When Creating Content Feels Like Climbing Mount Everest

You wake up, grab your coffee, and open your laptop with the best intentions. Today’s the day you’ll create that amazing piece of content you’ve been putting off. But instead of inspiration, you’re met with a blank screen and a familiar feeling of dread. Sound familiar?

Content burnout isn’t just about being tired; it’s about feeling disconnected from your purpose, questioning your voice, and wondering if anyone even cares about what you have to say. The irony? This often happens when we’re following all the “right” content strategies but missing the heart of why we started creating in the first place.

This post is inspired by our latest episode of Coaching with Content, where Darren and Dustin dive deep into the reality of content burnout and share their personal strategies for pushing through. If you’re nodding along, knowing exactly what we’re talking about, this episode is for you. Watch it here.

Why Content Burnout Hits Creators So Hard

Content burnout doesn’t discriminate. Whether you’re a seasoned coach with thousands of followers or just starting your content journey, that wall of resistance can appear overnight. The symptoms are unmistakable:

• Staring at a blank page with no ideas
• Feeling like everything you want to say has already been said
• Questioning whether your voice even matters
• Getting lost in comparison scrolling instead of creating
• Dreading the content creation process you once loved

Here’s what’s really happening: you’ve shifted from serving your audience to serving the algorithm. You’ve moved from coaching through content to chasing metrics. And when that happens, the joy disappears.

The 4-Step Recovery Plan for Content Burnout

Step 1: Revisit Your Why

The fastest way to reignite your content passion is to remember who you’re serving and why it matters. When Darren felt burned out, he realized he’d lost sight of his core mission. Helping coaches turn their expertise into content that actually serves their audience.

Action step: Write down the name of one person you’ve helped through your content. Picture their face. Remember their transformation. Create your next piece of content specifically for them, not for the algorithm.

Step 2: Create More, Consume Less

This is where most content creators get trapped. When we feel uninspired, our instinct is to scroll for ideas. But endless consumption leads to comparison, which leads to creative paralysis.

The psychology behind this is brutal: You spend an hour scrolling through “research,” only to convince yourself that everyone else is doing it better. Your brain goes into protection mode, whispering, “Why even try?”

Action step: Set a strict boundary—30 minutes of creation for every 5 minutes of consumption. When you feel the urge to scroll for inspiration, open a document and start writing instead.

Step 3: Lean on Community and Collaboration

Isolation amplifies burnout. The most successful content creators understand that creativity thrives in community, not in a vacuum.

This doesn’t mean you need a huge team. It could be:

• An accountability partner to brainstorm ideas with
• A VA to handle the editing and posting
• A collaboration with someone in your network
• Simply asking your audience what they want to learn about

Action step: Identify one person this week who could help with either the creative or technical side of your content. Make the ask. You’ll be surprised how many people are willing to help.

Step 4: Repurpose and Recycle Without Shame

Here’s a secret the top content creators know: Your audience hasn’t seen everything you’ve created. That reel that performed well three months ago? Most of your current followers missed it.

Give yourself permission to:

• Repost content that resonated with your audience
• Turn one long-form video into 5-10 shorter clips
• Update and refresh old content with new insights
• Create themed content days to reduce decision fatigue

Action step: Go through your content from 3-6 months ago. Find one piece that performed well and either repost it or create a “Part 2” that builds on the original idea.

Common Content Creation Myths That Fuel Burnout

Myth 1: “I need to post every day to stay relevant” Reality: Consistency matters more than frequency. One valuable post per week beats seven mediocre ones.

Myth 2: “Everything has to be original” Reality: There are no new ideas, only new perspectives. Your unique voice is what makes common topics valuable.

Myth 3: “I need to go viral to make an impact” Reality: Helping 100 people deeply is more valuable than entertaining 10,000 people briefly.

Your Content Matters More Than You Think

Here’s what we want you to remember when the resistance feels overwhelming: Your voice matters. The world needs your unique perspective, your specific expertise, and your particular way of explaining complex ideas.

Content burnout often strikes hardest when we’re on the verge of a breakthrough. It’s resistance disguised as fatigue, fear masquerading as writer’s block.

The antidote isn’t more strategy or better tools—it’s reconnecting with your purpose and remembering that somewhere out there, someone needs exactly what you have to offer.

