I met with my MasterMind group yesterday and we worked on this voice in regards to self-promotion. It says: “What’s the point? Nobody cares what I do anyway. There’s all kinds of other stuff out there and a lot of it is better than mine. Blah.”

I could identify that there is some kind of fear there—fear of disappointing people, fear of being judged or disliked. But I wasn’t getting very far focusing on the fear.

The Suggestion: Work with the voice. Ask, What IS the point?

When I tried that, I got something completely different:

The point of me talking about What I Do (or Doing it in the first place) is to remind people that they are not alone. That there are many people out there working on their “stuff” and trying to live a more conscious life, and trying to build a successful business too. That there is help and support available if we let ourselves ask for it (and give it to ourselves). Especially I want to reach people who might feel like they are weird or don’t belong or are too ______. I want people to feel OK about wherever they are in their life and empowered to make choices that work for them. It’s OK. We’re all just muddling along figuring things out. I’m not a guru and I don’t want to be. I’m just another person saying “Hey, this is do-able. You’re OK. Let’s play with it. Try this.”

Instant alignment!

Writing this changed my whole perspective on self-promotion. Suddenly it’s not about ME and whether people like ME and follow ME and think I’M the best thing since sliced bread and ohmygosh what if one day they DON’T like me—ugh.

Instead, it’s about what I want to give people: a sense of confidence in themselves and their own abilities and choices. Tools and resources that might help. Permission to experiment and find their own way. A reminder that underneath the fear and confusion is a pure, clean stream of wisdom and clarity that we can access and is always there waiting for us when we are ready to turn inwards and find it.

Re-orienting to what I want to give feels so much better. More grounded, more clear, and more free to create and give and share.

Lesson #1: Critical voices are wise owls disguised as rats.

That voice asking, “What’s the point?” was really trying to get me to see that I was missing the point.

By thinking of self-promotion as …well, as self-promotion, I was missing that it’s about something much deeper. The heart wants to give. Self-promotion is about tapping into that desire to give and sharing from that place. It’s not about getting people to like me—it’s about getting people to like themselves. That’s what I want to give.

Thank you voice…(and thank you friends for reminding me to hang out with it).

Lesson #2: Promotion, and marketing, is best done from a connected place.

When I start feeling like I’m just tweeting to get retweets, or blogging for comments, or that I’m creating in a void and shouting into the wind—I need to reconnect with what I want to give. Not what I want to get from my promotion efforts, but what I want to see others get. Then I’m out of my head and back into the stream of living, of giving, of loving.

Comment Magic:

This is a new section I’m adding, inspired by my brilliant friend Larisa.

I want to encourage more comments. It gets lonely in cyberspace, and I’d love to hear from you.

Do you have a “what’s the point” voice? Or maybe it says, “I don’t care anyway”, or “It doesn’t matter”, or “Why bother”. Maybe it’s just a sense of apathy or anxiety that creeps up.

What helps you remember that there is a point, that you do care, and that it does matter…what helps you reconnect?

In all the buzz and hoopla and the jungle of strategies for marketing and promotion, how do you stay connected to your desire to give?

This is Herman.

I drew him at my last Mastermind group meeting where I was asking for help yet again with my Eternal Quandary which one of the gals put succinctly as: I want to be famous but I don’t want to be famous. (And by famous, I mean internet famous — known amongst biz geeks for making cool things that help people).

I was lamenting finding myself in front of the same brick wall.

I wrote the problem down on my notepaper and randomly drew a circle around it.

Stupid problem.

I drew arrows and spears to represent all the angles of attack that had not worked to fix it. Therapy. Workshops. Morning pages. Etc.

Then, on a whim, I drew eyes on the top of the circle. And then arms and legs. And named the problem “Herman”.

With this simple drawing, something shifted inside me. I felt warmth for the little creature I had just given a name and a face.

Through this drawing, I had started to form a relationship with my “brick wall”. The problem was no longer a problem, it was a little being that wanted something.

The wall was its way of communicating. I was just unable to hear it.

As my perspective changed, I got curious about what this little guy wanted. What was his objection to fame? Why the big wall?

As the conversation continued, it turned out the “wall” was really a set of needs, wrapped up in a confusing jumble of beliefs about how those needs would not get met if I were famous.

