within just two months of returning from my year-long sabbatical from social media and my business, I said yes to about $200,000 worth of brand sponsorships. At first, the idea of getting paid to create content sounded amazing. I couldn't believe that I could have done sponsored

videos a lot sooner in my career instead of putting so much pressure on myself to work with clients and get customers for my business. So after only 2 months of trying out the sponsorship route, why did I back out of all of these deals? Okay, so today is April 8th, it's a

Monday and I'm about to call my brand manager and basically let him know that all the deals that we have with all the companies and the brands that are on the table right now, I just I'm going to say no to. And oh, I'm nervous. I'm going to

give them a call now. Okay, hey Vanessa, what's up? Hey Brian, I wanted to let you know where my head's at when it comes to the brand sponsorships. I took a whole year off to just take a break and now I'm coming back and I'm still rediscovering what I

even want to talk about on my channel, where I even want to take my channel, like who I am as a creator. And I'm noticing that I feel really boxed in already. The money is definitely really tempting, but I think it's also what's

causing me to just feel not very authentic with what I want to do. That even just looking at the spreadsheet, I'm realizing because this brand wants to sponsor and they want me to talk about this, I'm doing content for them and not

for me, do I even want to create videos about social media? Is that actually what I want to do? And I think because the brands right now, they're more in that industry, I'm basically recreating my old content schedule that I took a sabbatical from. I don't like the position I'm in.

and I also put pressure on myself too. I want to do a good job and I care about my audience. I care about it aligning. I care about all those things. I just need some time to reconnect back with like why I'm doing this in the first place. We

don't have anybody that's this booked out like you. There's good opportunities here, but yeah, I don't want to try and squeeze more in on Vanessa. I completely get you. And looking at all the potential deals, it is overwhelming for sure. Mhm. Whatever is in your best interest is in

our best interest. Yeah, there's money and stuff like on the line, but we don't benefit from forcing you or or whatever it may be just to get deals across the table. Thank you. I really appreciate it. I was so terrified like last week and over the weekend. It just really hit me. No

don't ever, no, don't ever be afraid to like literally call me like this anytime. There's never any pressure. Your channel is just going to continue to grow, and so you not doing sponsorships right now is is not going to hurt you. It's not going

to hurt your channel. Obviously, not going to hurt your growth, but we'll figure out the best way to keep a partnership alive. So okay, thank you. Yep, yep. No problem, Vanessa. Have a good rest of your week. You too. Bye. Yeah, we'll see you. Bye.

went a lot better than I expected and I'm so glad I recorded that conversation. Wow, okay, I'm going to stop recording now. In my last video, you would have heard me talk about how I no longer want to put pressure on myself to show up as

an expert or teacher, and instead I'm approaching my content as I'm inviting you guys into what I'm experiencing right now and what I am learning. Today is April 12th, it's a Friday, and the call that you just listened to was on April

8th, it was the Monday, so all of this is still pretty fresh, but I do want to share with you guys my learning lessons from this experience and what my thought process was leading up to that call. So the first thing I learned through this process is the moment that you decide to

put a label on what you're trying to create is the moment that you may constrain yourself to its rules. I learned this lesson from reading this book, The Creative Way by Rick Rubin, and I have a feeling you're going to hear me reference this book quite a bit in my

content because this book has been helping me so much, especially during a time period where I'm currently feeling creatively stuck and a little bit lost. I'm currently on this journey of being as true to myself as possible, and so what he talks about in this book is

often times when you put labels on what you're trying to create or who you are or who you're trying to create for, you will often constrain yourself into rules that come with that label. So a good example that he uses is think about a musician or an artist and they

want to create a country song, then what's going to happen is because they've already labeled what they want to create and that is being in the country genre, then of course they may play within the rules of country music and as a result what they end up with is

a country song, but Rick Rubin argues that often times it's better if you just create what you want to create and then decide who it's for later. And so what if instead that artist deciding from the get-go that they're going to create a

country song, that they actually just create what's on their heart. It could actually open up a possibility where they create a whole new genre of music or they find a whole new creative style that they otherwise wouldn't have found if they decided from the get-go what genre that they wanted

to be in. I also want to use Beyoncé's latest album *Renaissance* as an example. So, so one of my favorite tracks on her album is *‘Cuff It’*, and even in the intro of this song she talks about how genres are a funny little concept and even

