CL_Blog

New Year’s Day always seems so full of promise. Remember that feeling of being on the brink of something great?

That’s the day I launched this blog. My goal was to go on a learning journey to explore the future of corporate communications. I’d post every Tuesday and Friday. Life would be perfect.

This isn’t my first blog. Three years ago I launched a blog on our company’s social collaboration platform. My goal was to drive adoption and role model what colleagues could do with social business.

What have I learned so far from blogging?

Pursue excellence, not perfection. It’s important to write great posts, but it’s also important to publish with some level of frequency. Find the right balance, whether it’s a blog post, a work project or an exercise program. Know when to take the leap. And make the “thumb slam” I wrote about in my first post.

Do your most important work in the morning. That’s the only time you can truly control. Texts aren’t stacking up; people aren’t asking for a minute of your time. This is the best time to do what’s most important to you. For me it might be a blog post or a big work project. Getting something important done first thing makes me happier and more productive for the rest of the day.

Don’t be afraid to look silly. In launching social collaboration at work a few years ago, I felt out of my element. But I realized I could learn what I needed to know. I started an internal blog to share my learning journey and ask for help from others. Earlier this year I debated whether to post “What’s Your Theme for 2015?” It seemed too soft and self-revealing. But I gave it a thumb slam. And 2,154 views and 61 comments later, I’m glad I did. Colleagues inspired others by sharing their themes for the year – from brave to intentional and from growth to transformation and more.

No one knows all the answers. Doesn’t it always seem like everyone else but you has it all figured out? Except they don’t. And the way to figure it out is by doing it. One step at a time. Have a plan, sure, but take in feedback along the way and make adjustments as you go. Pamela Druckerman summed it up well as, “everyone is winging it, some just do it more confidently.”

Work and life are one in the same. No more searching for an elusive work/life “balance.” They are one in the same, and it makes life easier to approach it as one big mashup. What am I learning in one area of my life that I can apply in another? And as my HR colleague Linda Simon wisely says, “enjoy every day.”

On New Year’s Day as I was fine tuning my first post and figuring out how to point the servers with my domain name to WordPress, my husband, Kevin, made me a cake. The one that opened this post. Sweet.

And although my posts aren’t perfect and neither is my life, there’s joy in losing myself in the thinking, the writing and the learning. Sweet.