways. In this instance where I knew that there were some ad that I wanted to make to my personal brand and how I show up, which I talked about in last month's solo episode, but now that is also translating to the brand here. And I had been talking about it on the podcast for a while, I had been teasing it on social media, but it was also really important to me that I come sit down with you to be really transparent and to just talk you through what all of this means, where we're going and what is happening. So this has actually been a long time coming. I know that we have a lot of new listeners to the show who have found us within the past year or so. Our community has grown a lot, which has been really amazing. But this show actually started back in the fall of 2018, and I've done a few podcast episodes about how I started the initial idea for the show, the initial premise, but I do think with so many people just now finding us, sometimes that still gets lost in translation. So when I first started the show in 2018, it was kind of a rebrand at that time, or kind of a reimagining of the previous brand that I had started when I first started creating content called the Balanced Berry. When I first started the Balanced Berry, that was when I started this idea of playing around with the concept of balance. And at that time when I was talking about balance, it was because I had gone a little too deep into the wellness arena and I was over exercising I wasn't really resting well. I wasn't nourishing my body well. I didn't really have a life outside of fitness. And I was trying to figure, figure out, okay, how can I be well but still have a life? What does that balance between caring about my health but still having fun and still being a well rounded person look like? So when I first started creating content way back yonder, like 10 years ago, as the Balanced Berry, that was the intention. By 2018, it became abundantly clear to me that the Balanced Berry just wasn't my path. I think the Balanced Berry was a good gateway for me to get into content, to get into business, and to just experiment and play. But I had outgrown that brand and I had taken some time off from it during that time off of the balance Berry in 2018, that was when I had the idea for Balanced Black Girl. And it was very important to me to have some brand continuity because at that time I did still feel a little more aligned with the term balanced. And I wanted people to still know it was me. And I was very concerned about it being confusing. And so at that time I thought, I either am or want to be a balanced black girl. And that was kind of where I went with the brand. And when the podcast first started in 2018, the initial premise was that each episode kind of focused on a very specific area of wellness. Maybe we were talking about skin, or we were talking about gut health, or we were talking about menstrual cycles. And then I would interview usually a black woman expert, sometimes a non black woman of color expert in that area to go deep into that topic. And for many years, that was what the podcast was. And every single episode had a very specific kind of narrow health or wellness focus. And then we had often a black or brown woman expert to come talk about it and rinse and repeat for many, many years. That is what the podcast was for about the first four and a half years. Get to 2023, and that is when things on the podcast actually started changing. And that was when the seeds were really starting to be planted when it came to rebranding. The last, I would say time where it felt like kind of the old school. Original version of the podcast was January 2023. January 2023 was the last kind of batch of episodes that were super wellnessy in nature. That kind of followed that old format. And as I started moving throughout 2023, we just started experimenting with different types of content because at that point I was already, you know, probably like 150 episodes deep into the show and was just ready to start exploring other topics. We had gone really deep into most wellness related topics that I could think of or that I really wanted to explore on the show without getting into like the super scary stuff because there's still more wellness topics we could explore. But a lot of it is either really scary, it's really depressing. And I just felt like I was being very affected personally, mentally, emotionally by covering really heavy topics to the point where if I were having a really heavy conversation with a guest or maybe something they would say something, you know, really traumatic. I was noticing that it was starting to affect me long after we would stop recording and long after an episode was being released. And after a couple years and like a couple hundred episodes, I was beginning to carry a lot. And so in 2023, I thought, okay, maybe let's experiment a little bit and let's start kind of stepping outside of these initial minds that I had created and I started exploring different topics. So we at that time were running kind of monthly themes on the episodes. And I believe in February 2023, that was when we had kind of like a love themed month. It was, you know, we had an intimacy episode, we had a self love episode, we had a platonic love episode. What was really interesting was that in February 2023, we had some of the highest performing episodes this show has ever had when we had kind of stepped outside of that very narrow, wellnessy, sciencey focus. And that is not to say that I don't still love wellness or wholeheartedly believe in science, because I do. But I'm saying that we, we had did that, we covered a lot of that. And it began to feel redundant to talk about the same things over and over. So when we started venturing more into lifestyle topics, I noticed that it was becoming a little more fun for me to be able to host and conduct those conversations. But I also noticed that we got a good response from the community. That was when the show reached a turning point where it really started growing and where people were sharing our episodes more. And we were just beginning to see a little bit more conversation that was becoming just a little bit more positive as opposed to like, let's talk about all of these really hard health things and then kind of carry that through. It was just, it was, it was beginning to shift a little bit now. Also during that time, I was still experiencing a great deal of burnout just because I was still in my corporate job. I still had several years of talking about heavy trauma topics that I was still carrying with me. I was still getting a lot of, like, trauma dumping on me as a result of the types of episodes we were doing. So it was like every time I would open my DMs, every time I would open my inbox, you know, I would have really long responses about difficult things that people were going through. And while I am so grateful to be seen as a safe person for people, I also realized that I don't have the capacity to be that person for, like, thousands of people, nor do I have the credentials, nor do I have a strong enough support system in my life to be able to handle the things that I'm experiencing and carry that much for other people, too. And so all of these things were happening at once where I realized, okay, I think I want to start showing up a little bit differently because this isn't really working. I'm beginning to see a better response from the audience when we are opening up these topics a little bit more and talking about different things. And I am beginning to notice that I am feeling very weighed down and I am having a hard time wanting to even continue doing this show with some of the topics we're doing and the conversations that are stemming from it. So that was when we started pushing things a little bit more. That was when we started expanding to talk about other things on the show, be it, you know, career and lifestyle topics. In the summer of 2023, I got incredibly burned out trying to manage both my day job at that time and the show. And I ended up taking a break from the podcast altogether and actually wasn't sure if I was going to be able to bring it back because I just had so much on my plate. Obviously, because I'm sitting here, I was able to bring it back. A big part of me being able to bring it back was getting more support from the show where I was able to actually leave my full time job by the end of that year. And I just had a lot more mental energy to be able to bring towards the show.
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