30 day blogging challenge, Day 1 (and why I’m doing it)

For years, whenever I’ve asked myself if I’m doing what I really want to with my life, the answer would be “yes, except for the writing part.”

I used to write. A lot. I published poetry in high school and even created a poetry club with its own beat poetry readings in the evenings.

After college I shifted my writing mostly into journalling and social media and stuff for work. Then in grad school, I started blogging.

WOW. Blogging really pays off.

The new people I met and opportunities I had, simply by putting a few blog posts out there.

Then twitter came along and I fell in love with the format, and spent most of my time getting my thoughts to fit into 140 characters. (This limit has since increased and honestly it’s easier but less fun for me. I love the constraint and I was fairly good at writing things people cared about.)

But as my career evolved and I grew in my visibility and influence, I became more and more timid about putting my thoughts out there in blog format. I also had kids, maybe that was part of it. The stuff that was in my head was either deeply personal and possibly too revealing (my own spiritual journey for example) or #momlife related, or….

…it just didn’t feel like me.

The stuff I felt I could justify spending time writing and sharing came from a place of “strategic justification.” My time felt scarce. I was growing my coaching practice and also my children. So I convinced myself that all writing needed to be purpose driven, and “make sense” from a business perspective.

And man, that really killed my motivation.

I got overly strategic, which is the inbred cousin of judgmental. What seemed to make sense to write for my clients and my “paying” audience was stuff that felt too close to advice for me to want to put out there. The soul of my whole business as a coach is NOT giving advice as much as being a keen asker of questions and guide in trying on different perspectives. Finding my own wisdom in other words. So the stuff I strategically mapped out to write became something TOTALLY NON SEXY to me.

So i procrastinated a ton by spinning my wheels on doing research about blogging techniques and apps and strategies and tactics (a very familiar pattern for me) and trying to optimize a non-existent writing process.

In other words, in all kind of ways I was letting The Resistance win. I refused to use my own voice and I refused to trust my own creativity.

So today I begin a 30 day blogging challenge. No matter how short or shitty my posts are, I am committing to getting one post out a day. I believe this will pay off in a few of ways:

1. build the writing habit
2. strengthen my ability to overcome The Resistance
3. help me get better at writing when I don’t feel like it
4. teach me (inevitably) that it is better to write and fail than not to write at all
5. give me the sense that I’m at least moving in the direction of my dreams
6. reveal that writing crap won’t kill me or ruin my career forever
7. purge the obvious stuff from my writing backlog so that the interesting stuff can start to come through, giving me increased clarity in my voice and my message
8. reconnect me with a balanced flow of creativity — not just consuming content
9. potentially increase my reach and my impact, instead of sharing my own ideas mostly with the few dozen people I work with most often
10. help me get over myself. Seriously, who cares what I write? And who am I to stop myself pursuing my calling?

Whew, okay that’s done. I am not proud of this post in any way. I’m not going to edit it. That would be a recipe for it not going out, and I want to get back to the kids, who have now been watching TV for longer than is probably okay. But hey, Day 1’s post is done. Here we go. Okay. I’m going to press publish now. See you tomorrow.