Dad's Log - A Glimpse Into The Mind Of A Broadcaster

Today I want to talk about understanding, and the encouragement of said understanding. For most of us, this is a hobby or a part time side hustle. We don't do this for a living, and so we are setting expectations and motivating ourselves out of pure love for creating content. But some days, it's hard to do that. It's hard to get motivated, or to get the creative juices flowing to step up and deliver the best content we can. My encouragement for you today, is to consider the position your favorite creators are in. And know that they, just like you, wake up and some days just don't have it. We aren't on top of our game, and rather than creating sub-par content, we choose not to create at all. So do your best to have that empathy when it comes to expectations for your favorite creators, so when they do put out content, it's with the knowledge that it's their best content that day. God bless!

Today I want to talk about something I've missed since I've started creating content. It's called playing video games with my friends. As someone who has limited free time throughout the week, my ability to just sit down and play games is few and far between. When you start getting into content creation, you also give up focusing on playing games for focus on making better content. Updating graphics, interacting with your community, programming bots, fixing technical issues, learning new things. All these take priority over just sitting down and firing up your favorite game and kicking back. My encouragement for you, if you are considering starting to create content, is to ask yourself what you love more; playing video games or doing all the stuff I mentioned above. Because in order to have a successful stream, all of those things will end up taking priority over just playing games with friends. God bless!

We've reached the end of our discussion on the "4 Cs" of relationship building, what a series! Today we talk about consideration, and what it means to be considerate of others in your relationships. As you work with other people, it's worth taking a moment to put yourself in their shoes. Consider what they're going through, get some perspective from them so you can better communicate your intent, and compromise where you need to. As you can see, the other "3 Cs" are tied in closely with consideration, and form an important part of the overall relationship. My encouragement for you, is to be more open to others and their perspective, and consider what it's like to be in there shoes. Put your consideration together with the other Cs so you can continue to build and maintain healthy relationships. It's been said by many, it's more about who you know that what you know, and leveraging the 4 Cs to maintain relationships will be key. God bless!

Today we're on the third of four talking about the "4 Cs" of relationships. In this episode I want to talk about compromise, from two perspectives. The first in about compromising your core values and how that reflects negatively on your character. Never compromise for the sake of follows or money, people will see through it. The second way is in compromising in relationships, or meeting in the middle. It's important to find a balance in any relationship, as swinging too far one way or the other will put the relationship in jeopardy. My encouragement to you, is to be solid and uncompromising in your core values, and to find the balance of compromise in your relationships with others. It will help you and your friends or family thrive, and will bring a healthy balance to your relationships, which are important for your support structure as a content creator. God bless!

Here is the second part of our series on building relationships and networking. As my mom talks about, one of the "4 C's" is commitment, which can consist of two different types of commitment. The first is when you make a short term, or event based commitment. If you tell someone you're going to be at this place, at this time, you should commit to being there. This seems like an obvious concept, but the term "flaky" didn't just come to be without purpose. The second, is long term commitment. When you're getting into something, being committed through the ups and downs, while hard, is important. My encouragement for you, is to consider your commitment and how you regard your commitment to not only content creation and the relationships you build as you network, but also the relationships you hold outside of content creation. Understand what your priorities are, and how you can commit to those priorities to be the best person you can be. God bless!

Today starts my 4 day series on networking, specifically on building relationships. My mom taught me from a young age, the key to making relationships work is the 4 C's, communication, commitment, consideration and compromise. I've carried this throughout my life, and it directs the way I build and maintain relationships. Today I dive into communication, especially as it pertains to being a creator. When it comes to interacting with other casters in their channel, it's important to be concise. It's hard to read long messages, since chat generally moves fast. My encouragement to you, is to consider how you interact with other creators and with potential sponsors or partnerships. Put yourself in their shoes, you understand the pain of reading chat. It moves fast, long messages get lost in the mix. Getting to the point is important. Same with emails to potential sponsors / partnerships. They get 100s or 1000s of emails a day, so have your what, why and how bulleted and easy. God Bless!

