Starting a blog can be daunting, especially if you’re like me and you don’t consider yourself a writer. I still have chilling flashbacks to freshman year in high school where my English teacher picked on a student each week to put their writing sample on the board for him to explicate. “Explicate” might not be the exact word to describe what he ended up doing to your work. It was more like taking a knife and slaughtering the writing sample you worked so hard to produce. As with every other student, I had my turn and closed my eyes through the whole ordeal. Ten minutes seemed like eternity and finally, when the battle was over, I raised a white flag, accepted defeat and dragged my wounded ‘self’ back to my desk and put my head down. I discovered writing was not my forte, nor my calling, but it still had to be done. And like it or not, writing followed me through college and into my career as a content marketer. But little did I ever think, I’d be writing at my own free will and leisure.

It started as a journal assignment in class. The teacher asked us write about the topics discussed within each lecture and how it relates to real life work experience. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure what I had put down on paper, but whatever it was, I made sure it filled up an entire page within my notebook. I wrote the journal because it was an assignment and a requirement to fulfill. After all, journal entries did make up a third of my final grade.

Overtime, as we shared our journal entries, it became less about filling up the page and more about reflecting on my current experience and how I could have reframed a few of the situations to better support my team and my project. If I instituted daily scrum meetings, could that have improved cross-functional communications on a fast-paced environment? Would it have been beneficial to send out a follow-up email with action items after each meeting so people left the meeting knowing exactly who was doing what? Could I have been better at communicating timelines and milestones directly to my team instead of assuming they logged into the project management tool? Is there a way I could have tailored my discussion to be more agreeable with each personality type in the room? These are some of the questions that became top of mind as I wrote in my journal, and learned more techniques and ways navigate work challenges.

Writing in my journal became an outlet for me to creatively explore and experiment with new ways of thinking. It gave me the opportunity to brainstorm ideas and inspired me to freely express them on paper. It became more than an assignment; it became a tool that challenged me to reflect on the past as a learning experience and encouraged me to be a bit more forward-thinking. Writing in my journal unleashed a side of me that I never knew existed and soon, it transitioned into a full-fledged marketing project management blog on my website. I became a writer and an influencer within the project management space, and more importantly, I was able to learn more about myself, share ideas with others and become an advocate for the marketing and project management community. 

Here are a few reasons why you too should begin blogging, writing down your ideas and sharing them:

It forces you to spin those wheels in your head. We’re constantly learning whether we realize it or not, and the ideas we grasp and internalize can easily become part of our day-to-day practice. When that meeting with your customer that you’ve spent months preparing for goes well, you can attribute it to both the hard and soft skills you’ve picked up over time. It’s when that meeting doesn’t go so well, do you start fishing around for ideas on what you could have done differently to improve the situation.

Overtime, we’ve learned hundreds of frameworks and best practices to help us succeed; it’s a matter of gaining understanding and applying it out in the field. It’s very much similar to when you learn a new vocabulary word. You don’t fully understand it until you can use it in a sentence, so make sure to keep those ideas spinning and jot them down, so they can be more readily available for when you do encounter your next customer meeting.

You know more than think and give yourself credit for. As with every profession, after you’ve put in a few years, gotten kicked in the rear and fallen flat on your face, most of what you do by now is probably second nature. And when you reach this point, you shouldn’t just keep operating on autopilot otherwise you might find yourself falling victim to your own career. It’s this moment when you should finding more ways to push yourself to the next level and assert yourself as an industry specialist. Participating on a panel, volunteering as a board member, engaging in a speaking opportunity or blogging about it will not only help you sharpen your skill set, but it will also help others who might not be at your level, but aspire to get there someday.

You can help others within your field AND encourage others outside of your field to join. It’s a competitive market out there, and I’ve come to realize that sharing knowledge over withholding knowledge is a virtue that demonstrates distinctive qualities of leadership, wisdom and humility. When you share knowledge, you have the ability to influence other people and their way of thinking, play a role in contributing to someone’s skill set and ability to grow, and at the same time motivate others who might not have a clear direction. You become the subject matter expert and authority in your field, and it becomes your responsibility – your social responsibility – to continue developing yourself and others to keep pace with the rapid changes in today’s society.

As you strive to become more proficient in your field or explore another, you may not have the ability to jump into a formal class setting or gain some hands-on experience. But there are many resources out there that will get you up-to-speed and give you a good idea about the role you hope to pursue. And it’s for this reason, I like to read blogs, participate in forums and share ideas. I hope to come across your blog one day.