For instance, if I were famous, I would have to be Eternally Productive, never play games, always be available, do interviews, enjoy schmoozing, etc. And I don’t want that, no sirree.

It turns out the resistance wasn’t about the idea of getting my work out to more people at all. It was about what happens next, and if I could maintain my boundaries.

It turns out that Herman is this amazing advocate for my self-care.

Herman wants to go to bed earlier. Herman wants time for me to think and process my feelings. Herman wants the freedom to attend to what I really need. Herman wants to stop working before I’m burned out and exhausted.

Herman may feel a little conservative and cautious. But he’s totally on my side.

Our demons are parts of ourselves we have miscast in the inner drama of our mind.

Herman was never a demon. But because I had never formed a relationship with him, I did not know his true face.

In fact, as I worked more with Herman, I found another demon — the part of myself who has a bundle of needs around contribution and purpose and thinks that if I don’t work constantly I won’t be proving that I’m enough.  Another set of real needs mixed up in a tangle of unhelpful beliefs.

These two play tug-of-war in my subconscious, pushing and pulling on me. One yanks hard and I stay up all night working on a project. The other gives a good pull and I spend hours vegetating in front of the TV. Neither are happy and both are afraid of losing their grip on the only way they know of to meet their needs: by pulling me into their habitual strategies.

The wall turned out to be just a weapon in a larger inner battle that I’m working to resolve. (Other symptoms of an inner battle include: endless discontentment, fantasizing instead of doing, and never moving in any one direction for very long.)

Once I get these two parts of myself talking, I can get somewhere with what my whole system needs to move forward.

Maturing psychologically means learning to play the referee with our subconscious parts.

The drawing was an avenue to start humanizing this tangled knot of needs and beliefs, and get curious about them. This is the first step.

To do this work, you need some consistent way to get underneath the symptoms that appear to your conscious awareness. Writing, drawing, and talking with supportive people who ask good questions are what work for me. Experiment to collect your own toolset.

Keep a completely open and curious attitude about what you will find. It’s a wacky world inside our minds. Demons? Walls? Those are my metaphors; you’ll find your own. Whatever you discover, don’t judge it, or it won’t reveal its secrets to you.

Have patience and self-forgiveness too. There is no magic wand that will make issues instantly explicable. The mind is a labyrinth full of characters with different motivations and horribly inexplicable ways of communicating. It’s up to you to make a map and translate the hieroglyphics on the wall.

I’ve been watching Stargate SG-1. Every episode they jump into a swirling pool of light to find out what new world is on the other side. Inner work is kind of like that. It takes cojones.

The last element is to continually experiment with new, healthy, adult ways to meet your needs consciously and consistently. By “healthy”, I mean that you don’t meet one need at the expense of another. For example, eating two chocolate bars for dinner meets my need for comfort, but at the cost of my need for nourishment. Eating one square of chocolate, making myself a decent meal, and curling up with my cat meets many needs without cost.

Generally our demon strategies are costly and habitual. It’s up to us to investigate what they need, help them feel heard enough so they stop taking over, and develop the discipline of consistently choosing healthy strategies.

This takes a lot of practice. Again with the patience. Be good to yourself.

Worksheet!

I wrote up the drawing exercise and some of the questions I asked myself. Enjoy (and let me know in the comments how it works for you).

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Biznik, blogs, comments, status updates, “friend”ing, fan pages…aaah! Where does it end?

Do you find yourself avoiding social media, or find it overwhelming? You’re so not alone. I’ve talked to many people, of all ages, highly technical and not, and it’s a common issue.

What if you are not a natural social butterfly? How do you get any work done if you Facebook all day? How can you have meaningful interactions when you can’t keep up with all the conversations? What is reasonable? What is normal? What “should” I be doing?

First, empathy.

I have some perspectives I’ll share in a bit. But first I want to state vehemently that there are very good reasons for why it’s overwhelming and confusing.

The online business landscape is changing at a very rapid rate. Nobody can keep up. If you make it about keeping up, you’ll feel like you are drowning.

Social media requires a much different approach to media that we are used to. You approach an encyclopedia very differently than a magazine. You approach a raging river very differently than you approach a still lake. And you need to approach Twitter and Facebook very differently than email. For example, Twitter is a stream – you dip in and see what goes by, but you don’t try to drink the whole river. Email is more like a bucket – you process each thing that goes in and out.

