If you're tempted to start a new YouTube Channel (or IG), watch this first.

Multiple pivots, giant gaps in publishing content. I looked back on and cringed at. I was sure I had sabotaged my YouTube channel beyond repair, and for this reason, as well as a couple of others I'm going to get to soon. I thought it was best to start my channel from scratch, so I launched a new channel and while some good came from the experiment, as you can tell, I am back to publishing on my existing channel. Yeah, the dead one. And in this video, I'm going to break down the three deeper reasons I felt I needed to start a new channel and the painful reality checks I received as a result, and give you the chance to make a much more informed decision about whether starting a new channel, Instagram account, email list, or whatever is actually what you need. Or if, like me, you were trying to outrun something that will keep finding you no matter how many times you start over. As this video is going to make really clear, making a call about whether to start from scratch or stick with an existing account isn't always a straightforward decision. However, there are some really specific use cases where starting from scratch is a much better option strategically, and I'll share those at the end. But for now, let's talk about why starting over can feel so appealing, at least at first. YouTube doesn't know who my audience is. Most of my subscribers are interested in topics I don't cover any more. People will be confused if I show up as a totally different person. Compared to the last time I was publishing, I had a lot of very logical reasons for choosing a clean slate over a YouTube channel resuscitation. But you tell me if any of these ones sound familiar. I think it'd be better if I update my website before I start publishing. I need to make sure I make a strong first impression, so I'm going to do the rebrand before worrying about my visibility. I've only got six months left in my certification, so it makes sense to finish that before I commit to a content strategy. I've got so much happening over the next three months. I don't want to start something. If I don't know, I can be consistent. These are some of the very logical arguments my clients have made to me in the past and ninety nine times out of one hundred, I don't accept them. Here's why. They are fear and doubt driven excuses posing as logic. And when we're in fear and doubt, we look for certainty. I was determined to find evidence to help me decide whether to start a new channel or not. My research seemed to tell me that I was more likely to succeed with a new channel, and I was like, great. It feels less daunting than trying to revive my old channel. So let's go. And then I start creating and was hit with a reality check. I was still building a channel from scratch. I was out of practice. YouTube wasn't going to magically push my content out any more than on my other channel until my content was good enough. Which brought me to lesson number one. I am the only one who could make or break my success. Not the algorithm. The algorithm isn't some opinionated, bitter person sitting in a windowless office who has it out for you and needs to be bribed into sharing your content. It's a system designed to get high quality, appealing, and engaging content in front of people who appreciate it and as a result, will stay on their platform for longer. And you know what it takes to create that kind of content skills, strategy practice, trial and error, refinement, in other words, mastery, not magic. And the only way we can play the long game is if we stop falling into traps like the one I'm about to get into. Do you ever look at your Instagram feed, for example, and go, oh, what a mess! I know for me, nine years of this YouTube channel with multiple major pivots, infinite experiments, I felt like my channel only represented old aspects of me and none of the new. I wanted a clean slate so I could finally put all of the messiness behind me. But then I started publishing. And you know what happened? My very first video was imperfect. So was the next one. And the one after that. The mess had managed to follow me onto this clean, brand new channel. So I kept getting the urge to delete all my videos and start again. And I almost did, until I realized that it was my ego that was wanting, that it wasn't actually strategic, and it certainly wasn't going to benefit my audience by doing that. I just hated seeing imperfect videos sitting there, many with hardly any views, taunting me and reminding me how far from my goal I was. I was feeling humiliated and frustrated and impatient, just like every client I've ever worked with has had to experience on their visibility journey. Which brings us to lesson number two. Clean slates are only temporary. Also, they can become a vicious cycle that blocks our momentum because every time you restart, you are stopping the flow of energy. You are rethinking things. You are going back to the drawing board and making new plans, but you're not actually taking action. Whereas when we continually show up and keep publishing, no matter how messy our feeds become, we are still building on that momentum. We are developing more of that mastery that I talked about before, which is why I had to shift my focus from needing to create perfect content to instead focusing on increasing my capacity to publish imperfect content and to hold steady even when my ego was kicking and screaming. This is deep work, and it has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with self-awareness, discernment, patience, and nervous system regulation. This is the invisible, unsexy work that every successful person on the planet has had to do, but barely anyone talks about. Because it's not easy to sell. We buy quick fixes and guarantees, and when they start to feel tough, we give up and we look for the next solution, which keeps us in a vicious cycle. Now, here's what's funny about all of this. In hindsight, the best results from my YouTube channel came back in twenty eighteen twenty nineteen, when my content was very unsophisticated, very imperfect. Like when I look back on that content now, it makes me cringe. But it landed me clients. It landed me media features. It attracted the opportunity to co-host a television show. I got these opportunities because back then I just kept publishing, and those opportunities stopped when I stopped publishing. While I was busy trying to focus on perfection, I lost sight of the bigger picture and I started letting my ego run the show. Contemplation question for you that I give my clients. What is your