Ready to push through the burnout and create content that matters? Start with step one today: revisit your why, picture that one person you’re serving, and create something specifically for them.

Full Transcript

Darren: And I posted the other day about this because I was trying to be like, you know, meta and post about not wanting to post. And I don’t even know if I’m using that term right.

Dustin: I just love it when Darren goes meta. And so I’ve heard somebody I heard a Gen Z or say it once. Sounds so rad when you write. I’m so cool.

Darren: Welcome back to another coaching with content conversation with me, Darren Cooper, and the one and only that’s always here with us, Mr. Dustin Pead. What’s up, Dustin? How are we today?

Dustin: I’m doing well, Darren. How about yourself?

Darren: I love it. I love it. Well, dude, we are going to dive right in today. We’re going to talk about content burnout, content burnout in the sense that all of us experience this in one way or form when it comes to we’re creating content to grow our business, to reach our audience, to make our life better, to serve the people that we want to serve. And then we wake up one day and we go, I don’t want to do this anymore. Not just your job in general, but just like, I don’t want to create another piece of content. I don’t want to put together a thought on it. I struggle to even know what to say or what to do. The imposter syndrome has won for the day. You know what I mean? Have you ever been there, Dustin? Have you ever experienced this before in your life?

Dustin: Yeah, 100%.

Darren: Well, I think the reason that I want to bring this up today is because I am in a season of that right now. I’m in a season of just like, I don’t want to. Right now, right now what we’re doing right now, you don’t want to do this.

Dustin: Well, yes and no. But like, yes or no in the sense that like, well, I love this. I love this part of the content creation process. You and I having a fantastic conversation is awesome and I love it. But once this is done, there’s a whole slew of things that’s got to be done. As a solopreneur, we got to go and we got to edit the video and then we got to get the audio version. Then we got to get the snippets or the clips or the reels or the quotes and we got to put that together and we got to do these things.

Darren: And I posted the other day about this because I was trying to be like, you know, meta and post about not wanting to post. And I don’t even know if I’m using that term right.

Dustin: I just love it when Darren goes meta. I’ve heard somebody I heard a Gen Z or say it once. Sounds so rad when you write. I’m so cool. Thank you.

Darren: But I posted about this just like we create content for other people all the time. We tell that with this whole podcast series and the things that we’re doing is helping you create more content in less time. And I follow our steps. I do the long form content. I chop it up into all the different things. I set it up the way that it does. I batch record the way that I’m supposed to. And yet I find myself a little bit overwhelmed by it. Don’t want to do it, and I got a little bit of burnout on it.

Dustin: Sure.

Darren: And I just want to talk about it today because I think, and I guess what we’re doing here today is we’re going to have a little pep talk with the audience. We’re going to encourage you a little bit along the way to, if you’re experiencing this, we’re going to give you some things and some thoughts and maybe some encouragement along the way. But really what we’re doing is we’re encouraging Darren today.

Dustin: I was going to say, how about we do this? How about I encourage you, you encourage me and the listeners and viewers get encouraged along the way.

Darren: That’s what I was trying to say, but you just said it more eloquently than I. All right. Here’s where I want to start. I don’t know where you want to go from here, but I got to get this all out of my brain before it goes away.

Dustin: Bring it on.

Darren: I had recorded an episode of my podcast this morning about 30 minutes before we did this one and I didn’t really want to do it either because today is a very busy day and I got a lot going on but that’s what I do on Mondays. I start the week off on Mondays recording my episode. And the reason I’m in that rhythm right now is because it reconnects me with why and the passion of what I’m doing right off at the beginning of the week to kind of set the temperature and the tone for the week, right? We talk about leading other people a lot as leaders, we know that leading ourselves is probably the most important leadership there is. Like we can’t lead others, can’t lead spouses and families and team members and organizations and clients and all these things without really leading ourselves. And so for me this morning, I didn’t want to do the episode. Thank God past me had already written my notes so that all I had to do is kind of show up and just talk about the things that were on my notes. And so it just went and it reconnected me with, wow, we’re doing a lot here for in my business, Chief Creative Consultants. Like we’re doing a lot here. So let’s go do that this week. It’s huge. It doesn’t always work, but today it did.

Darren: Well, Dustin, I want to know. Well, I’m going to ask you a question. Did I share any notes with you before we started this podcast?