though they're simple in nature, some artists may feel incredibly confined. And if you actually listen to the album, even though you think it's a country album, it's actually a Beyoncé album. It's so unique in how she put a spin on country. Another good example is Taylor Swift. You

never know what album she's going to put out. Maybe it might be folk music that she explored or country or pop. She just does something different in every single album. And so I think the artists that really define their generation, the ones that really create a legacy for

themselves are the type of artists that are willing to push the boundaries of their work and they're willing to break some rules. And how I link this back to the Creator economy is the moment that you decide that you're going to be a beauty influencer is also the moment

that you may only create content that a beauty influencer would create. But what if instead you approached your content as, 'I'm just going to create what's on my heart. I'm going to create what interests me. I'm going to allow myself to be

pulled into the things I want to create?' Then you may discover a whole new niche or a whole new segment of audience or a whole new opportunity that you otherwise would not have found if you just solely labeled yourself as a beauty influencer. And so for me it really gave me a few

aha moments. The first aha moment was was feeling constrained with all of these brand sponsorships that I prematurely accepted so soon coming back from my sabbatical. There was one company that is a very well-known podcasting software, but I don't have a podcast and so

because the deal was on the table, I almost forced myself to think about what topic would make sense. Do I talk about podcasting even though I don't have a podcast? Should I launch a podcast just so that the deal makes a little bit more sense? And so I was almost like changing

my business model and changing my content strategy just to make the sponsorship make sense. And so automatically it didn't feel authentic and it just didn't feel natural. And when I read what Rick Rubin wrote, it it it just made me be more aware of how that's

actually not serving me during this time period where I'm trying to discover who I am and what I'm interested in and so I want to share that with you because I think a lot of creators go through that and I think it's really normal. I was

teaching that before: find a niche and it gives you structure and it gives you guidance, but at the same time maybe we should have some awareness of the fact that what if it's actually limiting us? What if it's actually blocking us from finding the next best

thing? What if it's actually blocking us from serving a whole another segment of people that we otherwise would not have considered because we put ourselves in that box? Now, the next thing that I've also learned is having an employee mindset versus an owner's

mindset. Now I want to fully acknowledge the privileged position I'm in to even be able to walk away from sponsorships because I also recognize that there's a lot of creators, there's a lot of people out there who don't have that opportunity or that privilege or

that safety net to walk away from money, to walk away from opportunity. So I'm not here trying to tell you what you guys need to do. I'm not here to say that this is the right way and that if you are someone who's taking sponsorships that

you're a bad person. None of that. Get your bag! It's so great to have companies sponsor your work because that allows you to do your work and what you love full-time and that's what made me really excited about the idea of working with

sponsors in the first place until I realized that, oh, this actually doesn't sit right with me and I just don't think it's the right time for me to enter these deals. So I want to make that clear. I want to talk about this third learning

lesson that I got, which was the employee mindset versus the owner's mindset. I want to be transparent with you and let you guys know that I was terrified to make this decision to walk away from all these brand sponsorships because back then, before I burned my seven-figure

business down, I was making around $100,000 to $300,000 a month and a lot of that was profit. And I basically walked away from my business. I burned everything down and now I'm in a position where I am not cash flowing as much, and so the

brand sponsorships, it felt like oxygen. Cash flow is oxygen, and the idea of not seeing things like money coming in monthly scared the hell out of me. But here's what my mentor said when I was going through this situation and asking him for advice, 'Cuz now you're an owner,

you've had your first success. I think we haven't had time to process that for your identity to shift up to that because typically when we're an employee, we think in terms of monthlies. Okay, I need to pay my mortgage monthly, it's a monthly expense on your

cash flow, but actually what you need is you just need $120,000 Canadian to give you one year of runway for both you and Leon. And so that once you put that into that perspective, that could be like, 'Oh, let's get a loan for 120k, we'll have a very

low interest rate based on a portion of my investments, then I'm not like gun to my head with these brand deals. And then maybe I could do a launch later down the line and I'll probably make that even like one day, it's like when you say 120k

in my mind, I feel like that's so less than monthly, yeah, grand for some reason. Yeah, it's that pressure of every month you have to pay, it's that, that employee mindset, right? So we have to shed the employee mindset because you're definitely an owner now and that's

that's what a system as a program does, right? So there's always fragments left in us, so we have to just get rid of that. And so what I learned from that conversation was the fact that I still don't feel safe because I am still thinking like an employee and seeing

things in monthlies even though I have investments, I have a lot of money that I've saved up from the previous years that I've been running my business, but because I'm not seeing the monthly paycheck, it's scary to me. And what's