Rules and social expectations are different too. If someone sends you an email, they usually expect a response. But if someone comments or “likes” your Facebook status, a return comment is not expected. It’s a more optional medium. These are rules and norms that take time to figure out and get comfortable with.

And there’s the issue of privacy. The lines between personal, private, public, and professional are getting all blurry. That’s fascinating…and scary. Privacy is a primal need. In human society, rules and norms about privacy usually change very slowly. Right now they are all over the map. Understanding how to navigate in a world where the very nature of privacy and the personal is being questioned and rewritten daily is confusing and unsettling.

Social media tools are changing fundamental patterns of interaction, and I think we can’t even see where that will take us yet. It’s going to be disorienting for awhile. The best way to cope is to expect change and give yourself a liberal amount of self-acceptance for not knowing what exactly is going on or how you feel about it.

Next, some perspectives.

I’m not a social media expert. In fact, I’m pretty skeptical, and sometimes a bit peeved, at most people who call themselves that.

But I’ve had my share of resistance to social media. These ideas represent my  experience making sense of it.

Resistance #1: It is all too much! I have a dozen invites to different services in my Inbox!

It’s an 80/20 thing. 80% of the activity is on 20% of the sites. Only it’s probably more like 95/5. Facebook’s popularity is huge compared with most others. Twitter is up there too.

You only need to have one network that you really participate in to build an online community. So choose one that makes sense to you and you feel at home with.

I like Facebook because I like the way it has threaded comments and it’s personal. Some of my friends live in Twitter. Another friend is crazy about GoodReads. Community is happening on all these sites. It’s more about picking and sticking than about being on all of them.

Don’t join the smaller ones unless you really want to. Or you have a compelling reason to, like you already know a group on that service you want to be part of, or you know that it’s where folks in your niche actually do hang out.

If your people aren’t there, you can’t socialize with them. So join a network where people you like and want to share space with are hanging out.

Resistance #2: I’m an introvert. I have nothing to say to these people.

A lot of us creative types are not exactly the life of the party. We prefer small groups of friends or one-on-one conversations to big gatherings. We’d rather know a few people well than keep up with hundreds of acquaintances. We can’t imagine why anybody cares about all the trivial crap that gets posted on Facebook.

Here’s the thing: Even if you are not that social, a lot of other people are. They will get value out of connecting to you and reading your updates, even if you think they are not worth posting. They will want to “friend” you even if you would never think to “friend” them. Sometimes you don’t have to do much more than let them. Let people (and customers) know you. Start there.

Next, notice what events or activities in your daily life you talk to your friends about. What do you send in emails to people you know well? What do you share with them on the phone? Become mindful of the news you are already sharing with the contacts that you already know. Start posting some of these news items to your Facebook status feed or Twitter. Develop it as a habit slowly over time.

The stars of social media post constantly and consistently. And they’ll say it’s necessary. But it’s not, in my opinion. Once a day, or even once a week, is enough for people to have a presence to connect to. Do what is natural to you. More becomes noise. You don’t have to become Ms. Chit-Chat if that’s not who you are. Start with just showing up, in your authenticity, and letting people get a glimpse of you from time to time.

Resistance #3: People won’t like me. Nobody will care about what I write.

Do your friends like you in real life?

Of course they do. Bring whatever it is that they like and love about you into social media.

What value do you already bring to the network you already have? Ground yourself solidly in who you are and what value you bring before approaching social media.

Use your strengths. Are you an idea person? Post some of your ideas. Are you a researcher? Post interesting sites or discoveries. Do you inspire people? Post inspirational thoughts. Do you like to make people think? Post questions or links to controversial articles. Are you an artist? Do you love your family? Whatever it is that makes you a well-rounded human being is stuff you can share.

Bring your full self.

Then let go.

You can’t control what anybody else thinks about you. Whether they like you, friend you, ignore you, or even criticize you in some way, it’s not about you. You met their needs, or you didn’t, or they had a bad day, or they had a good day, or you remind them of their favorite niece, or who knows. Take it as information, weighted evenly with what you know of them and how close they are to you. Consider its value to you as feedback, but don’t take it personally.