Dustin: No. In fact, I asked what the notes were and you go, I don’t know. Let’s just get into it.

Darren: Okay. Well, I got a few things written down and I’m just going to tell you the top thing that I wrote down was to revisit your why, which is exactly what you just said. So I don’t know how you got into my head or how you knew what I was about to say.

Dustin: Yeah. Other sandwiches. That’s a good sandwich too. It’s probably from Jimmy John’s right?

Darren: Jimmy John’s. You already know. Give him Jimmy Peppers. This podcast episode is brought to you by Jimmy John’s and now Dustin and I are going to go get Jimmy John’s later in different States. That’s how much we eat Jimmy John’s. Anyway, hot peppers.

Dustin: Oh, so true. If you don’t do the extra hot peppers at Jimmy John’s, you’re really failing yourself. I went the other day and was so proud because I was like, I’m Darren’s going to be proud. I’m going take a picture of this moment. And I left and not only did they leave the tomato on when I asked them to take it off, but I also was mad at myself for not even ordering our regular hot pepper much less any hot peppers at all. And that was a big mistake.

Darren: You completely failed your Jimmy Johnson. I did. And it was nowhere near as good. was just like, yeah, anyway, moving on. That’s not what we’re here. But no, what you just said Dustin is one of the biggest points that I know that I had to wrestle with in this feeling of content burnout. What am I doing? What am I trying to say? Who am I trying to help? Like you start to question everything when you find yourself in content burnout. One of the number one things that I wrote down was you’ve got to revisit your why. Why are we doing this? You got to put your avatar in front of yourself again and you got to go, this is the person that I’m trying to serve. This is the person that I’m trying to help. And this is important because I get to help others in the content that I create. Hence the idea or the title of coaching with content. You can coach through your content. You can reach people with your content. If you find yourself burnout today, if you find yourself overwhelmed, which I will be the first one to raise my hand and say that I am, you got to just simply revisit the why and say, man, it’s worth it. It’s worth it. Cause it is a battle. I mean, creating content is not easy by any stretch of the means. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it, but everybody does kind of create content. So maybe that’s not a good way of saying it, but in the sense of what you just said, Dustin, with revisiting your why, let’s talk some practicals there. I mean, obviously you can read some of the stuff that you’ve written down, but you gave some ideas where you go, Hey, I start the week off with this so that I revisit my wire. Are there other ideas, other things that you do to keep the why in front of you so that you’re not missing it?

Dustin: The why, maybe not. Maybe this, maybe I’m looking at your notes without really seeing your notes. So don’t know if this one’s on your other ones or not. Let’s see how good you are. Let me back up to when, about a year ago now I was in the process of releasing my first book. And when I got about three months out to releasing, I don’t want to release it on October 1st. It was just a random goal that I set for myself. October 1st released my first book. So about June 1st, I opened up pre-orders. book wasn’t done yet. Nice. And so you kind of put the self pressure self accountability on. And so not everybody is going to have an opportunity to say this content is bringing in some revenue like we just got a sponsor for my podcast. So now my motivation is don’t drop that ball. Right. but also for the people that are telling me that it’s helpful and that the content is worth listening to. I just think about even if it’s just one or two people, I just think about those one or two people and go, I want to help them this week. Like that doesn’t matter how I’m feeling. Think about how, cause your content is supposed to serve some audience. You’re supposed to be adding some sort of value to something. And so for me, I just think about, all right, if there’s, if those one or two people that I’ve heard from in the last couple of weeks about the podcast, if they are, you know, someone commented on it on a short reel or something like that, or maybe we saw a real, get some better numbers than others or whatever. Then I go, okay, well it’s okay. People are paying attention. Let’s lean into the, so it’s an others driven, like don’t let other people down. don’t drop the ball on potential income, like that’s a motivator too. So it’s not necessarily a, maybe it’s why adjacent.

