I Pretended to End My Podcast, but Discovered Something I Didn’t Expect | #601

Welcome to Personal Development Mastery Podcast. I am your host Agi Keramidas. Today I want to share a story with you, something that happened recently and the reflections that it triggered me to do. 

On the 1st of April I put the following post on Facebook and I'm going to read it to you. This is one of the hardest decisions I've had to make. After nearly 600 episodes since February 2020, I've decided to stop the Personal Development Mastery Podcast.

When I started I had no idea what this would become. I just knew I cared deeply about personal growth and I wanted to explore it, document it and share it with anyone who might find it useful. What followed has been an incredible journey, hundreds of conversations, thousands of ideas explored, moments of clarity, of doubt and of growth and transformation and most importantly a community of listeners who chose to spend their time here, episode after episode. 

But over time things change, priorities evolve, energy shifts and sometimes the most aligned decision is to close a chapter even when it's a meaningful one. This hasn't been an easy decision to reach. There is a part of me that doesn't want to let this go.

There's a part of me that wonders what more could be created. There's a part of me that will always be connected to what this podcast represents. But for now this feels like the right time to step away. 

If you've ever listened to an episode, shared it or reached out, thank you truly. You've made this journey more impactful than I could have ever imagined. April's fools! I'm not going anywhere. 

Episode 600 is already on the way. See you there! I don't know if while you were listening to this you had an emotional reaction. The reason why I'm sharing this on the podcast today is what I received as comments in that post and I will read you a few of them to illustrate the emotional reaction that the post provoked. 

Louise said you had me hook line and sinker Agi. I even had that sinking feeling in my stomach. Ricky said oh my god I was about to send you a message saying why why why.

May said my heart almost stopped when I read your message. And James said dude I was oh my god oh my god. When I was reading these comments I first smiled and said that the writing in the post felt real enough to trigger these authentic responses. 

However, it was a specific comment that my friend Northern Deer wrote and that comment really triggered my reflection and it is the lens for this episode. The comment he wrote was a good one but from the comments here it also makes great sense. We appreciate something only if we are losing it and today in this episode there are three things I want to talk to you about. 

Three simple things, each of them will probably take a couple of minutes. The first is this previous comment, the message behind it that we don't appreciate things until we're losing them. I think it's a human tendency, a universal perhaps human tendency, to take things for granted and not appreciate them. 

And then when we lose them or we are about to lose them suddenly we begin to realise that oh my I appreciate that and now I'm losing it, it's going. And I think the reactions in the comments from the community reflected this. So my invitation to you as a message that I can pass from this story is to ask you to think and reflect what in your own life you are not fully appreciating right now, that you have taken for granted. 

Reflect on it and write it down even better. The second thing that I would like to talk to you about in this topic actually makes me emotional, it's the butterflies. You know just now I asked you to reflect on what in your own life you're not fully appreciating right now. 

But honestly I had to ask that question of myself first because when I was writing this April's Fool's post something unexpected happened. I felt something that I was not prepared for and that's what I mean by the butterflies. I realised that even though I was writing a fictional story, a joke basically, there was something real that was staring inside of me.

This reaction was real and when I paused to ask myself, I realised that there were two different opposite but intertwined directions or feelings. One of them was when thinking that this post could be real, it could be you know a real post not an April's Fool's post. I looked at the post at that moment as if as if I was writing it for real and that created sadness inside of me. 

I always look at the podcast and I'm totally open and vulnerable here with you. I have always looked at the podcast as something that I would love to keep on doing. Something that my future self carries on doing and I have always said when people ask me that I want to reach episode 1000 and then we will see. 

However, I said there were two directions or two opposite energies there that I was feeling and there was another one when I thought that this might have been a real post. There was also an element of relief and that's when I realised that I had quietly over time drifted into taking it for granted, not appreciating the podcast for what it is. In a sense, I had lost touch with my why and you know this happens in any long-term commitment to anything. 

Quietly, subtly over time it can go to feeling like a habit. So this brings me to the third thing I wanted to share with you today and this is going to be very brief and that is appreciation and in particular the distinction I want to make is that there is a difference between knowing that you are appreciating something or saying you appreciate something and actually feeling it. It's a different energy, it's a different state to actually feel the appreciation and reconnecting with our why when we realise that we have drifted into habit and we take something for granted. 

A great way to reconnect is to ask ourselves why am I still doing this and ask that question not with any self-doubt but with genuine curiosity. Why am I still doing this? Who am I doing this for today? And this is the question that I would like to leave you with. What are you doing on autopilot that deserves to be felt again, to be appreciated again? Thanks for being the reason I keep showing up even when I had lost touch with my why for a little bit. 

When I saw those reactions in the post, people saying that their heart almost stopped or that they had a sinking feeling, I realised something. I realised that you care about this and that matters to me more than I had been letting myself feel. If any of this resonated, I would love to hear from you. 

Go to personaldevelopmentmasterypodcast.com and you can send me a message or find me on social media and send me a message. Stand out, don't fit in.