Any kind of recognition brings up our fear of rejection. Notice it, affirm your own worth, be true to who you are and show up in the fullness of you, and then let go of the need to control what other people are thinking. You can’t control anybody else’s opinions, actions, or preferences. You’ll go nutty trying.

Hand it over, or do whatever works for you to surrender things you can’t control.

Resistance #4: It will take over my life. I sit down and suddenly it’s 4 hours later.

Reading updates and following blogs can be addictive, it’s true. And it can be draining. You sit down to check your feed and make a status update and suddenly you have followed a thread to a blog to another blog to a new site you spent 1/2 hour on to a book you had to buy on Amazon. And now you are down $12.95 and you didn’t get anything done today.

This is an opportunity to get mindful and notice what really serves you. How much time per week reading blogs and Twitter fits into your life in a balanced, healthy way? Is it 1/2 hour? 5 hours? Nobody knows but you. But that’s the amount you should do it.

Personally my limit is about 15 minutes per sitting, and I like to do it once a day or so. I’ve developed the habit of checking in with myself: “Is this getting draining? Is it time to stop now and do something else?”.

Mindfulness is simply noticing what is true for you. As you become more aware of your needs and validate them, you will find it easier to approach things that are overwhelming and be confident that you can be responsible to yourself.

Resistance #5: I am a private person. I don’t want to be “transparent”.

There is a difference between “authentic” and “transparent”. Authentic means what you say is true and it’s about you. It’s not spin, hype, promotional, invented, or, um, plagiarized. It’s said in a genuine spirit of sharing.

Transparent, on the other hand, means you share everything. That works for some people. But it doesn’t work for most people. And that’s not what social media is really about. It’s about connection. It’s about inviting people into your living room occasionally. Or maybe onto your front porch to sit and have a chat. Not into your bedroom, or any other rooms you don’t want them visiting. You get to choose.

You can be authentic and share only 5% of what is going on for you in your life. That’s OK. You don’t have to be naked. You can wear a snowsuit. As long as people can see your face, they can connect to you. And that’s the point.

Resistance #6: Social media is full of shallow self-promotion and friend-collecting. I’d rather spend my time cultivating real connections.

Yes, there is a lot of self-promotion going on in social media.

Of course, there is a lot going on everywhere.

When I go to an in-person networking meeting, there are the people who shove their business cards at me, and the people who engage in real conversations with me. I get to choose which one I’m going to be, and which people I’m going to engage with. The choices I make determine whether the event meets my needs or not. You have those same choices online.

Social media is like one giant party that you can drop in and out of at any time, and you can pick exactly who you want to talk to. Get comfortable with tools like “hide this person’s updates from my stream” and “ignore” and “unfollow”. There is no reason you have to engage with people who aren’t being real. Make choices, just like in real life. Go for connections with people that are genuine and that you care about.

Set the tone you want. It’s as much about how you show up as how others show up. If you’re being real, other people who like that will want to be part of the conversation you’re having. Ask yourself: am I demonstrating the quality of connection I am seeking? Am I open to genuine interactions with people?

It’s up to you.

There are no rules here. It’s really up to you.

The key to working with any resistance is mindfully noticing what it is about over time and seeing what is true for you. Eventually the resistance unwinds and you come back to a place of choice. Curiosity arises about the possibilities.

What do you want to create? What works for you? How might social media be an asset to your life or your business? In what ways do you want to open to the larger world around you? In what ways do you want to reserve space and time for aloneness, introspection, time away from the computer, and rest? All needs are valid, and there are many strategies to meet these needs.

A final note: Believe in yourself

A lot of resistance to social media boils down to one thing: shyness. Not the natural introversion and need to be alone that a lot of us can relate to, but a more insidious lack of faith in oneself. It’s a feeling that your work isn’t so great that it would be all that interesting to anyone anyhow. So you hold back, in big and small ways. And people don’t get to see you, or benefit from what you have to offer.

If this rings true for you, consider this: it’s highly likely that people already love you more than you let them. If you have a habit of hiding or putting up fences for fear of being exposed and rejected, you are probably keeping love out more than you are keeping criticism out. Criticism will happen, but love will happen more. People like to love each other. Social media is just a conduit for it.

Sometimes I just can’t go full speed with the socializing, online or otherwise.