Darren: Yeah. And I love you bringing up that point because it is so true because we just get, we get lost in it, man. We just get lost in it sometimes and we begin to worry too much about, we worry less about who we’re serving and more about the likes and the shares that we get. And I know it’s hard because sometimes the likes and the shares give us an indicator that we’re onto something. So it is, there’s a fine line there, right? Because it’s so hard to not look at that stuff because those are the quote unquote metrics, but also like you can’t get lost in it because you’re trying to serve the folks and something that came to mind as a, isn’t on my notes. So we’re going to be adding to the notes now at this point, but something to do when you feel this and this is, I’m looking in the mirror when I say this today is to create more and consume less. to create more and consume less. When you find yourself on content burnout, I know when I feel this, it’s usually because I’ve spent the majority of the day scrolling, looking, researching, would say. Researching, Dustin, I’m researching the post. Just know. And what happens psychologically when you do that? do you go? man, psychologically you go, I’m not as good as that person. That guy’s got it all figured out. look at this dude, look at this girl, they are killing it and I am just a piece of crap. Like it is the mental health slide of all mental health slides, right? You just go. And so I think for us that are finding ourselves at content burnout, we call it step two in the, we like to build frameworks as we go, I’m not sure we’re gonna get there today, but you know, we’re gonna do a step out of content burnout. That just rhyme. I think I think it did anyway out out. Yeah. Oh yeah. It’s the same word. So never mind. You know it’s it’s Monday bro. It’s my we’re recording this on a Monday. Give me some slack. Yeah. I know like when we when we stop consuming and we create more we can find ourselves in this place that we’re talking about what you were just what you were just saying where it’s just, becomes a, man, we’re speaking to the right people. We’re helping the right people, even if it’s a handful, right? Like you said, and you’re finding great passion in that, not because the numbers are blowing up and we’re going viral again, but because you know that you’re serving your audience well. And that brings a lot of passion to what you do, especially in the content creation game.

Dustin: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So, We’ve revisited our why we’ve we’ve gone a little adjacent. We consume less and we create more. But something else that I wanted to bring up in this this this content journey and something that that will help if you’re finding yourself burned out today and something that I just wrote down as as ways that I could get out of my own crap, right, was to to lean on the community and collaboration more. lean on community and collaboration more. And what I mean by that is, is how can I lean into, for example, Dustin, your co-host at this point on the coaching with content podcast. That’s what my agent told me. I know we’ve suckered you into this and I’m here for it, but you’re a co-host in, in today. Like we were joking earlier. I basically said, man, I just want to talk about content burnout. Cause I’m there and you’re like, what angle are we taking? And I didn’t have this three point sermon and a altar call ready to go. I just said, let’s let’s have a conversation about this. I wrote down a couple of notes of how I could get out of this, but really I’m leaning on you, right? To kind of help shape this conversation, to help ask me questions when we’re kind of like, what are we saying here? Or what are we doing here? And bring your ideas and bring your perspective. And you’re at a, you’re not saying that you’re at a content burnout place. And now you’re inspiring me and helping me and saying, well, how are you feeling about that there? What are you doing there? And now I’m leaning on you as a collaborator, but then leaning on, you know, the community, the people who could, who could I, now it’s given me creative ideas of going, who could edit this podcast for me? Who could get it down into the, the, the content buckets that I need, right? Like how could I lean on some other people right now? maybe it’s not a forever thing, but right now I lean on the community and the collaborators to get me to a good place. And that’s really, really helpful. how have you seen that play out for you, Dustin? I know you got a couple of folks that help you. I mean, but you’re primarily in your podcast and doing your thing, but I know you have some people around you and like, what does that look like for the community and collaborators you have around you?

