I mentioned two or three weeks ago on my Facebook page that I’d love to spend more of 2016 blogging. Believe it or not, I’ve been a blogger since 2005, from back when it was very “out there”, very weird and I felt I had to be slightly furtive about the whole blogging business. I started blogging on a personal site called Shades of Bliss and my tagline was “musings and other inspirations”. Then, when I started my business in 2011, I stopped “musing” there and blogged solely on this site.

Over the years I’ve taught a couple of blogging workshops; in some ways I was very ahead of the curve in blogging and mostly I talked about how to blog authentically. The last blogging session I held was at the Victoria Yoga Conference in January last year but ironically, the 2015 I experienced after that was probably the worst year I’ve ever had as a blogger. The good news was that I was super busy with my business, the bad was that blogging was often the first to go when I was working full tilt trying to get my “actual” work done.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my business and blogging and what those two things look like together. I love Seth Godin’s example that he sets of quickly “shipping” out super fast blog posts when he has ideas to share. They aren’t ideas that are fully researched and from what I’ve seen they almost never reference sources. Seth appears to use his blog as a little window into his thought world, and his thoughts are many and varied.

It probably sounds very strange to say this this way, but I have a ton of thoughts too. 🙂 Once I heard or read something about a personality “type” or some such thing about people who have a very rich inner life, a rich inner world inside their head. That’s me. I’m constantly thinking, and I am at my best when I’m not making small talk with other people, but delving in deep and wide with random “idea-full” thoughts with them. Even better if they are about my field of expertise! I love it when I can do this with what I write on my blog too.

But I haven’t been doing that. Not lately, anyway. And I’ve been thinking about why that is.

One of the things that I’ve come to the conclusion about, that I think holds me back from blogging as much as I want to, is that I feel this pressure to have the type of blog that is full of well researched posts that could be contributions to my field. But honestly? Thinking about having to put out blog posts that involve a lot of research does not inspire me to write. It actually holds me back. I feel I’m at my best when I sit down and bang out a post about what I’m thinking about and feeling right now. About ideas and yes, sometimes random thoughts. These kind of posts are decidedly not researched, and not full of “7 tips…” or “3 ways…” or really anything like the type of blog post that a lot of people will dictate that we should be writing now. But yet, it’s still the type of post I want to write.

I’ve realized that the way I want to blog, the way that I have done for more than ten years, and the way that still gets me excited about actually blogging (and not just thinking about it), is to talk about ideas and things in the world that spark my interest. Snippets, fragments and tiny little inklings of ideas. I want to put out the ‘what ifs’ and the ‘wouldn’t it be great ifs’ and the ‘how abouts’ to the rest of my community and see if those ideas resonate with anyone other than me. I don’t need to be the expert, I just want to have the conversation.

Maybe these are the kinds of posts that you like to read as much as I like to write. Maybe they’re not. Are you OK with “musings”? Do you want to be sparked by ideas (or told what to do?) I think that talking about ideas can still be “value-added” and talking about real feelings – yes, even about work – can be “curate-able content”. Maybe you’re feeling some of those feelings too about your work and when you read my words, you can feel just a little bit less alone.

I guess this is it in a nutshell: when I blog, I’m mostly writing for me. I’m writing to help formulate what I think and feel about the world and my place within it and my contribution to it. If this engages you, stay with me and share this space with me. I’d love to have you along.

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