When I talk to people about blogging they usually come up with the same things to say about it…
- I don’t know what to write about
- I don’t want to do videos
- It takes a lot of pictures and images to make a nice one
- I don’t have time
- Nobody cares what I have to say
…and the list goes on.
It isn’t as if I have spent so much time talking to people about blogging but rather that these are the things I say to myself. Yet in these statements, and the others that are used for reasoning about why people don’t blog, is embedded the very reason it is great thing to do.
I don’t know what to write about.
What is embedded in this statement? Embedded in this statement is the admittance that you have no idea about what you are about as a person. If you can’t articulate your thoughts about the things that matter to you in your own words, on your own “piece of paper” then it reveals that you are going through life without taking stock of it.
Not that you have to make everything you think public, but blogging is a great way to evaluate your own thoughts by looking at what you have written.
I don’t want to do videos.
Yes I know this is a painful thing to start doing because as time goes on I get less and less happy about the way I look on videos. I am a particularly vain person and I care what things look like and if I don’t think it looks good then I don’t want to show it to others. The fact is, it is in the videos that don’t look so good that people can best see themselves doing it.
But, more importantly, through video we can show who we are inside without so many words. Plus, doing video forces you to articulate yourself without too many ums and ahs. It develops communication skills and also by taking the videos in interesting places, it gives you a reason to go to them.
It takes a lot of images.
Yes, you want images on your blog, the more the better and I’ll admit it takes a lot of them. By using Canva, you can easily upload images to a certain size and then also write titles and thoughts on them as an added feature on your blog.
But, just as in videos, going out and taking pictures is a good thing, right? Isn’t it better to go for a walk in the park for a reason than just for going for a walk. Doesn’t looking for good shots make you observe the world around you with more interest and give you a different perspective on things?
Going out into nature and finding things to take pictures of and turning them into images for your blog is a very creative thing to do, plus, when I take pictures I usually begin to associate things to write about with it. For instance, if I take a picture of a field with a fence around it, I may relate to boundaries in life as a way to define something in life. If I take a picture of a Cardinal sitting on branch I may think about how fragile the branch seems, how light the Cardinal must be and how secure it feels on that branch because it knows it can fly.
I don’t have time.
I find taking time to write to be one of the most therapeutic things you can do. I think it is relaxing and I can use it either to vent about something that is frustrating me or to dream up some beautiful ideas to lift my own spirits. Taking time with yourself to think and express in a safe environment with the ability to share what you want with others is something that is missing in society.
People WASTE a lot of time watching the news or some banal TV sitcom and whittle away precious moments in their lives when they could be involved in their own thoughts, ideas and ways of finding a solution.
Nobody cares what I have to say.
Maybe it is because you aren’t saying anything. What do I mean by that?
People will care what you have to say if you actually say something that they can follow. Most people don’t know how to express themselves and then turn around and claim that nobody cares what they have to say, when in reality it isn’t what you think you are saying isn’t important to them but because they can’t understand what you are saying to begin with.
Constructive self expression through writing, speaking, taking pictures of the world around us are things that help us articulate who we are and develop a higher sense of value in ourselves because we get better at it as time goes on. One of the best things you can do in life is to keep a diary, a journal and your calendar to be able to retrace your steps and to see where you have been and to see where you are and what you are about.
The ability to articulate what you think in the most concise and powerful way is something everyone should be able to develop and there is no better place than a blog to do that, plus it is forever recorded and organized chronologically and by categories and tags to help you find what you have written.
It is a creativity creating machine. Something you can work on over time, something that can increase in value as you increase the number of posts, the quality of the posts and the ability to create content on demand.