In this solo vlog recorded in Paris on July 27, 2024, Mary Schiller reflects on the first 19 days of her 30‑day "following my dreams" self‑activation challenge. She emphasizes that the purpose of the challenge is not achievement but internal activation and experience. The central lesson she shares is the importance of guarding one’s energy, which she treats as a non‑replenishable resource alongside time. She outlines four concrete practices she has adopted: (1) aggressively unsubscribing from email lists and other information streams that no longer serve her self‑activation goals; (2) habitually questioning whether any activity aligns with her current purpose, discarding or limiting consumption (e.g., TV shows) that drains her energy; (3) checking in with the kind of person she wants to be in each moment and adjusting behavior, language, and priorities to match that ideal; and (4) curating the people and online groups she engages with, staying only in spaces that inspire, challenge, and elevate her game. Throughout, she frames these actions as expansive rather than restrictive, inviting viewers to apply similar filters to protect their energy. The video ends with a call for comments and a promise to continue the challenge the next day.
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Hello, bonjour! It is day 20 of 30 days of following my dreams, and wow is all I can say because so much has occurred during this past 19-day period, and I am just excited to see what's next in the last 10 days. It is The 27th of July, 2024. Le 27 juillet 2024. Yesterday was the amazing opening ceremony for les Jeux Olympiques, the Olympic Games, despite the rain. It is raining all day today too. That's just the way it is here. What can I say? As some of our friends say, you don't come to Paris for the weather. But I wanted to make a special video for you today because I have shared some of the lessons I've learned so far throughout this process, and I wanted to make a specific video on this one lesson because it's been so eye-opening to me, and that is guard your energy with your life. Like, really guard your energy. Because, you know, if we look at the things that we have that are not replenishable in that sense, time is certainly one of them. And I would argue that energy is too, because once it is spent for the day, it is spent for the day. It's hard to get it back. And for some people who have issues with energy, you know, it's even more important to do that, but it's important for all of us. So I began looking at ways that my energy was being diffused, that it was going in directions that just weren't helpful to me and were not benefiting me, were not helping me activate myself. It's not about achievement. Again, I want to be really clear that Throughout this whole challenge I've set up for myself, it has not about been about what can I achieve over this period of time. It's been about what can I activate within myself, what can I experience more of within myself. So I want to share some things that I have done over these past 19 days, now day 20, that have really helped me in terms of preserving, guarding my energy. One is that I have begun to unsubscribe from anything and everything that does not support my self-activation. And I mean literally everything. There are people whose lists I've been on for a long time who were maybe good for me back in the day, as they say, but are not really sharing anything that I need to know now. And so I have just unsubscribed, unsubscribed, unsubscribed, so that now my inbox feels a lot less busy. I don't feel the need to read a lot of things that come across my inbox anymore, and I'm still weeding people out. And it's nothing against them, it's just that I realized that so many of the lists that I have been on were about things that either were not all that helpful to me in the beginning anyway, whenever I first signed up for them, and now they have even less relevance to what I'm trying to do within myself, capital S Self. And so I am letting them go. Another thing I've been doing to preserve and guard my energy and really treat it like the sacred thing that it is, is when I am going to do anything, basically I ask myself the question, does this, whatever it is, relate to what I am trying to do here? Or is it something completely extraneous that doesn't really excite me all that much, that, you know, is more like killing time? I don't want to kill time anymore. I don't have that much time left to kill, if you know what I'm saying. So I've started to ask myself that question about all kinds of things. Like, for example, we were watching a show that was very well made, very well made, well acted, very interesting visually. But there was something about it that was just not sitting right with me. And I found that after I watched it in the evenings, I was having nightmares at night. And I just thought, you know, this is not helping my energy, so I'm not going to watch that anymore. I think we watched one or two episodes, and I just said, that's enough of that. Sometimes I will watch something that is helpful to me, especially when I am in fiction writing mode and I need to get into a different kind of headspace or get a different mood going for myself, because the novel that I'm rewriting is a bit dark, and sometimes I can I can really benefit from being in that kind of headspace. And so sometimes I will, but if it's not sitting right with me, it is just gone. Now, this particular aspect of guarding my energy, I'm not sure I'm going to explain very well, but I'm going to do my best, which is basically, am I being the kind of person that I want to be in this moment? And if the answer is no, there's no judgment around it. It's simply like, okay, so if I were going to be the kind of person I want to be in this moment, what would I be doing? What would I be saying? How would I be responding? And this can relate to pretty much anything in relationships with other people, in, you know, how I'm spending my time, what I am doing in terms of planning my days out a little bit. As you know, I don't use to-do lists, but I do like to have deadlines. And so a lot of what I do every day relates to deadlines that I have set for myself. And if I am not being the person that is self-activated and that is really rising to the occasion then I stop and I ask myself, what do I need to do? Who do I need to be right now in this particular moment? How can I raise my game? Because that is what I want to do. I want to be more self-activated. So this is something that is a little bit hard to explain. I'm hoping it makes sense. Tell me in the comments. All right, here comes one more. All right, so here is the last one I'm going to share with you, and that is that I have really started to guard my energy in terms of who I'm spending time with. And I'm mainly talking about who I spend time with online. If I am going to join, let's say, some kind of live program, the person leading it and the people in that program have to be top-notch for me now. And they have to be in a space that is exciting, that is really inspiring to me, that asks me, am I raising my game to this level? If it's a space where there are people complaining, I'm out of there. If it's a space where people are talking about things that don't relate to what I want to be doing, I'm out of there. I can't tell you how many groups I have left during this time period, things that I realized, you know, I may have been interested in this before, but I'm not now. And so I would encourage you to take these examples that I've given and ask yourself if you can guard your energy in a way that doesn't feel restrictive at all, but instead feels expansive. So let me know in the comments, and I will be back tomorrow. A bientôt!