It's really easy as people and as content creators to focus on numbers as measures of success. They are the easiest to measure, they indicate trends, and they are useful tools to find the general direction a channel or content is headed. However, numbers aren't the ONLY way you can measure success. In fact, it can be one of the most detrimental ways that people measure success, especially when they are first getting started in content creation. My encouragement to you, is to consider what success looks like for YOU and for your community. Because at the end of the day, it's the impact you have on others, whether 1 or 1000, that really matters. Numbers are great, but people are better. Consider what your QUALITATIVE metrics are, and start to measure your success by those metrics, as opposed to just the quanititative metrics that most people measure success by. God bless!

We all have those days. The days where we aren't feeling ourselves, or are in a negative headspace because we're tired, or sick, or just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It's really important on those days to make sure that you're aware of those feelings, and to disengage with conversations that may end up hurting you in the long run. There was a situation on Twitter recently regarding another streamer, and I saw a lot of hate getting flung by people who generally are positive folks. My encouragement for you, is to take a moment each day or each week, to sit down in a quiet place, disconnect for a bit, and reflect on how you felt this week. Ask yourself what you did well, what didn't go so well, address how you felt and try to plan to replicate the feelings you had when you were at your best. The more often you can do that, the better chance you have at succeeding in whatever you're focused on. God bless!

Today I wanted to cover a state of the game for Warframe. We've been streaming and playing it a ton, and I've really been enjoying the switch to PC. So here are the thoughts on the game in it's current state. Given that this is a FREE to play game, it really is stellar. Digital Extremes continues to invest not only in the game and it's content, but into the community and the creators that surround the game. They have a 3 pronged content delivery strategy (core function updates like melee 3.0, prime access releases every 3 months, and major releases like Plains of Eidolon and Fortuna). This strategy is paying off. My encouragement to you, is that if you like games like Destiny, No Man's Sky, The Division or any other loot based game, is to give Warframe a solid try. Make sure that you find a community to be part of when you're just starting, it will be important to have a group to ask questions to. But give it a shot, you have nothing to lose, it's free! God bless!

I bet you thought based on the title that this was going to be a lecture about how you have to have it all together all the time. It's not. I wanted to take a moment and be a little vulnerable with you. Contrary to what some people have literally told me, I don't always have it together. I have struggles that I deal with, and I don't always agree with people all the time. It takes work, communication, compromise, commitment. And even then, it can still be tough. My encouragement for you today, is to be ok with not having it all together. Commit to the relationships in your life that mean something to you, and be willing to work through tough times. And don't feel like you have to have it all together, because realistically, even the most successful people, who appear to the outside world to have it all together, don't. And that's ok. God bless!

We all have challenges we need to overcome. For instance, I have a baby on my chest in this episode. It was literally the only time I had during the day to record my podcast, so I got it done with a baby hanging off of me. Sometimes, we face overwhelming challenges, sometimes they're small, seemingly insignificant challenges. The important thing is to face them, and overcome them. They are an opportunity to grow, whether as a content creator, or as a person. My encouragement for you, is to take the opportunity to overcome your challenges. Grow as a person, as a content creator. If you need help with a challenge, then reach out for help! Get the help you need, overcome your challenges, and you will be a better person for it. It's how we get stronger, smarter, and do better. God bless!

Today I wanted to cover how I use the various social media sites that are available today. I'll cover Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, with a focus on how I use each of them as a tool to become a better content creator and grow the community. At the end of the day, these are just tools, same as the software you use to broadcast or the computer you broadcast from. This is my perspective on using each one effectively. My encouragement for you today, is to get setup on each and to start exploring how each one of these social media networks can be used to grow your brand and your community, and to get your content out there. If you have a way that you use social media that I don't list here, let me know in the comments below! God bless!

Today I'm going to talk about my opinion on partner pushes and roads to numbers. I've seen a lot of folks put in their stream titles and going live tweets that they are on a "partner push" or on the "road to x followers". My personal opinion on this is one of optics, a PR notice if you will. Instead of putting something meaningful in your tweet or title, you're telling everyone that they are a number, whether you mean to or not. My encouragement for you, is to consider the message you're sending to your prospective viewers. Think about what you want people to understand about your cast that day. Do you want them to focus on your numbers? Or do you want them to focus on the good time they might have or the content they might see. I'd love to get some perspective from you on this, so leave a comment on YouTube or Facebook! God bless!