Part of why I created my own business was so I could spend long stretches of time doing my own thing. Alone. No contact with people, not even email contact. Not even Twitter. Perhaps especially not Twitter.

I really prefer a few in-depth friendships to small talk, and I struggle with a perceived expectation of availability or consistency or constant productivity online. “Show up and be cool.” Every day. Ack!

I recently joined the Third Tribe private forum, so I posted about this pressure I feel to be social and engaged and productive online – Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc more than I might actually want to. I say “might” because I’m still sorting out my “shoulds” and comparison jackals from my fears from my true desires.

Through the discussion I’m beginning to discern some points to work from.

How to Create a Sane Relationship with Social Media

1. Become aware of the difference between a natural need for alone time vs fear of being rejected publicly, both of which could show up as not wanting to be social or create content online. The former needs acceptance and permission to log off, the latter needs whatever you personally do to work through fears.

2. Find (or create) the size of room you like to talk in. That could be a small core group of Twitter friends or the world stage. Or some combination of both, and different conversations in each. Find the conversations you naturally want to keep up with. Think of blogging etc as “keeping up your end of the conversation”. You may not always want to, but you know that it works best when you are engaged on a fairly consistent way.

3. “Shoulds” indicate standards or expectations. Notice them and then pursue awareness of what naturally works for you. Release comparisons between yourself and others–they create unnecessary pain. Appreciate and honor your uniqueness.

4. Let yourself change as your needs and interests change. Give yourself complete permission to find what works for you and let it evolve over time.

As social media becomes more embedded in our lives, we will all need to find our own right level of engagement in it–just like we currently do for our in-person socialness. Find out what works for you–and let go of the guilt.

The general idea is this: we are a conduit for Divine energy/purpose to manifest. We are channels, we are the mouthpiece, we surrender, we hand it over, and we become part of something much larger than ourselves. We are fulfilled and happy, and everything is glorious.

All good. Really.

But you MUST take care of your human ‘vessel’ to do this. That means self-care, self-love, self-nurturing, etc. It means resting, eating nourishing food, having fun, being nice to yourself, and meeting your human needs.

The vessel can’t be full of holes.

If you are running yourself ragged or neglecting your human self, you are just not going to be effective in your mission.

There’s no way around it.

We are here on this planet in human form, and that form has to be respected, honored, and care for or it will not be functioning like it could. Your vessel-ness will be ineffective.

The idea is co-creation. The “co” part matters–half of that is us, the human half. That half matters. That half needs the structure, the nourishing, the health, the time, and the self-love to really show up as half of the equation.

And the Divine half? That is there, that will always be there. It’s through honoring our human selves that we create the conditions where we can be present to that Divine presence.

So if you want to be a conduit for truth, healing, and beauty in the world, get a good night’s rest.

Say no to overwork or busy-ness. Say nice things to yourself in your head. Pay yourself first. Take the time to make dinner and call a friend. Be a friend to yourself. Wear sunscreen. Floss. Create beauty in your workspace and your home. Take a walk and take in the sights, smells, and sounds. Slow down. Stretch.

These things are the foundation and support for everything else you create in the world. They are the structure within which God/the Universe/Spirit/Source can do magic, create miracles, and heal. They matter.

All emotional suffering and stuckness is caused by closing down and contracting around pain. Pain happens, and change happens – this is the nature of life. However, suffering is an add-on that we create through our reaction to that pain and change.

Healing is the process of grieving and accepting this pain and change, and integrating the information into our lives in a way that supports our growth and wellbeing. Healing is an opening-up process. The ultimate goal is to reconnect you to the flow of life.

Our resistance to pain and change blocks this flow. Our ability to adapt to change, and to grieve pain and loss, determines how much we will be able to taste life as it unfolds before us.

The stages of grief apply to all transitions.

If you look at the five classic stages of grieving, there are four stages of resistance/contracting/”inner war”, and then one stage of healing/expansion:

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

And that’s OK. This model was developed for dealing with death, which takes our bodies and minds some time to adjust to. It’s OK to take however long it takes to go through the grief process. But in each stage, one can hold in mind the idea to open up and to be kind to oneself (this supports opening up).

I believe that all change requires grieving on some level. Our bodies and minds naturally attach to things and it’s up to us to develop the ability to move through change and transformation gracefully.

