Your heart is in the right place, hit publish already!
Each week as I sit down to write an article, I aim to do a few things:
Help you write more.
Inspire you to want to write.
Encourage you to go for it.
Believe that writing can be easy (you just gotta do it!)
Each article here has a variation of the above goals backing it up. I refuse to write something just because it’s blogging day. If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, I get the idea that you’re one of these people too.
You write from the heart.
You put your guts into it.
You’re not half-assing what you’re putting out into the world—you’re full-assing it. Cheers to asses-all-in!
I’d sooner throw in my blogging towel or put it on hold than to write crap to fill up space. We do not need content for content's sake, and I refuse to contribute to the noise.
If you’re pausing to wonder if right now, your work is positively contributing to the world, or contributing to the clutter—then you’re on the right track.
You’re pausing to read this article because you give a shit. You give a shit about your work, your people, your brand, and probably lots of other stuff too—like recycling, choosing the good chocolate, and saving the whales, or whatever your cause may be.
The world needs your helpful, engaging content. In many of my writing workshops, clients tentatively share their work with me.
Is it good enough? They wonder.
Almost always, it’s perfect. Perfect in the sense that the intention behind the article is clean and powerful and the essence is to help, inspire, entertain, or educate. My clients have never shown me fluffy copy. It’s not about being perfect in the sense of every comma is in the right place, they’re writing in an active voice, or a sentence structure is spot on.
If your heart is in a good place when you sit down to write content for your audience, your readers will almost never notice the odd typo or funky word. People are forgiving.
You have permission to hit <publish>
Sometimes, people ask me if their blog article is good enough to post. My answer is always YES YES YES! We can tweak and tweak for hours, but for what? Often they’re hesitating to hit publish because they’re worried more about how they’re going to look to their peers, their mentors, their coaches—the people who are NOT their audience. Here's your official permission slip. There's a caveat though, you only get ONE permission slip, because you don't really need it and you can write your own permission slips now!
Your writing will improve
That is if you keep doing it. The more you sit down at the page and make something out of nothing but a few thoughts, the more you’ll continue to strengthen your blogging voice. You’re going to blog more than once, right? This is good news. When you sit down each week and focus deliberately on writing something that your audience craves, you grow your body of work, bit by bit, until you have 10 blog posts, then, 50, then hundreds.
Hiding is your ego talking
As much as we may point to our egos for wanting to be seen, wanting to go viral, or experience fame, the opposite is also true. If you’re hiding, afraid to put your work and yourself out there, this is also the ego piping up trying to protect you. Give that bugger an elbow to the gut, publish your work, share your work, and carry on with your life.
I’m a recovering perfectionist. I spent roughly a year thinking about what I’d blog about before simply starting. A YEAR! I started. I wrote about food, family, and striving for minimalism and living with less. If I didn’t start, I might not have found that the thing I love talking about more than anything is writing. Helping you write faster, making it more natural, and making it actually fucking fun.
If I didn’t just start, this blog and my copywriting and coaching business could still be a bunch of ink in a notebook.
Sure, I aim to publish something weekly(ish). I don’t commit to a hard time frame because if I don’t have something helpful to say, I’m not going to say anything at all. Sometimes an article takes me a little longer to get it just right.
I’m thankful that you appreciate this.
Your writing is ready. Get it out there.
If this article made you smile, or gave you the nudge to hit publish, you might like these too:
And if you need a bigger nudge to get writing, you can get that here inside the Write Like a MOFO Community
