What's up friends, we are back for season two of the Dream Life Club podcast. This is your host, Sue Me Christian. If you don't know me, I am a tech founder in 500 CEO turned recording artist in LA. I followed my path to follow my heart, follow my dreams. And this podcast is for you. If you have a big dream in your heart and you want encouragement behind the scenes, inspiration and advice and counsel on going for your big dreams and how to actually build a life that you truly love. So last season on the podcast, I talked a lot about what it looked like to build my company, a lot of the lessons learned, building an eight figure, 200 person, multi million dollar company in DC. This season and going forward, we're going to focus on actually building my creative dream, building my music career. I'm going to take you guys behind the scenes with me. As I'm living my life, as I'm going through my weeks, what challenges am I coming across, what producers am I working with, what songs am I writing, you know, like what's the feedback I'm facing, what obstacles have I run into? The music industry in Hollywood is a crazy, crazy, crazy, freaking place and there's so many good stories to share and so many lessons that I'm learning out of this process that I really want to bring you guys along on the journey with me and I want to really build up this community of women chasing their dreams. This is going to be an epic season two and season three moving forward. We're going to be in this together. So that's the goal. I also have a really special surprise for you. Okay. So one of my producers and I couldn't help but every time we got together to write a new song, we started talking about what's going on in the world because let's be real. What's going on in the world right now is hard to ignore and it's extremely painful sometimes. It's kind of like a comedy of errors. It's tragic. It's cruel. It's heartbreaking, right? It's hard to process and every time we would get together to write a song, we would end up talking about the shit that's going on for, you know, the first 20, 30 minutes of our session and then I said, we should be recording these conversations because these conversations are gold and I want like everyone to feel like we're all seen in our feelings and I think too many of us just feel alone in trying to process what's going on in the world. So we decided to start recording our conversations and to include our conversations as separate episodes of this podcast. So I'm excited to hear what you guys think about these episodes. They're totally different. It's like you're a little fly on the wall. You're literally just like a little fly on the wall in our conversations. It's super informal. It's super casual. I say things I would like never say really like in public. So I know it's a public platform so I guess I am saying it in public now but it's really candid and my goal, our hope, was is that it just makes people feel less alone. It helps people process what's going on and it gives people sometimes some ideas of what we can do to make a difference, to make change and then in general just to feel not alone in the chaos because I also think that that's really important as human beings that we continue to connect with each other deeply on a heart level, on a spirit level, on a human emotional level and not just let ourselves get isolated and separated with all of the noise. So I can't wait to share those episodes. You'll see those popping up on the feed. Those episodes are going to be called what the F do we do now. So you'll know if it's like a dream life club episode from me or an interview with somebody in the music industry or another powerhouse woman or if it's an episode talking about what's going on in the world, it'll be called what the F do we do now. So you'll get to see those episodes popping up weekly. And then on these episodes, the regular standard dream life club episodes, I'm excited to just share more of my lessons learned and my challenges and my blocks and how I'm moving through them and bring you guys guests, bring you guys epic leaders from the music industry and from entertainment in general. And just powerhouse women in general that are like freaking kicking ass and changing the game and making an impact in a really big way because those are the people that I love to be inspired by. And I want to just have those conversations and share them with you. In fact, we have a really special guest and icon in the music industry coming up shortly in the next few weeks or so. And I'm so excited for you guys to hear that. And that's what we're going to be doing from here on out. So I will just wrap today by sharing something that's going on this week to give you a little flavor of what these episodes are going to sound like. So I think all of us right now who are building brands on social media are noticing that we're in a social media drought. And I don't know if that's because of various algorithm changes. I don't know if that's because of just the world news and politics taking over everybody's feeds, whether we're all social media out, whether we're just all sick of it or what, but everybody's engagement has plummeted. And I'm like, wait, at the time, when I was like, okay, I'm ready to, I'm like, I'm like, I got into such a good routine with making content for every song that was coming out, by the way. As of September, we've been releasing new music every three weeks. And when I see we, I mean, like me and my team, but my music under Sumi X on all the streaming platforms. I hate to shout out Spotify now because of some of the troubling things