Acceptance is not resignation.

Resignation is a form of closing-down. Acceptance is an opening-up. To cultivate acceptance means practicing opening our heart when it wants to close.

Being open-hearted requires skilled self-protection.

Pain is always an opportunity to open up more; but this requires skill, not just ambition. Constant exposure to pain will not transform you. It’s being able to learn from pain that helps us to grow.

To do this requires inner and outer boundaries. If we open our heart when it’s dangerous to do so and if we don’t look out for ourselves, we will get hurt more and shut down again.

Part of cultivating acceptance and open-heartedness is developing the skills to protect ourselves in healthy ways. They go hand in hand. Our mind is not going to give up its shutting-down behaviors if it doesn’t have any sense of trust that we can provide protection for it any other way. You have to earn the trust of the scared parts of yourself by learning to care for them well.

You can learn and practice these skills.

If your family did not model skillful adaptation to change, this is something you will need to learn and coach yourself through.

But it’s well worth it–developing this “grieving muscle” gives you a strength and inner resilience that keeps you steady and centered throughout everything that life brings.

Feel your feelings.
All of them.
All of them, feel them, as much of the time as you can.

But, don’t identify with them.
Don’t loop around in thoughts that make them worse.
They are messages, they are flags.

Feel them in your body. Not in your head.
Feel them and let them go.
Listen to them, heed them, and let them go.

Listen to them, but remember you are not them.
You are vast; your emotional brain is limited.
Whatever the feeling, you can handle it; you are bigger than it.

It will not kill you.
Really.
It just feels that way. So feel that too.

Lately the feeling I’ve been processing is anxiety. I never thought of myself as an anxious person before, but now I realize that’s because of all the unconscious patterns I had in place to avoid feeling it. Lovely.

I don’t have much to say on this topic that hasn’t already been written, except to just encourage you to do it.

This is what is on the other side of that feeling you don’t want to feel: freedom. Ease. That soft relaxed feeling in your belly. (There is nothing better really than a relaxed belly.)

10 reasons to feel your feelings:

1. When you suppress a negative feeling, you are suppressing your ability to feel positive feelings like joy, aliveness, happiness.
2. Suppressing emotions is courting depression.
3. It’s not fun, I won’t say it is, but all the antics we do to not feel aren’t fun either. Is your favorite habit or addiction really fun? At this point? Really?
4. There is a wonderful you on the other side of those feelings that you haven’t met yet. The you that can handle whatever comes her way.
5. You stop projecting so much and  become a much nicer person to be around.
6. You get the energy back you were using to suppress your feelings.
7. You get the acceptance you always wanted from everyone else – from yourself – and realize you can give that to yourself any time you want to. You gain emotional independence. Which is fabulous.
8. You feel worse for awhile, but then you feel SO MUCH BETTER. After all that work to avoid it, it’s such a relief to have it over with.
9. You grow and mature as a person as you integrate all the messages those feelings were trying to get to you.
10. You have more access to your intuition as the channel between you and your inner self clears up.

Fear and anticipation, approval and validation

When I first started blogging four years ago, I didn’t have online buddies, I didn’t have Twitter, and consequently I didn’t have any commenters for a long time.

Having a small number of comments made each one take on a bigger proportional meaning and value. I both desired and feared comments – and when I did get a comment, I would often dislike what the person said. Sometimes I felt like they just didn’t “get it”. I felt awkward absorbing praise from strangers. I didn’t quite believe I had any writing ability, so it was hard to hear praise and I felt hollow–like they didn’t really see me.

I struggled and felt deeply ambivalent about comments. I wrote a long preamble above my comment form, something like “I love comments but…please don’t diagnose me, try to fix my feelings, offer solutions as if I can’t think of them on my own….” and it went on. There were many forms of feedback I didn’t want or didn’t know what to do with or that would trigger me in various ways. I was writing about very vulnerable stuff and I wanted people to respect that; but in some ways what I was needing was more like a support group than a blog (more on that below under “unconscious reasons for blogging”).

I gradually realized that I was discouraging commenting at all. It took about two years for me to gradually trim that paragraph and then finally delete it. I don’t regret having it – it helped me at the time, even though I didn’t keep it–it created a zone of safety for me by discouraging comments that I couldn’t handle. It was a boundary, and boundaries are important.

