Ceatro is taking up a challenge: write a blog post everyday for 30 days. And today is the first day.
When companies launch challenges it usually to get other people involved but this one if just for us. Let’s admit it – we are bad at blogging. When it comes to blogging or writing “thought leadership” we make lists of everything we want to share. We sit down to write and then we find 1000 other things we can do. You should see how well filed our virtual filing cabinet is . . .
We always advise our clients to write, to publish, to start the conversation, to get their thinking out there – and yet, we don’t do it. The omnipresent joke about giving advice is that you rarely take the advice you give: “do as I say, not as I do.” We never thought we’d become that company!
Like any good consultancy we have analyzed our inaction in this area 17 different ways. Are we afraid of failure? Do we not like our own ideas? Do we think no one will care? Are we terrible writers? Do we not have the time? The answer to each was: no. So, then, what is it? Why aren’t we writing more?
Here is what we have concluded:
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We don’t like self-promotion (it feels gratuitous)
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We can’t share clients’ stories and we don’t like talking about our work or our thinking in general terms (it feels ungrounded, less executable, and is harder to understand)
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We find most business writing boring (sorry) and are worried about boring you with our writing
So, in an effort to get unstuck, we are following the lead of Dabble’s #30daysofhonesty and forcing ourselves to write everyday for 30 days. Whereas Dabble is confronting start up challenges (and it is worth a read), we will be pushing through all the thinking and topics we have been wanting to share with you and haven’t. An added benefit in putting this much information about what we do and think out there is that it might finally help my parents understand that I’m not in CIA (I’m not. Really.)
– We hope that it gets us over the discomfort of talking about ourselves, our projects, and our ideas. Being anti-self-promotion is the death knell if you are trying to marketing a knowledge-based company, which we are.
– We hope that it helps us find a way to share the passion we have about our client work, even though we have to talk in general terms, because we LOVE doing work for our clients. We LOVE talking to our clients about all of our thoughts, our past work, and our philosophies. We love helping our clients learn more. And we LOVE building the strategies and plans that help move our clients forward.
– And, most importantly, we hope it isn’t boring. You know that feeling you get when you read a terrible business article and you think “is this really the field I work in?” or “ugh, no more buzz words! Make it stop”? We don’t want you to feel that when you read our writing.
30 days of blogging, here we go. Is 30 a magic number? Everyone does 30 day challenges when it comes to habit changing (except when food is involved and then we suffer through 3 day challenges.) Of course ‘it has been said’ that it takes about 30 days to form a habit. However, it has also been said that it takes 10,000 hours to form a habit. We thought about splitting the difference but then we realized that reading 30 articles from us will be a lot more fun for you than 5000.
We aren’t sure what will happen after 30 days but until then – please write to us, tweet with us, share our writing, tell us what you want us to write about, and help us keep the conversation going.
-Cynthia