Good morning. I feel like blogging today.
Things are shifting in my creative coaching practice and I’m excited about it. A few things are going on behind the scenes and internally which I want to share: gently, slowly, without fuss or pretension.
Firstly, I’m doing an integration course with Eric Maisel. In the ‘Make it Your Own’ course we are working towards integrating all our experiences, learnings and interests towards creating something new that is completely our own.
The course has given me the opportunity to reflect on what I’m truly interested in intellectually and emotionally and how my past has shaped where I am today. It’s pulled out nudges of things I have been meaning to ‘get to’ and reignited the visions I have for my creative work and coaching work.
Writing a regular blog (again) has been one of those things I’ve been meaning to ‘get to’.
There is a proliferation of information online on how to run a successful blog. how to attract attention for yourself through writing good copy that’s SEO optimised, how to write attention grabbing headlines, what you should write about and how in order to position yourself as an expert, about giving value, how you should encourage engagement, how you should include images. Not to mention all the information about how blogging is dead, especially the personal blog, how no one has the attention span anymore and so forth.
Somehow all this abundance of information on how to do it ‘Right’ makes me not want to start. I start to over-think, over-plan, criticise each word when I do start writing (eg. I know saying ‘I start to’ is not good writing, I use too many superfluous words and too much passive language). Thinking about all these things blocks my flow. My inner rebel archetype also begrudges being told what to do.
As a coach, I feel like it’s been beaten into me that my blog must GIVE VALUE, GIVE VALUE, GIVE VALUE, be profound, change people’s lives, FIX, FIX, FIX.
Shhh, could you just quieten down with all that Value, please?
Maybe let’s not rush in to fix things or give value or optimise, maybe let’s just be human for a moment, let’s be gentle for a moment.
Honestly, I just want to have a morning chat over a cup of coffee with ya’ll, to have space to share what’s on my mind, to have you hear me and to hear what’s on your beautiful mind too. If so inspired, you are invited to comment below, I’d love you to consider the comment section a space to express your own reflections and have them witnessed.
I want to use blogging as a way to take time to reflect on what’s intellectually interesting to me, what’s concerning me, inspiring me, lifting up or saddening my heart or things I’ve found helpful that you might find helpful too.
Putting things in writing has always been incredibly helpful to me to clarify my thoughts and intentions. I have always ‘written myself forward’.
So, I’m writing this blog post as a way to clarify my intentions.
My intention is not to do it ‘Right’.
Gentle and beautiful
Thank you Keren 🙂
I had/still have this problem: if it’s not going to be perfect/the best thing in the world why should I even start? This idea comes from a lot of different things, my education who made me a perfectionnist never satisfied, internet who show us a lot of people doing amazing things “without effort”,… So I often burried an idea even before I started to work on it. To overcome this I had to stop putting value in the finish product and to start adding value in the making process. If I enjoy doing it, it doesn’t matter (that much) if it’s perfect or not, or if it’s going to have a huge impact on the others. I do it for myself.
I still struggle with this when it’s related to professional relationships (I don’t want to send a flyer that isn’t as good as I can, and at the end it takes me too much time to send it). But I’m learning. Another thing we keep forgetting is that no one is their best at their beginning. No one won an Oscar the first time they played a character, no one won a prize the first time they wrote something. Even for the “first book” prizes, they worked on that first book, they read it and re-read it again and again. To remind me that, if I think that a blog or a photographer is “too” good, I go in their archives to find the oldest blogposts and notice that they were not that good at the beginning. They had to work to become better. So I should too start to work on my ideas, even the unperfect ones, to, me too, become better.
Nike is right : “just do it”
Thank you for sharing your thoughts Delphine, I hear you. I’ve also spent time going through people’s archives to see where they came from, not just their shining successes. It’s comforting. Creating is less fun if we’re holding ourselves back because it’s not perfect yet.
I’m with you Rach…Love a blog that sounds like a handwritten letter…from a friend..thought from the heart…if you could watermark a stamp for old times sake, that would be grand…keep writing, I love your words
Oh yes Veronica, that would be grand. I’ve sometimes thought about hand-writing blog posts, just because I like that letter feeling.