When I started, I had a lot of unconscious expectations of readers. I wanted love, connection, and approval. I wanted my thought processes to be validated. I wanted blogging to cure all my confusion around my purpose and my value.

And like any relationship, unconscious expectations cause suffering in one way or another.

What are your unconscious reasons for blogging?

My journey around comments has also been a journey about my reasons for blogging and the needs I’m trying to meet.

As my unnamed expectations continued to be dashed, it gradually dawned on me that maybe I was looking for love in all the wrong places. Or rather, I was looking for consistent supportive creative feedback and connection in a medium that doesn’t necessarily provide that. Writing on a blog is a one-to-many relationship – and the many can be silent. It can be a bit like shouting in the desert.

By naming my needs and accepting that blogging wasn’t going to meet them, I was empowered to find strategies that would. I looked around and found creative outlets that did provide me reliable and consistent supportive feedback in a very safe space.

That clarity shifted the focus of blogging for me. Now, I don’t blog primarily to get connection or creative feedback. I do sometimes make connections, and I do often feel a creative connection with my readers, but these have become side effects.

Now I blog primarily to be in the creative flow of the ideas that want to be expressed and shared through me. That changes the focus and makes my experience much more consistent. I always have a good day writing, or if I don’t it’s because of something going on with me, not my readers. My feeling of “success” no longer depends on getting comments, or the right kind of comments. I’m here to be a channel for whatever creative impulses and collective wisdom comes down the chute in my brain, and that is enjoyable by itself. It’s no longer about meeting my unconscious needs, so I write with far fewer expectations.

And, because of how the Universe seems to work, I now seem to get a lot more readers who “get it”, and more comments in general. I think we attract (or project) people who push our comment buttons until we learn whatever we need to learn from them.

Now I see comments as appreciation – whether they “get it” the way I wanted them to or not, they still got something from reading and took the time to comment – and I appreciate that.

And yes, if nobody comments on a post sometimes I feel a little sad or disappointed or sometimes embarrassed. But it’s a minor feeling, it’s not this jackalfest of “Why bother writing?” or “Nobody loves me”. It just means that for whatever reason, what I wrote didn’t land for anyone in a way that had them wanting to comment. But eh, there will be more posts and more comments, and I’m just along for the ride. And many people read but don’t comment, and they could be getting stuff out of it that I have no idea about.

Thinking of creativity as something that you “channel” takes a lot of pressure off. It’s not me – it’s just what comes through me. All I have to do is be of service to that muse, and leave the rest up to it – and trust that if I had that impulse to write, someone somewhere is getting something from receiving it, even if they don’t speak up and say so.

Your relationship to comments is a reflection of your relationship to your creativity

When I was unsure of my creative worth, I was unsure of comments. Like all relationships, comments act as a mirror. There is a saying (I think from the Course in Miracles), “Love brings up anything unlike love”. Comments are, in essence, love – they are someone receiving your energy and giving back some of theirs. So consequently, they will bring up whatever is unhealed in you around creativity and connection.

I want to emphasize that this is a journey. There is no “right” way to be with comments – there are more and less “healed” ways to be perhaps, but you can only be wherever you are at with healing.

• Does the thing you are doing, even though you enjoy it, never feel like “it”?
• Do you pick up interests, burn through them, and  then drop them?
• Does doing the same thing “for the rest of your life” seem like a life sentence of boredom?
• Do you  feel like you should know “what you want to be” by now?
• Do you wish you could feel focused and commit to one thing, but you just can’t make yourself do that?

It describes how our culture is skewed right now toward rewarding people who have “one true interest”. The author compares Mozart vs Ben Franklin. The former was all about music, music, music from a young age. Ben Franklin on the other hand, had a lot of disparate interests, from politics to experiments with electricity to creating the first public library–and more. She gives a bell-curve of interests with Mozart on one extreme and Franklin on the other and most people in the middle.

The problem is for some reason (probably due to industry wanting to have highly specialized workers or something like that), our schools and our culture tends to reward people who specialize early and stick to one thing.

People who don’t fit this model often feel broken or deficient. They keep trying to get themselves into a mold that doesn’t fit.