crazy is I even had this conversation with my partner Leon and he talked about how he knows that there's a lot of founders who exit their businesses for like multiple millions, like so much money that they don't have to work for the rest of their life, but they still

feel pressure after they've sold their businesses because they're not getting that monthly paycheck anymore. And so they still feel that desire to need to work, to need to make money, to need to get more. And so I just thought it was really interesting that society really

conditions us to think in monthlies and how this even affects people who already have money. And so yeah, I hope that this kind of helps you because it certainly helped me feel a little bit more normal in what I'm feeling in terms of feeling like you need to make that monthly

paycheck all the time and putting a lot of pressure on yourself and maybe even compromising what you actually want to do just to make that, just to feel safe on a monthly basis. And by the way, of course this only applies to people who like don't have debt and have enough

saved up already, but it really speaks to that concept of even though we have enough, why sometimes we still don't feel like we have enough. We also talked, talked about leverage and talking about how the rich get richer by leveraging debt and that is a whole topic that I am

not like equipped to even share because I'm still learning about that concept too. But more importantly, it was the idea that being caught up in an employee mindset can sometimes hold you back from making really great decisions in your business and in your life. And what if

instead of me feeling the pressure to make a monthly paycheck with these brand sponsorships and all these things that I actually just create what I want to create and organically and authentically lead into maybe attracting an even better sponsor or an even better, more

aligned opportunity that actually pays out all of what all those brand sponsorships could have totaled up to? Or what if I just focus on being myself and building a community and being at a place where I get enough clarity on what exactly I want to launch next in my life?

and I make all that income in one day like that could possibly happen and it's really funny because I actually shared this analogy like the owner's mindset versus the employee mindset to a friend of mine and so a friend of mine right now she is someone who is constantly

taking on a lot of clients every single month to the point where she feels a little bit exhausted from taking on all that client work and because she's so focused on making making the monthly income and taking on these clients she's basically taking away her ability to

work on needle-moving projects so one of the projects that she really wants to work on is to create a passive income product so that she doesn't necessarily have to trade time for money working with clients one-on-one and she also wants to spend more time growing her

audience so she could build enough traffic to sell that passive income product but because she's so fixated on making that monthly income she is choosing to work with those clients because she's afraid of not making monthly income even though she has a lot

of money saved she has money in the bank and so the moment that I I even told her and confided in her what I was going through and sharing what I learned from my mentor she decided to take a whole month off of client work so she can

actually work on this big project that could potentially earn her even more than working with one-on-one clients and so I'm sharing this with you guys because I think some of us who are in this position where maybe you're at a spot in your career where you have made

a lot of money, you have a lot of money in the bank, or you're like safe, like you can pay your bills. Maybe it might help you reframe where you want to invest your time because I get it. Like a lot of us, we focus so much on the

monthlies and we focus so much on making sure we're making enough income every single month to pay our bills that it takes us away from the bigger projects that could potentially change our lives, change our financial situation, or make us allow us to feel more connected, allow

us to feel more aligned. And so that was almost the permission slip I needed to walk away from those sponsorships and just trust that by walking away and allowing myself to be in this discovery phase, maybe it'll lead to an even better and even more aligned opportunity than I

could have even imagined. Next, the pressure to deliver does not grant us the time to consider all possibilities. Here's a few things that I've learned about my short stint with brand sponsors and that is there are a lot of deadlines and those deadlines are negotiated like

way in advance. And you also don't get paid until that video is posted, and even once you post the video, there is a possibility that you might not get paid until 30 to 60 days after that video is posted. So the cash flow is not as

instant whereas when you sell a course or you sign a client, the moment the invoice is paid, like you get cash in the bank, you can pay your bills. But I think a lot of people don't realize that when you work with companies, the payment schedule is a lot slower, and so if you

are a creator and naturally you want to get paid sooner because you want to pay your bills sooner or you just want to have money sooner, then you are going to want to post that sponsored content sooner rather than later. So let's use a real example that I went through there.

