Not everyone likes New Year’s Resolutions but I do – I think they provide a great opportunity to look back on the past year and make decisions about what you want to change in the next few months.
Having coached plenty of people through the process of making resolutions and putting them into action, I’ve seen a fair cross-section of what works and what doesn’t. So I’m going to post soon on Why Most New Year’s Resolutions Fail – and how you can succeed at keeping yours. It’s only fair to share my own resolutions with you, so I’ll post them up here and then use one or two of them as ‘case material’ for my ‘How To’ posts.
So here goes with my first one…
1. Make my blogging more like my coaching.
When I started this blog, I thought of my website primarily as a marketing platform, but I’ve come to realise it’s much more interesting than that. As well as attracting new clients (which is always nice), I’ve discovered that it adds a new dimension to my coaching with existing clients.
For one thing, clients are reading the blog and coming to me with questions, ideas and suggestions based on what they read. And now I often suggest that they read a particular category before or after a coaching sessions as preparation or part of the follow-up. The feedback I’m getting from clients is that the blog adds the following extra dimension to their coaching:
It was only when I stopped to review at the end of 2006 that I realised how much the blog is transforming my coaching. So my first resolution for 2007 is to accelerate this convergence by making this blog as much like my coaching as possible. I’m sure there are limits to what can be achieved on a blog as opposed to a face-to-face or phone conversation – but I want to see how far I can push those limits…
Luckily for me, blogging and coaching are both conversations – so there’s lots of potential for me to develop Wishful Thinking as a discussion space, and for extending the conversation onto other blogs. For that to really work of course I’ll need your input – so please feel free to send me questions you want me to answer or topics you’d like me to cover on the blog – whether about your own creative process or career, creative collaboration with others, or managing creative professionals. Comments or e-mails always welcome – and let me know if you want to remain anonymous when I answer your question on the blog.
In terms of the blog content, I want to incorporate more of the recurring themes of my coaching with clients – i.e. to start capturing more of the things I find myself saying over and over again. The best example of this is my post on why enthusiasm is better than confidence – I heard myself saying it a couple of months ago and thought “I’ve said this hundreds of times, I need to put it on the blog”. Although it’s relatively recent, it’s been far and away my most popular post, in terms of traffic, links and other feedback. And there’s plenty more where that came from – so in 2007 I’m aiming to capture more of my ‘coaching memes’ and get them out there on this blog.
Right, that’s Resolution no.1 – I’ll post another 2 or 3 of my own, then start looking at Why most New Year’s Resolutions fail – and what to do about it.
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