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Hi everyone! Today I thought I'd do something different and share some of the challenges I've been facing in my business. I just want to share some of the things that have been weighing me down, and why I haven't been sharing as much on the blog in the recent years. In this episode, I cover Key challenges that I've been facing [1:01] My solutions to tackle them [15:37] Challenges that I'm Facing Today [Transcript] Celestine Chua: You're listening to The Personal Excellence Podcast, the show that's all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. I'm Celestine Chua, your host and founder of PersonalExcellence.co. Let's get started! Hey everybody! Welcome back to The Personal Excellence Podcast. So today I thought I would do a different type of topic. Usually, I cover a topic on personal growth and I share tips on that. Today I thought I would do some personal sharing, and I'd like to talk about some of the challenges I've been facing in my business. I thought it would be good to share some of the things that have been weighing me down. I did feel that I haven't been able to do deep personal sharing on my site for maybe at least the past couple of years. As you listen, perhaps you may understand why. Challenges I've Been Facing #1. Feeling that my work doesn't matter The first challenge that I've been facing, and I think some of you guys may have noticed this, is that the web is so cluttered today. There are just so many, you know, businesses? It's cluttered in a very commercial way, and I guess this is what happens when the main driving point of a society, the main agent that people need to work towards, is money. I'm not trying to build any negativity around money because I think money is important and it is a good neutral tool for us to objectify value. I'm not of the camp of people who go, "Money is evil," but I also don't see money as the "end all and be all" of life, or that it accurately indicates the value that people are giving to the world. Money as a tool definitely has its issues. So when the main agent that people work for in the world is money, naturally when you have a clean starting ground (such as the internet in the 1990s), it will get dominated by very commercialized activities after some time. And oftentimes it reaches a tipping point, and beyond that point, you get diminishing returns. So I started PE in 2008, and way before that I started my first website in 1998. The Web was in its infancy with very very few people online. I've seen the internet and how it has evolved in the past two decades. Today, the internet is hugely commercialized — almost everything is linked to paying or buying or money. Advertisements are everywhere. While everything has its role and its place, I do feel that the internet today is extremely cluttered with businesses for every single thing, along with "me-too" businesses. It's gotten to the point where there are so many life coaches and coaches online now, that sometimes I do wonder, Oh okay. Err. So where do I fit in? And how does my work matter? When I started PE in 2008, the reason I started it in the form of a life coaching business online was because there wasn't necessarily something like this. At that point, yes, the industry was already competitive. There were many personal development blogs. But I felt there was space for me to add unique value after assessing the landscape. Now it's 2018. If I were to start everything from scratch with no legacy of my work in the past 10 years, based on how the landscape is today, I would do things differently. Maybe I would start a multi-coach platform, like a platform that gathers coaches from all around the world or that consolidates the best minds to help others grow. This is just something I'm making up; it's not something I've been thinking about. What I'm trying to say is, if I were to start something from scratch, I'd think, What is the most unique value I can give?