“I have nothing worthwhile to say.”
“My ideas aren’t creative enough.”
“No one will listen to me.”
Snuggled in my bed last night under my three year old daughter’s bright pink knitted blanket, lovingly made by her late great-grandmother – the Strutt family matriarch whose husband my daughter is named after – sipping on a cup of hot sleepy time tea in a Baby Yoda mug, I dreamed and planned my personal 2022 goals.
Back in 2020, I set a goal of creating AmyStrutt.com, which I purchased and published on December 30 and 31 of that year. I spent 2021 revising the site and making only a few blog posts, which I blamed on time: I finished my master’s in the spring and ran for local office in the fall. Sure these things kept me busy, but they also would have been great blog topics. So why didn’t I write about them?
The answer hit me instantly, like a 1-2 punch in a Peloton Kendall Toole boxing class: I didn’t think I had worthwhile things to say about either topic. Or anything else for that matter.
Ya’ll, I’m a writer. I’ve been writing professionally my entire career. I’ve been working in internal communications and change management for a decade, I love it, and I’m good at it. But I work with executives and business leaders to tell their stories, consulting with them on strategy and tactics to finely tune their messaging. I haven’t told my own story in…well…forever. And because of this, I have doubts about my story being interesting, my thoughts being original, and anyone taking using their precious time to read what I have to write.
Also – and if you don’t know this you don’t know. Or if you know, you DO know – content is time consuming. The beautiful social media and blog posts canvassing the internet are [generally] not thrown together, and each one is crafted through hours of drafting, revising, and often visual image creation, either through graphic design or photography. There’s an entire study behind “pink collar” jobs – the demanding and time consuming social media jobs most often held by female-identifying individuals.
I know I can make time to write, if writing for myself is a priority. And through my goal setting, I’m figuring out that it is. I rarely post on social media, because I consciously try to be present: this was a huge 2021 goal of mine which I’m continuing in 2022, because my six year old asked me more than once last year to put down my phone, and it is not ok that my phone gets more attention than she does. But I do want to engage with old friends and colleagues on social and leverage LinkedIn to build my professional credibility, and to do that, I need to post content that is insightful and worth reading. I’m working on a strategy to connect longer blog posts here on my website to shorter social posts, all while finding my own voice and leveraging the expertise that I know I have.
What would you like to read about this year? What topics would make you pause and spend your finite resource of time reading? Are you a content creator (hint: if you post on social, you are!) and how do you determine what to write about? How can I connect my social platforms and website in an efficient way that is interesting and worthwhile for my audience? (This last question is one I’m working through for myself, but please please please share your thoughts – I’d be grateful.)
Cheers to 2022, more thoughtful content, and moving forward together.