Today I want to talk about setting milestones and next steps for your channel. This is SUPER important, especially for those of you that want to do this for a living. When you "make it" to partner status on a platform, it's easy to say you've "made it". And there's nothing wrong with celebrating that milestone, because it's HUGE! But, when the partner hype dies down, and the "real" grind begins, that's when you need to make sure you have another set of goals to obtain with your community. My encouragement for you is to make sure that you have milestones above and beyond partnership. Because the worst feeling is to come off the hype of becoming a partner, just to crash and burn when the hype dies off. Make sure you have a plan to continue the momentum forward and up as you grow and focus on what's important to your community. God bless!

I was talking with a few other casters at GuardianCon about things. And we came to the determination that as casters, we're often times overwhelmed with a lot of stuff, which means we often forget things. Which is why it's super important to write it down. Figure out where your list is most accessible and easiest to add to, and write down your ideas as soon as they come to you. It's super important that you find the best way to keep track of ideas. My encouragement for you, is to make sure you determine where you can best keep track of your ideas, whether it's a notebook, the notes app on your phone, a spreadsheet or whatever, and start using it. It will drastically increase your ability to execute on new ideas, iterate and grow and a broadcaster. It's a simple exercise, but one that doesn't get done by a lot of people. Start today, you'll be amazed at the changes you'll see tomorrow. God bless!

Mixer released updated partner program requirements and it's causing a frenzy with folks wanting to get in on it. I wanted to address the updates to the program and make some recommendations for those of you considering applying for partner. Mixer has bumped the follower requirements from 750 to 2000, but removed the "across the board" concurrent requirements. They also added a 12 unique casts a month and 25 hours cast per month threshold, and some subjective requirements around professionalism and representation. My encouragement, is to look hard where you're at. If you're under 2000 followers, I can't recommend enough for you to WAIT to apply for partner until you're there. Especially right now, there will be a slew of applications in, and a lot of automatic denials going out. I would hate to see someone have to wait 60 days if they're close. Talk to someone who's been through it, they can give you advice, and sometimes a little patience can pay off big time. God bless!

Today I want to talk about giving yourself grace. This is not meant to be an excuse for not getting started creating content, or to take weeks off without purpose. But it's meant to encourage you to know it's ok to miss a day here or there of content, especially if you're working on backend things. Most of us don't do this for a living, but many of us want to. Which means we should be executing like a business. This means creating content every day. However, sometimes things come up that prevent us from doing so. My encouragement for you, is to give yourself some grace when it comes to creating content. There are things that will come up in life that need your attention, and should take priority. So don't feel guilty if you've been executing for months on end, and need to take a day to take care of adult things or work on "non-customer facing" items. Get back at it the next day, and you'll be ready to keep creating content that you're proud of. God bless!

Today I wanted to chat about soliciting feedback from others. I think it's an important part of content creation, and a very useful tool in progressing and improving as a content creator. We all have trusted advisors that help us make decisions, whether we call them that or not. For me, I make sure to debrief after every stream with my mods, who are the people responsible for helping me curate the experience we create each and every stream. My encouragement for you, is seek out your trusted advisors, and solicit them for feedback. Ask them what went well, what didn't go well, and how they think you can improve your content next time. This will help you grow as a creator, and will help you and your trusted advisors to strengthen your relationship with each other, and ultimately with your community. God bless!

We all have challenges in our life, some are huge and some are small. But no matter what, we have challenges to deal with. As with anything in life, how you overcome those challenges will dictate how much success or failure you see in your life. The biggest thing is to make sure you're taking on those challenges with everything you've got, and to be self aware enough to ask for help when you need it. My encouragement for you is to focus on your challenges, and to break through them to see the success on the other side. It can be easier said that done, but make sure you stay focused, and address the challenges you can address. Ask for help when necessary, and no you can do whatever you put your mind to. God bless!

I've been back from GuardianCon for a couple days now, and I'm seeing the Twitter talking about the "con flu", the inevitable sickness that people bring back from conventions. It's important, especially post-con, to take care of yourselves. Drink fluids, get rest, and take a day or two to recuperate if you need to, because if you aren't taking care of yourself now, you will be forced to in the future. My encouragement for you today, is to listen to your body. You know yourself the best, and you know what you are and aren't capable of handling. I know that if I go three or more nights with less than 6 hours sleep, there is a high likelihood I will get sick. So I pre-emptively choose to take a break, so that I can avoid long stretches of no content or sub-par content. Listen to your body, overcommunicate when you need to take a break, and then rest and recuperate when needed, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. God bless!