content? A means to an end for. Because once you can answer that, it's a lot easier to realize that perfection is not a prerequisite for achieving those goals. To be fair, though, sometimes this pull to start fresh is actually to do with something a lot more selfless. It's about your audience. Which brings us to lesson number three. Side note if you're finding this helpful so far and you're new to my channel, hi. I would be incredibly grateful if you would hit the like button and subscribe so you can help me teach the algorithm who to show my content to in the future. And if you're an OG subscriber, wow. I am honored that you have stuck around. Thank you so much. now. Lesson number three is not going to apply to everyone who's watching this video, but it has tripped up my clients so many times I knew I had to include it. My old channel, this channel was full of subscribers who had followed me in the past. They might have followed me because of topics that I no longer talk about, or because they liked my approach to personal branding, an approach that has evolved a lot since I was last publishing. Consistently. When I was mapping out my content, I kept feeling this pressure to not disappoint my existing audience, to maybe tone myself down, so I didn't shock them with how different I am these days. For my clients, a lot of their fear comes from knowing how many friends and family follow them, who don't necessarily understand what they do, and may find it weird being judgmental of their lifestyle, skeptical about their chances of success, or plain old confused by their content because they are not their target audience. So for me, in my clients, starting a new channel or Instagram account seems like a logical solution, and in some ways it works. I did feel freer to just share authentically, and my clients often do feel a little less self-conscious about posting, but only to a point because there is a root cause here that is not being addressed. For me, it's people pleasing and this unhealthy responsibility I carry to be able to help everyone and to be liked by everyone. For my clients, it's often connected to deep visibility wounds and the parts of themselves that they haven't yet integrated and accepted. And so when they are feeling this anxiety and self-consciousness about people's judgments, what they're really waiting for is for them to confirm the deepest fears that they have about themselves, that they are weird, that they are going to be rejected, that they're not valuable. And until we deal with these root causes, we are still going to keep falling into the same traps, even with our new accounts. And you know what else? We also have to build those accounts from zero, which brings its own mindset challenges with it. So the lesson here is no solution can solve all our issues. There is no magic wand solution, and we should see that as a red flag if we think we've found one. And ultimately, what we need to do is remember that every single choice we make in our visibility journeys, in our businesses, in our careers, even if they seem super appealing, they always have consequences. For me, the biggest thing that I gave up in order to have a fresh start was a huge amount of credibility that came with having a decent subscriber base that was very hard earned over those years. But in order to run from some of my challenges, I overcomplicated things and created a bigger challenge for myself, which is why I'm back on my original channel, choosing to see it through, knowing very well that a huge number of my subscribers will have zero interest in what I have to say anymore. That is if YouTube even shows them my videos. But ultimately, it feels more important for me to return to what I started and see if I can nurture this channel back to health and in the process, put an end to a pattern that I have held for so many years, which involved not only burning channels to the ground, but also everything I'd ever create in my business. Now if it wasn't already very obvious. When you are considering a fresh start for any one of your platforms, it is going to require you to untangle the emotional and psychological from the strategic and the logistical. It is also imperative that you don't outsource your authority to make this decision. In other words, don't pull a Kat and ask AI what's more likely to succeed. Starting from scratch or trying to get my old channel back up and running. Because when you do that, you are bypassing the more important stuff. So for those of you currently chewing on this decision for yourself, I want you to pull out your notepad and I want you to jot down all the reasons a fresh start appeals to you. Then what you're going to do is item by item, run through them and see if there is a chance that any of those things are actually motivated more by fear or doubt than actual strategy. Because here is the truth. There are only a couple of reasons why a fresh start might be important for you strategically. And they are one, you're doing a major pivot. Think changing niche and subject matter, and the majority of your subscribers or followers are the totally wrong fit for it. Reason two is your account was blacklisted by one of the platforms, and you have evidence that they are actively blocking your content from being shared. For instance, you might have received some strikes from YouTube because you went against some of their policies or I know a lot of people talk about shadow bans on Instagram number three, and this is for YouTube only. You are wanting to launch a new podcast or show that has a very different format and target audience. Now, this one is actually very nuanced and I recommend doing your own research. But in short, what YouTube has said is that channels should be treated like television shows, which is why you often see big creators with multiple channels. But the big thing here is really about target audience, because you could actually have more than one show on a channel, as long as they're in the same general niche and appealing to the same kind of audience. So with all of that out of the way, you should hopefully be feeling a lot clearer on how to make an aligned decision about whether or not it's time to start fresh, or to just double down and make your existing account work for you. But by the way, feeling the urge to burn things down and start again is just one of the ways that doubt can trick us into sabotaging our progress as content creators and aspiring thought leaders. For a deep dive on doubt and how to stop it from running the show, I highly recommend you check out this video next. Thanks for watching. See you next time.