Dustin: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a couple of layers. think it’s a, for one, it’s what, what topics do you address? Right? Cause I’m a, I recorded an episode 126 this morning. Well done. You start to go, what else do I say that I haven’t said already? You know, which side note I would say you can repeat things and I often do because not everybody has heard every single episode. Yeah. But I lean on from a content like from like, what do I talk about? What do I even talk about? You know, when you’re kind of talking yourself out of a fitting record, you go, I don’t know what am I even going to talk about anyway? I’m not going to do it right. Then you go. Now that I’ve ever heard you say that before there, no, never said it. But I start to ask people like Darren and other people, other contractors on my team and go like, hey, what do think about this? Or I’m. Hey, I’m running, the wells are running a little dry on content ideas. Go there. You could certainly tap our best friend Claude and ask him, hey, what are some content ideas or some angles that I haven’t taken before? So as far as like the network and the community and the collaboration, freehand, like before I hit record, that’s it. After I hit record, I’m like you, I’m always looking for who can I delegate this to? How can I automate this better? I’m putting it through the focus funnel. Is there any part of my podcast that I’m making harder than it needs to be let’s eliminate it Let’s eliminate the friction as much as possible to even to even showing up and getting the thing out So is there a part that’s over complicated right now? That’s not really serving me then let’s trim it back a little bit Are you trying to do 30 minutes when you run out of stuff to say at 10 then do a 10 minute episode who cares? And then I’ve yeah, I’ve got a friend of mine who knows social media really well and runs everything off of his phone. And so I pay him a little bit of money to take my content and use the basically the CCOS to chop it up into the reels and shorts and stuff. And then I’m taking my stuff. I’m taking my transcripts like we’ve talked before and, you know, creating the SEO stuff on my website and different things like that, just to be able to have the content a little more searchable. Even today, when I was putting together my newsletter for the week, I was like, I know I’ve talked about this certain word or the certain phrase before. So I Googled myself. It’s like Dustin bead intentional was the word I was looking for when I talked about intentionality on my blog. Did it pop up? Yeah. did. That’s So it’s like, cause I went to my blog and I’m like, I don’t have a search feature on here. I should probably work on that. And then I was like, wait, there’s a giant search thing that searches the internet called Google. Amazing. So I used to Google and did that. anyway, that’s wild. Yeah. And then I know we had 1898. We’ve used apprentices before, which are cheaper, free labor. On another podcast that I’m on for my, for my other business, the culture base, my 14 year old son edits that podcast. I just reviewed this week’s episode this morning. It looks great. Looks great. And so he’s busting that out and it’s 25 bucks an episode if you’re looking for somebody to edit a digital podcast. You know, it means like it doesn’t, it doesn’t take a lot. Like it just takes thinking outside of your box a little bit.

Darren: Yeah. And what I love about what you just explained Dustin is that, that the, the thing that happens when we find ourselves at this burnout place or just getting tired or we don’t feel like it, right. Is often that is the catalyst to new and creative ideas. And what I mean is all of a sudden you go, man, I don’t want to edit this all the time. What if Dustin’s son edited it for me? Now all of a sudden it’s like, oh, that could actually help me by doing X, Y, okay, sweet. And now it almost forces you into new levels and new ideas, or like you said, where you delegate. Now, this needs to be delegated to somebody else because I can’t do it right. in can’t have the time. Sure. Sure. And it’s just like, man, all of a sudden it helps you to level up. So I would encourage you today listener as I’m again encouraging myself along the way, cause I’m already having some ideas as you’re talking Dustin is when you find yourself here, look up a little bit, look up and look around and say, what is this saying to me? And how, how can I change what I normally do? Do I bring in somebody to help me? Do I delegate something that has been on my plate that just keeps getting pushed? And if, if so, it might just change the game of how you’re feeling right now that the burnout might just be an indicator of something needs to shift and change and move a little bit. And there’s, there’s power in that. If we can reframe that a little bit. And I’m again, I’m speaking to the choir here going, Darren, you’re an idiot. Why didn’t you think of that sooner kind of thing?

Dustin: So yeah, I read this morning and some I’m morning reading. It’s a, it’s something that’s been stated many, many times. So it’s nothing new, but every crisis is an opportunity. if your crisis is, I don’t want to do this or the crisis is, the resistance that Darren and I have talked about before in our, in our private coaching stuff, if it’s, which is from the artist way, Julia Cameron, talks about the resistance being basically what stops you from wanting to do the thing. And the thing we’re talking about today is creating content. So whatever the resistance is, or if it’s burnout or if it’s, whatever the crisis is, it’s an opportunity. And the opportunity that Darren’s saying is it’s an opportunity to look up and look around. Because I think when we get to burnout, we so often, it’s, it’s because we’ve been looking at ourselves too long and not looking around at the other opportunity.