There was a company that wanted to sponsor me doing merch and honestly, this has been on my bucket list. I've always wanted to create merch for my audience, for myself, but what I found was that because they were the ones reaching out to me, they needed me to decide, hey, when are

you planning to launch the merch? And so already there was a deadline that I had to decide on and then I put a lot of pressure on myself to almost reverse engineer that so that we could make that deadline. And what I mean by reverse engineering is let's say I tell the

company, yes, we are going to launch merch in the summertime, then months prior to that, I would have to tease the merch, create an actual community with a movement that we can all agree on, so the merch line will be successful and will sell through because obviously, when you

partner with a company, you want the campaign to be successful and you also don't want your community to feel like this is coming out of left field and is just so random. And so you want to almost make it seem organic and like really get people excited about it. And so I would

basically have to work months in advance. And as someone who is just coming back to social media, just dipping my toes back in it, it just seemed like a lot to commit to and it didn't feel organic. But what I would rather see instead, for me to create videos for me to build an

organic community and for my community, you guys being the ones telling me that you want merch, then that would make a lot more sense, that would feel so natural, and it would just be this organic thing. And then I would reach out to a merch company and be like, hey, this

opportunity came up, would you be interested in sponsoring me for this project? That would feel a lot more natural to me. And so that is another reason why I decided to put a pause on sponsorships for now, until I see opportunities naturally come up and

there is synergy, and I know exactly what company I want to work with, and it just all makes sense, and it's a win-win-win. It's a win for me, it's a win for the brand, it's a win for you. Fourth learning lesson, and that is, know yourself, know

your enemy and win a thousand battles. One thing I know is about you, if we okay, I say, know yourself, know your enemy, you win a thousand battles. This is all understanding yourself first, okay? Then it's very easy to deal with the enemy or others, very easy because how can you

know them if you don't know yourself? How can you know who's an enemy when we don't know what part of us are working against ourselves? How can we feel safe if we don't know ourselves? And then know the enemy, we can't feel safe and then we

want to control, and then we want to keep people at a distance. But once you know yourself and others, you'll be fearless, and that's what you're looking for. So this quote, "Know yourself, know your enemies, and win a thousand battles," comes from *The Art of War*, and my

The interpretation of what my mentor told me as I was going through this conflict in my life, as I was feeling stuck with just my content and feeling stuck in my career right now, is the fact that I need to prioritize learning about myself and what I've actually learned about this

process of learning about myself is that it is beyond just "here's what I like and here's what I don't like." It's more about exploring why I am the way I am, and a lot of that work comes from relooking at my childhood, relooking at my past,

relooking at how my parents raised me, relooking at how I was taught relationships should look like. And a lot of this work, work is work that makes me cry. It's work that is very painful for me. And for a lot of my life, like my

parents got divorced, there's just been a lot of that I've gone through in the past that makes me who I am. Um, that I've just locked away in a box and threw away the key. And just so that you guys have a better idea of who I am as a

human being, being raised in an Asian culture makes a huge difference in terms of my viewpoint of the world, how I interact with others, the pressure to achieve, the pressure to maintain a good image, power distance, my relationship with authority, with people that I perceive as more powerful than I am. And even like being

the oldest child also comes with a different viewpoint of the world. Feeling the pressure to provide, feeling the pressure to be responsible, feeling the pressure to basically carry everyone on your back. And so right now what I'm going through is I'm opening up all those things because as of right now, how

I currently live my life as if I focus on my enemies, my enemies being you guys, opportunities, what to launch, what my career is going to look like, who I should be friends with, all the external things. And by the way, I don't see you guys as enemies, but just to fit the

quote, 'enemies' represents just anything external, anything that you're trying to get through, right? And so because I haven't done that work yet, I then find myself in a lot of situations where I take opportunities that actually don't feel aligned, and I have no idea why I get into situations

where maybe I might launch something that I actually don't want to launch, but I'm doing it because I think other people will like it, or because I think it's going to make me money, or because of this strategic reason or whatever. And then in the end, I end up having to burn

it down because it doesn't feel aligned. I'm learning right now that the path to authenticity is really hard. It's a lot more complex, and it's a lot deeper than I expected. That's the path that I'm on. These are the things that I'm learning.

What led me to make the decision of walking away from all those deals, taking that risk? Because obviously it is a risk. I'm sure not everyone can be in a position to do this. And also, even if you did do this, I don't know if some of those

companies might have even put me on a blacklist and never want to work with me again. Like, it is a risk. It's not, it's definitely not the smartest decision, but it was the right decision for me, and I wanted to share why I made those

decisions and what I learned from this experience. Thank you for watching this video. I hope you do something fearless today. I believe in you and I will see you in my next video. Bye guys.

Last week I canceled $200,000 worth of sponsorships. Here's why.

I make videos that help creators feel good, have fun, do less, and earn  ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ enough.

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