I’m reading a book that talks about vulnerability. I think that is partially what I was trying to express in the previous post. Blogging is in a way letting yourself be vulnerable. The reasons we want blog posts to be air tight is because we are exposing ourselves. Others can come in and say things like: “I already knew all of that” or variations on what we said was not good for any number of reasons.

The truth is I never feel qualified to speak at conferences.

I just recently in the past few months pushed myself to do them, and at first I was sure no one would accept my submission, but I got a very high success rate. When I read up on the other presenters I’m always like wow this person did this, and that person did that. And I think I have a tendency to compare myself to all of them together, I think this a common thing we do with our “system 1” (from the Thinking Fast and Slow book). If you were to ask someone if they do it, they would be like, of course not that doesn’t make any sense. But in that moment, I think that’s what we do. Is it the imposter syndrome? Perhaps, I know I have many signs of it. And while I do think being humble is much better than being arrogant I think it’s sometimes hard for me to walk the line between humble and imposter syndrome. Maybe it’s the birds of a feather flock together scenario but it seems a common pattern in my friends.

A co-worker of mine (Matt Wiebe) has recently(ish) started blogging. I really enjoy reading the thoughtful posts.
I think as humans we have a tendency to forget when we didn’t know things or didn’t have the same opinion we once did. I often feel that anything I would write would be self evident to everybody and they’ve already had all these thoughts. And personal experience has also taught me that the quote “life is a journey that no one else can take for us” (find real quote). But I think I’ve also noticed that we can help others go thru the learning process a bit faster and a bit smoother than we did. In the past I always tried to help people in the past, and I still do, it’s just that way I go about it is different. I would previously feel like I had failed if I could not convince the other individual to heal themselves (in a mental health sort of way). It took me a long time to realize that it wasn’t more effort or less effort or anything I did that could impact someone to the point where they will change. I’ve had friends who were in exactly the same situation I had just been in, and that they had counselled me thru. When I gave them the same advice, they wouldn’t listen. It’s very hard to step away from things like this but I think we have to. All that to say that I think it is worthwhile to have a blog and to post things to share, either as reminders of things they already know or to help give someone the idea for something they can incorporate for themselves.

I think blogging is inherently hard because there is a different expectation than Facebook or Twitter. The medium, and our eexperiences with it (reading popular blogs for example) make it that we believe this is somehow more formal, that it has more staying power. Part of it (for facebook at least) may be the lack of the public being able to view your writing. We therefore want to polish it. We don’t want to write something that is not air tight. It’s easy to post a random thought that is not worked out to Facebook, but on your website? It feels like the bar is higher.