Darren: Man, that is. That’ll preach right there, dude. That will preach right there. We’re so focused on like, yeah, it goes back to the, we’re looking at the likes and the shares more than how can we serve the community that we’re trying to, right. look up, look up from the likes and the shares and the no one’s paying attention and that kind of thing. And just go, just, man, I really love working with that client. Think about a client that you really love working with and then go, I’m going to show up today for them. I’m going to do this. I’m going to put out this piece of content today for them. I’m going to write it, record it, speak it, whatever, post it to them. Yeah. Man, that’s good. That’s encouraging me. So I hope it encourages some other folks along the way too. You know, that’s good, man. That’s good. All right. So we’ve revisited our why we’ve leaned into some of the community, some of the collaborators that we have. We’ve looked up from consuming and we’ve started to try to create for those around us. A couple other things I just want to bring up that I, again, that I just wrote down, and these are a little more just high level, nothing too deep, and we’ll wrap up here in just a minute. But I really want to encourage what we continue to talk about here at 1898, which is just simply repurpose and recycle content. This isn’t this isn’t crazy. This isn’t life changing. This isn’t like if if you are struggling, if you are kind of at this place where you’re like, man, what do I do? What do I say? Like, yeah, repurpose the long form content like we talk about, right? We talk a lot about that here. Do the long form content that you can chop up smaller and smaller and smaller and distributed out everywhere. But even even repurpose and recycle in the sense that, man, you had a reel that popped off three months ago. You had a post that went really, really well a couple of weeks back. Just recycle it. Recycle it because you’re, one, it’s good content. Maybe tweak it a little bit, maybe change some of the copy or whatever you wanna do, but just recycle it. Put it out, give yourself a break mentally today and just post something that worked a few weeks or a few months back. And that just allows you to kind of just get a little bit of margin to kind of go, okay, today is a day that, you know, I’m just gonna take a little bit of a break. And that was something that I wrote is just, find those intentional breaks. And I think you can do that by recycling some old content, finding some other things, repurposing what you do so you’re only creating really, really heavy one, maybe two days a month and everything else is taken care of for you. But if you recycle that, like Dustin, you were saying, oh man, that real few weeks back, few months back really popped off, what would it look like to just recycle that, to put it out again because you’re… your audience, your full audience, whatever platform it is that you’re on, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever, not 100 % of the people saw it anyway. So how can we recycle that to get that in front of them to encourage somebody else again today? So don’t recreate the wheel all the time. Give yourself a little bit of a break that way and recycle some content. I think that’s gonna be really helpful if you find yourself at a place of burnout. In fact, I think today I’ll go back and do just that. I will go find an old post. That’s my challenge for myself today. I will go find one that actually worked and I’ll recycle it or repurpose it. Now we’re getting into the reason, you know how I get with repurpose. Anyway, you said it great earlier and I didn’t want to interrupt. So, I appreciate you. Just if I don’t think about it, I probably say it right. Yeah. The minute that I started thinking about it, man, the wheels fall off. So anyway, well, as we wrap up here, Dustin,

Darren: I think the big thing I wanted to, why I wanted to bring this up today is, is really just to kind of encourage not only, again, not only myself, but those listening that, that it’s okay to feel this way to normalize the burnout feeling. We all experienced that. And I think you nailed it on the head when you talked about the resistance and the creative field, the resistance is real and it will come up against not just the bad things that you do that the resistance isn’t trying to get you to stop those things. Most of the time it’s trying to get you to stop the thing that you are here to do, here to say, here to be involved in. The world needs that in your voice to be able to share that with us. We need it. And that’s when the resistance is gonna come. I know Dustin, you said it was The Artist’s Way, right? That’s the name of the book?

Dustin: Yeah, Julia Cameron. Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way talks a lot about that. If you haven’t read it, that’s a highly, highly, highly recommended book. Yeah. Even if you’re not a consider yourself an artist, would definitely, if you’re, if you’re someone that’s trying to put something out that matters into the world, then I would, I would check it out.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah. And so that that’s the thing is that often, and we’ll say it here once we’ll say it a thousand times is that your voice does matter in this world and we need you to do the hard work to fight against the resistance to, to battle it, to, to win and be victorious in it so that the world can experience your voice and your art and your thing because that’s when awesome things happen. That’s when people’s lives are changed. That’s where, and when I say that often, I know it’s easy to think about hundreds of thousands of people and all that and blah, and yes, maybe, but often it’s just that one person. It’s that group of people. It’s your audience, large or small that you can begin to encourage and, and, and coach and change and challenge and all of those things. And it starts by battling against that resistance and really stepping into it. And so if you find yourself in content burnout today, if you find yourself overwhelmed by it all, keep battling, keep stepping in, keep making it happen.