Choosing blog foder …

I have a number of half written blogs in my draft folders. At the time of starting they seemed like good ideas, I start well, but then after a paragraph or two I lose all momentum.

Some of you may well be despairing at this – I’m sure best practice is to plan your blog before you start, but that’s not me. This is my process – I’ll get an idea, throw it around in my head a bit, start composing the first lines ( this is usually all taking place whilst on a walk), then I’ll forget about it for a while, this could be for hours, days or sometimes sadly forever,,,,,! At some point I’ll get out the laptop and bring it to life.

With a good idea the content seems to flow, and comes together relatively quickly and easily. I’ll re-read it a few times, often reducing the length slightly, find an image I love and voila. But then other times one paragraph in I’ll stop and begin to question myself, why am I writing this/ where is it going? and do I really buy into everything I’m writing. Its important to me that everything is congruent …

I’m a great lover of walking, and agree with Nietzsche ‘ all truly great thought are conceived by walking’. I use walks to get exercise, to explore the area, on routine walks to the local shops I’ll often take calls and I use my walking time to work through ideas. To many friends and colleagues, the way I present my ideas is very unstructured, rather chaotic and random, to me its connected, creative and fluid 🙂 But I do acknowledge that sometimes I can have too many ideas and that I can feel overwhelmed by choice or detail. And this is when I find that the act of walking seems to act as a natural filtration system whereby the important things to come to the top and others fall to the ground. From a somatic perspective holding my body upright and getting moving also brings more blood and clarity to the brain.

Last week I started a walk with the purpose of thinking about my blog and within minutes I had the ‘aha’ moment on what makes a good and authentic blog (well from my persepctive).

I love a mental challenge, problem solving and most of all being made to think. At work I like a good old healthy debate, and I am quite happy to change my views based on new information provided. In my personal life when I’m grappling with something I will share this with others, keen to get their perspective, keen to hear different views to broaden my thinking, but ultimately I will make up my own mind. I revel in this process of increasingly divergent thinking.

And this is where my blogging fits in. My blog is about this chapter of my life, but it is not designed to be a diary or record of events, I blog about things that make me think, things that in some way stretch me. If something makes sense then I move on quickly, blogging provides another way of getting my head around an unfamiliar concept, it helps me make sense of something I’ve read or has happened to me.

Having written this it seems so blinding obvious but initially it was not…

How and where do you decide what to blog about ?