(The roundup for the “How Blogging Helps Your Career Series” is here)
You have things to say. You have ideas. You have statements.
You want to get them out. To broadcast them.
You want to know how to reach people and connect with them.
You want to get over your fear of doing it in the first place.
Come to think of it, on your job, chances are you wish you were better at shooting your mouth off effectively.
A blog is a great way to get better at this.
Blogging is a soap box you can stand on and shout from.
When you blog, you have a way to get the word out, a giant canvas of text and embedded images in which to express yourself. You can shoot your mouth off via your fingertips as it were.
When you blog, you get used to communicating. You get into the habit of speaking out and trying to reach people, or at least speaking.
When you blog, you get into the psychology of speaking out. You learn you can do it, you learn how to do it, you get used to it.
When you blog, you also get used to being in the public eye. From building courage to taking feedback to ignoring irrelevant criticism, you learn to deal with it. For that matter, you may find your anther enjoy it.
A blog is a way to stand on your electronic soap box and shout to the world (with embedded Hyperlinks)
In your career, this brings a lot of benefits:
- You develop the courage to communicate. I know I’d certainly like to see more of that in my career, having had to tease information out of people repeatedly.
- You get into the habit of communicating, ready, willing, and even eager to do it. In a good way it may even be hard to shut you up (OK, it may be in a bad way too, but I’ll assume the best).
- You get used to being in the public eye. It makes you bolder, it makes you more relaxed.
- You stand out because you’re actually doing something.
A blog is a soap box. Get ready to shout.
Takeaways and To dos:
- Have a goal for your blogging – this helps you effectively shoot your mouth off as it were – and also makes it easier to communicate.
- When blogging, find out if you’re overly bold, underly bold, or properly bold. This will help you push yourself – and avoid making mistakes with too much bluntness.
- Watch your reactions to your blogging and feedback – it’ll tell you a lot about yourself and how you communicate. It’ll also teach you where your barriers are.
- Look to see how you communicate best in blogging and see how you can transfer that to your career. Do you do sarcasm, white-paper, snark, giant lists, etc.?
- Push yourself over time in your blogging to reach ‘the right level of bold” for you and your career.
- Nothing says you just have to blog on your own blog – you can go help with other blogs as well, and find more soap boxes!
- Collect feedback and learn to deal with people! Seek the feedback so you can process it!
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.