I Lost My Place
I was once told that one of the best ways to recover when you've lost your place in a speech is to simply be transparent about the fact that you lost your place. It's happened to me a couple of times (especially as I've started to do more deckless presentations) and, lo and behold, it works.
I figure if it works well enough for public speaking, it should work well enough for blogging. So: I've lost my place.
In some ways, it feels like I lost it back in late 2010 and I've never really picked it back up. Life happened, and when I looked up, I'd shifted so much that it was hard to go back to where I was and pick it up from there. But starting the conversation from where I was after all of that and moving forward was challenging, too.
It feels to me like I had just published the third book in a series, didn't write the fourth and fifth, and all of a sudden found myself in the story of the sixth. If you were reading along as I was writing that third book, you probably feel the same way.
In my story about that series of story - I know, that's meta in only the way I can pull off - something got lost in the sixth story. Call it the soul of the series, if you will. It pops back up every now and again, but never with the same integrity and transcendence as it once had.
Of course, the story is only partially true for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that my Inner Critic is likely magnitudes more critical than yours is - imagine the normal Inner Critic that's a skeptical and well-trained analytic philosopher, editor, content strategist, and former military officer. Needless to say, being satisfied with my work is feat itself; impressing myself happens at most a couple of times per year.
Where the story is true, though, is that somewhere along the way, the content I share here on the blog diverged from the content I put elsewhere. I know it's true because enough of our core readers and supporters had the courage and compassion to tell me so. (Thank you, by the way.)
Their feedback: the blog content is meh, especially since many of them have seen me present, have had conversations with me, attend our Monthly Momentum Calls, listened to recent interviews and podcast appearances, or have taken some of our classes.
Meh?! Yep. That'd be my own evaluation most of the time, but it's always hard to tell because my Uber Inner Critic can tear apart even the greatest achievement.
But the interesting thing is that they like the narrative parts of our newsletter, though, so it's clear that it has more to do with my mindset as the writer than anything else. Oh, the demons we writers hoist into the endeavors of our craft.
The trick with finding my place this time is that I don't have a prepared speech to return to. I have to go somewhere both familiar and foreign, forgetting the science of "what works" - which I know all too well is usually someone else's marketing spin - and admitting that I don't know what's next and still have a lot to learn.
What I do know is that I can't think my way out of this Gordian knot. More thinking will lead to either more silence or more Meh as I bloggify my thinking and voice. The only way to get back into the type of publishing groove I want to be in is to write the truth and press publish.
See you tomorrow. I've got an Uber Inner Critic to wrestle with.