Finding yourself through blogging – part 2

Many of us start blogging because we have all this pent-up communication that we have not been able to deliver. Others blog to recall the good old days when things seemed to be better.

This is beginning to sound like a take-off from the song, Hotel California, by the Eagles: Some blog to remember. Some blog to forget…

No matter how one starts, it is quite evident that the act of blogging causes changes in viewpoints and purposes in the blogger!

Often this seems to be a direct result of writing down and analyzing events of the past. When this is honestly done, I find that old issues seem to resolve themselves.

Writing out a complete account of an old upset or regret for the entire world to view seems to bring out facts and attitudes that were missed at the time. The end result is that the old incident is no longer of interest. It seems to fade from view except as an interesting footnote to an earlier point in life.

There is another effect, which I didn’t anticipate and is even more significant in some ways. My purpose in blogging is being steadily influenced by the bloggers I encounter. This has happened several times and has caused me to write one book and start two others.

The primary mechanism that seems to be at work here is that a blogger will make a casual observation about my blogging which stops me dead in my tracks. Not because it is upsetting, it stops me short because it is something quite obvious which I have completely overlooked.

The first revelation was triggered by my dear friend Rosa Say, whose weblog, Talking Story, is an inspiration for anyone seeking a path to enlightened leadership. She observed that I was an inspirational business blog. At the time, this was news to me since I was writing whatever came to mind. I assessed my writing and concluded that I was indeed writing a lot about business, from a post-corporate viewpoint. That got me to sharpen my focus and resulted in my writing Danger Quicksand – Have A Nice Day.

The most recent revelation came when following a chain of links to Work-related Blogs and Work. James Richards, a lecturer at a university in Scotland, is trying to make sense of work: Bringing work blogs and work-related news together .    

I realized from reading his weblog that I write about businesses as workplaces. I don’t think of them as clients or customers. Almost all of my writing is done from an employee, owner, or customer viewpoint. My interest is in defining what is necessary to achieve an optimum balance between work and life outside of work.

I wrote a recent post Satisfying Work, which affirms my orientation toward recognizing and creating saner work practices for a happier, more productive life.

Business blogs are written for the purpose of getting a corporation to do or buy something. Work blogs are written for the purpose of enabling employees, at any level, to achieve goals that may currently be out of reach.

I will probably be making some subtle adjustments to my blogging image to show Ripples as a work/life/philosophy blog. There is no shortage of genres to choose from.

This is what blogging is all about. You conceive of something, write about it, and it causes you to change your course of action as a result. The only barriers are in your own mind. Once you break through them, the sky is the limit. You write, and it affects creates your future. If that scares you, don’t blog. 🙂

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