Blogging is as hard or as easy as you want to make it. It’s easy because all a blog post really consists of is a story, and we tell stories all the time. But we can choose to make it hard for ourselves by judging the story – is it good enough, or right enough, or funny enough, or relevant enough; or by judging how well we tell it – worries about spelling and grammar, or being no good at telling a story, or being rubbish at writing – who told you that? Because blogging isn’t like other writing. It’s not an essay, a business report, or a proposal. Then there are all the other fears, such as what if people laugh, or what if a competitor tells their stories better, and of course, the little voice that says, ‘who am I to do this anyway?’.
Recently I’ve been making blogging hard for myself, while at the same time knowing that it can be easy. This is somewhat embarrassing, since helping other people to blog is my business. I certainly used to find it easy. Back then I blogged, and sent a newsletter out, every week. But then I started to focus more on writing my novel, and that became my priority. But now that the back of that has been broken, so to speak, I really want to get back to blogging. I miss it. But I’ve struggled to get back in the saddle. I realise that I found it easy before because I had the momentum. I didn’t wait for inspiration, I just found something to say and said it. And even though I’ve not been blogging, I have found lots of stories to tell, I just haven’t been telling them.
But today, thanks to my yoga practice, I think I’ve released that blogging block. I’ve been practising yoga every morning since the beginning-ish of the year. I follow Yoga With Adriene – if you’re looking for a great home yoga practice I can totally recommend her – and I’m currently making my way through her 31 day Revolution Series. As I was unrolling my yoga mat I was pondering that fact that I’ve now practised yoga for 57 days in a row but I can’t seem to get a weekly blog post out. I wondered how I could translate that daily yoga practice into a more regular blogging practice. Then during today’s practice, which was entitled ‘Forgiveness’, Adriene asked us to consider what or who we needed to forgive, and it came to me that I needed to forgive myself for something. This is not a rare realisation. If I had a pound for every time I find something to forgive myself for, well, I would have no need to earn an income!!
So after I’d rolled up my yoga mat, I sat down with my journal and wrote down ‘I forgive myself for…’. And what came out was: not blogging, being a fraud (Ouch! Really?!), letting myself off the hook, being too easy on myself. But then I realised that I had been telling stories, just on my personal social media rather than more publicly. And that I’d found it easy to blog before because I’d build up some momentum. And once I really forgave myself for not blogging, I realised that all I had to do was to start, and keep going. And isn’t it wonderful that we can start as many times as we want? There’s nobody actually standing guard to tell us that we can’t blog today because we didn’t blog yesterday, or last week, or last month. We get to start again whenever we want. And really that’s all it takes to resume blogging. To make it okay that we haven’t, and then start.
So now all I have to do is build up the momentum. To find the ease in blogging, and sharing my stories publicly once again. So blogging and sharing more stories publicly are now firmly ensconced within my daily ‘to-do’ list, because that’s how I built up my daily yoga practice. And that’s how I’ll gain the momentum so that blogging becomes, once more, just something that I do.
If you know you’d benefit from blogging, but don’t seem to be able to build up to a blogging habit, then click this link to find out more about taking one of the six spots on my new service ‘Write And Review’. We spend a bit of time each month to draft out four blog posts, then you write them, before sending them to me to review. I then send you back some suggestions about how to make the post even better, after which you decide which suggestions to adopt, before clicking ‘Publish’. A great way to get some blogging momentum and build up a blogging habit. 🙂