What did I learn??

I am a Toastmaster. I cannot speak highly enough of the Toastmasters organization. They provide a supportive sandbox to develop speaking, evaluating, and leadership skills. I have been engaged in public presentation for nearly 40 years and I still find myself learning in Toastmasters.

This is not a Toastmasters advertisement (although it may seem to be). However, I opened today's blog with those statements to contextualize the rest of my writing today.

Part of the Toastmasters process is through different speech/leadership projects (called Pathways, in the Toastmasters LMS). This past month, I worked on a project that involved writing a blog. I had to write eight times in a month and at the end I will give a speech about what I learned. Today, I am sharing the thoughts that will go into that speech.

This is not my first time blogging. I have probably done it three other times since the concept of blogging started. I would write three or four times and then stop.

The process of writing eight times in the last thirty days has done a few things.

1. Through my dissertation work I became aware of the importance of writing regularly. Committing to these eight blog entries has reminded me how important that is. It may not have been the best writing in the past month, but I have forced myself to put "pen to paper." My plan is to continue that pattern moving forward. I may need to do the Toastmaster project again to keep it going, but hey, it's a start.

2. Perhaps others have felt this way, but I always worry that writing a blog has a prerequisite that others find what you say to be of value. Forcing myself to write twice a week forced me to let go of the need to worry if what I wrote made a difference to others. I hope it does, but whether it does or not, i still put my words out there.

3. Little ideas can lead to change. When I sit down to write, I don't always have something to say. I start with a kernel and usually through struggling with the kernel, I get to bigger thoughts. The thoughts then sit with me and for days after writing, I find myself reflecting on those words for weeks after writing...and in small ways they begin to change me.

4. Writing a blog on a phone is hard. The periods in the day when I have time to write, I am not always at my computer. In fact, right now I am at a Panera typing on my phone. However (see point 1), I committed to writing, so I have to make do with what is in my hand when I have time to blog. These keyboards are small and my fingers are not....so I make a lot of mistakes and spend a lot of time deleting and retyping

In the end, this project forced me to revisit something I had tried before.  I have realized that blogging twice a week is very manageable. I think that as I continue this process I want to coalesce around a theme of some sort, but I am continue to just write about the thoughts of the day until that theme presents itself.

In this case (and many others), the Toastmaster Pathways has encouraged me to grow beyond where I am. How have you grown today? How will you grow tomorrow?