that their leadership is involved, is involved with. But on all the streaming platforms, you can listen to my music under Sumi X. And we've been releasing a new song every three weeks. And with all of that comes a lot of making content, right, and a lot of wanting to build community with people who actually want to enjoy my music and eventually come to my shows. And so we've been going hard on the social media content right at the time when like everybody's engagement was like plummeting. And you know, I'm sharing this for a reason, which I'll get to in a second, which is that I sort of start to feel like what is going on, you know, like I mean, I, you know, like it was almost embarrassing to post and to see like the lack of reach, the lack of views and the lack of engagement on my posts. And it was like, I was facing for the past couple weeks this little standoff with myself where I'm like, I know I want to share, I know this is the way to reach people, right? But I'm also like not getting the results that are very rewarding and it's also kind of embarrassing, right? It's hard not to feel that way because you know people are like people, everyone's comparing and everyone's judging as we should not be doing. But everyone is, especially if you're trying to pitch for a festival or a pitch for a show, you know, especially in the music industry, everyone goes first to like check out your socials. And then so I was feeling a little bit down about that. And then I had this like turn around yesterday where I realized I was like, you know what is so much more important than that and that I want to hold this small win because ultimately at the end of the day, no matter what dream you're trying to pursue, if you keep going, you'll win. I truly believe that. I mean, you can find so many quotes about, you know, the person who wins isn't necessarily the best, it's just the person who hasn't given up, right? It's the person who doesn't stop, right? It's like you, if you outlast everybody, then like you win, right? And I think so many people in creative careers give up because it's so challenging, mostly emotionally to handle, of course, all the things we have to do actually, logistically do, but also emotionally, right? Handle the feedback. We're constantly being vulnerable and putting ourselves out there. And then to receive crickets back, doesn't really feel good. But then I had this moment yesterday where I was like, appreciate the small wins. This just washed over me like, oh my God, actually, I'm building such an epic. First of all, all of the new people who have been coming across my social media over the past few weeks have been like epic women who are all, you know, building dreams of their own, the exact type of women I want in this community. And they're all loving my music and they're so engaged, right? And then I looked at my email list and I'm like, you know, most people's email lists, no matter how big or small they are, it's not, it's low open, right? It's these days low click through rates. My numbers, I was looking yesterday at our email community, our community of, I call it our insiders or joining the sumiverse if you join our email community. We've got like epic open rates and click to open rates. It's click through, yeah, click to open rate ratios, click to open ratio, sorry, CTOR, getting all the technical on you guys all of a sudden. But our click to open ratios are like through the roof. That means the people on our list actually want to listen to the, you know, things that I sent them like a demo the other day. And if you're not on this list, you should definitely get on the list. We'll put the link in the show notes here. And I'm like, those are the things to appreciate. It might not seem like much, right? It might not seem like much, but those are the things to appreciate at every step along the way. So I want you guys to take that away today, you know, no matter where you are on your journey, I want you to figure out like, okay, but what can you appreciate? Right? What can you be grateful for and what can you actually acknowledge that's going well because we need that energy back in order to keep going. And we need to keep going so that we'll actually win, we'll actually achieve the goal that we're going for. It's like a cyclical thing, right? And if we focus on what's going well at all times and acknowledge it, then we'll have the emotional bandwidth to not give up, which will then allow us to actually win. So I wanted to offer that to you guys today because they think too many people are feeling in a slump, too many people are feeling really low because of whatever lack of engagement or trying to grow or just burnt out, right? And acknowledge what's going right, even if it's the smallest of things, it can only just the one person that said that, you know, something you did touch them, acknowledge the one person that liked your post, right? Acknowledge the one person that you talked to in real life that said, wow, that's so impressive that you've done this or that or whatever. And take that as energy and carry it with you to whatever you're going to do next, whatever you're going to do tonight and tomorrow and the next and keep accumulating all of those things. It's like your little energy coins, like my nephews play like video games and it's like you have to collect the coins, right? Like take these as all like energy and health coins and collect them and let those give you life. That's all I got today. Can't wait for you guys to hear all of the other good stuff coming on this feed and I'll thank you guys for all of you doing it. Take care.
