Blogging to reclaim your mojo

I somehow fell into blogging a few months ago in an effort to rekindle my intellectual verve. This was following a sustained period of working within a largely unstimulating environment with little sense of professional growth.

It was quite a step to enter the public space where you're ideas are potentially exposed - taken that someone actually stumbles across your blog, let alone reads it!

I think my initial motivation to blog was more around challenging myself intellectually, to distill my ideas into a narrative, rather than engage with a social network. The process of blogging quickly energised my thinking in a way I hadn't experienced for some time. 

Blogging isn't for everyone, though I think it's a tremendous medium for making sense of the information you're digesting and for narrating your work to others as a stimulus for dialogue and further learning. I've recently embraced Harold Jarche's approach to Personal Knowledge Management (PKM)   and I see blogging as an integral part of this process for me. I'm now trying to share my blog posts and hopefully engage with others on Twitter.

Blogging brings many challenges, including developing your online voice, which should sit more in an engaging conversational style rather than the academic realm where many of us have our roots. Another challenge is making a regular commitment to blogging, which ideally should become a habit. When you're juggling the competing demands of work and family, it's not easy to find the time or headspace to maintain continuity.

I have tried to engage some of my colleagues in my blog to stimulate some sort of intellectual exchange. However, my colleagues don't really get blogging as a point for engaging with each other, in what seems to them - beyond the (mechanistic) context of work.

 

Although I'm still a neophyte, I've found blogging to be transformational and see it as a valuable learning tool for organisational storytelling and informal knowledge management.

I'll leave you with something powerful from blogging advocate, Euan Semple.
Starting the Social Media Journey