Writing a blog every two weeks or so gives you a mental goal.
You have to be able to come up with something that you are happy to share with your audience of friends, colleagues, clients and total strangers. Every word that you write will be judged, and you will be making an (albeit minuscule) impact on the lives of every reader.
That is a challenge and a privilege, and I find that it helps me to focus my thoughts.
Running my own recruitment business comes with the usual ups and downs, and a myriad of thoughts accompany me on the journey. Most of these thoughts are repetitive and mundane, but every now and again an insight comes along like a bolt from the blue. Before I started writing, I didn’t have a “place” for these thoughts in my life, and many of them would be lost. In the process of composing my semi-regular blogs, I now find that I make that little bit more effort to develop these thoughts further – after all, they might turn into that next message to be shared with the world.
The mere act of going the extra mental mile with some of these thoughts can often lead to new perspectives and even fresher insights. From a practical point of view, they might not seem to be overly useful for my business, but because I am thinking about them with my blog in mind, I feel that giving them the mental headspace is worth doing. I have solved and parked a few fairly hefty problems in this way over the past year.
The British mentality is to keep things bottled up, but we all know that this isn’t so healthy. When we allow ourselves to think about things in a creative way (with no more of an objective than writing 500 words), we give our mind a crucial workout and get all those hidden thoughts space to breathe. It is surprising how seemingly unrelated concepts can be connected to each other.
Knowing yourself is important to any small business owner. It is all too easy to lose yourself in the pursuit of financial gain, and all of a sudden you find yourself doing this that simply aren’t “you” in the name of your business. Thinking about potential blog topics helps me to work out what is really important to me, and the recurring thoughts are the ones that I know that I have to deal with.
I sometimes think that I am more writing for myself than for others. The brain is a muscle, and I must admit that I enjoy giving it a workout every now and again.
The most interesting thing happens when it comes time to decide what I want to write about. All those random thoughts swirl around my head, and I seem to settle on the idea that has been most prominent. Reading and re-reading my previous blogs then gives me a genuine insight into where my head was at any point in time.
Writing has got me through some of the most challenging periods in my career, and I intend to rely on it as a mental crutch for a long time to come.
Written by Alex Turner, Edited by Paul Drury