I know I suffer from this self-criticism immensely. I have 4 blogs (and am working on launching 3 more) and I often feel like a freak. Shouldn’t I have just one? If I only had one I could write on it more regularly, and isn’t that what I’m supposed to do? Will my readers feel abandoned? Will I lose momentum? Am I sabotaging myself? Am I diluting my personal brand? AHHH!!!

This post isn’t a “I have the solution” post, more of a “I am working on this one” post.

I’ve been feeling all BLAH about this blog, and about writing in general, and trying to figure out why do I write anyway.

I think what happened is I briefly got caught up in the whole blogging-twittering-”internet famous”-popularity-contest aspect of blogging. Which can be fun and all (I guess), but what seems to happen to me is that I lose touch with my purpose in writing. As in, I literally forget why I started the blog.

There is this idea of intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation: intrinsic is what you do because you feel like it – extrinsic is what you do because it will get you something, like approval, money, etc. The problem is that extrinsic motivation can destroy intrinsic motivation. For instance, if you start rewarding a kid for studying, and then you stop rewarding them, they’ll stop doing it. Even if they were actually doing it of their own volition to start with.And I knew this, of course, but I am surprised at how I didn’t realize it was happening to me.

The thing with me is that I don’t last very long on extrinsic motivation. I just sort of space out and don’t feel motivated at all. And that’s exactly how I’ve been feeling about the blogging lately. But I didn’t put it together.

I think the reason that the idea of “popularity” draws me off-course is because of my personal history with schoolyard unpopularity and a lifelong struggle with isolation. So my mind started fuzzily equating popularity with acceptance or friendship. Which of course are not the same at all – you can have thousands of fans and have few real friends. They aren’t the same thing.

I think this is a big piece of the “fear of biggification” idea I’ve explored before on this blog. Part of the fear is of my unintegrated need for acceptance and inclusion taking over. It’s similar to the way many artists are afraid that if they become successful they will “sell out” – in other words, they are afraid of their unintegrated need for security or status taking over.

I hadn’t put it together before.

Luckily, I had “self-sabotage” to save me.

I think people misunderstand “self-sabotage”. The popular/Hollywood idea is that you start going toward success, and then somehow that success scares you so you “sabotage” it or “get in your own way”. But I think it’s really important to look at what and why exactly you are doing this supposedly “sabotaging” thing. Because I bet it is actually a really healthy thing.

For instance, in my case, about a month after gaining some new readers and commenters from Twitter and whatnot…I started feeling very blah about Twitter and very blah about writing.

But that’s not self-sabotage. At least, not in a bad way. That’s a self-correcting mechanism kicking in.

It’s the part of me that says “uh, I’m really not in this to get more comments”. A that’s me, that’s real, that’s the part of me I want to listen to. Cause it’s true, I’m not in this for more comments.

And if I start feeling like I am, I really want to go back and remember why I’m really  in this.

Over-riding “self-sabotage” without understanding it is a very bad idea.

Achieving outside success is not the measuring stick.

The ephiphany I had was around why I actually do write.

It’s not about other people at all, not directly. I write when I feel this internal nudge. It’s like an internal pushing sensation. That’s it. That’s the whole reason. When I feel the nudge, I write. And it feels great! It’s like I’m channeling something from somewhere.

I think that inner drive, that urge to create, lives in all of us. It manifests in different ways. Sometimes I feel the nudge to write, other times I feel a burning desire to start a project or something else.

I believe that these little (or big!) internal nudges are the voice of our true Self/God/whatever you want to believe in – they are the juice. They are the thing to listen to.

Everything that comes from that, if it comes, or if it doesn’t, or whatever – it doesn’t really matter.  It’s not good, it’s not bad. But the fact is, if you are following your nudges, you will be happy and feel connected to life no matter how many people read your blog. Conversely, if you are trying to get people to read your blog, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have, you won’t feel satisfied.

It’s a weird paradox. External input feels wonderful – but ONLY if we are already fed from within. External input feels hollow and cheap if we are trying to survive on it – it’s not nourishing enough on its own.

So take a moment to think about the internal indicators that you are following your nudges, and the internal indicators that you have lost touch with them. You might want to write them down and make a little “SOS” note for yourself – “Read in case of total BLAH feeling”.