So here goes. Welcome.
For a large part of my career, I’ve found myself inhibited with writing, especially long form. And then for another large part of my career, I’ve enjoyed writing very much. I’ve been thinking about why that has been, what currently is, and what might be.
What inspires me
Writing is a useful way to think. It’s a way to connect with people, a way to share what I have to offer with the world, and a way to have fun and delight in the humour of the English language.
What holds me back
Not knowing whether anyone’s reading or responding (oh god please won’t someone like and subscribe). The idea that people find it easiest to respond if they disagree, and not having the best life experience with written conflict. I sometimes attach too hard to convincing my audience and resolving disagreements. I get things wrong, and then people call that out, and it’s embarrassing.
How my voice got constrained
At different stages of my career I’ve had to write in different styles, and each stage narrowed my range a little more.
When I was an academic, there were certain styles of academic writing that were very dry and rigorous but also quite fun to subvert. In academia, you’re writing very seriously about whatever takes your fancy as your intellect goes on its whimsical journey. But by the end of my PhD I Just. Wanted. The. Writing. To. Stop.
Then I started a consultancy, and I found myself writing more and more as the voice of the company, which I guess I was. The company and I were pretty fused—the company was a manifestation of me, and I was a manifestation of the company. Over that period, my writing voice became very sales and marketing oriented, PR oriented, bullshit-flavoured. I kind of lost sight of the authentic, witty, subversive expression of myself that I used to enjoy.
And also, when you’re writing as an act of leadership, your writing becomes a projection surface for everyone you’re leading. You’re supposed to write in a way that makes sense to everyone, and as an early leader, that dilutes one’s range quite a lot. Or at least runs the risk of it.
The loss of my personal voice was cemented with a post on Facebook. I wrote in relation to some trauma—a betrayal by a friend—and my attempt to come to terms with what had happened. I didn’t speak directly to it; I spoke in more general terms, like “even good men do bad things,” that kind of thing. It didn’t land well. People who I cared about had negative reactions to it, and my (false) takeaway from their reactions was that my experience was invalid—and even though others felt immense validation from what I wrote, it was too much to bear. I shut down writing in a personal way.
To put the cherry on top, I then moved to working in government. In government, there’s a whole bunch of half-political, half-transactional writing that everyone believes is necessary. So much of it was documentation, procedure, minutes, ass-covering, announcement, coordination—entangled work, in Claydon’s sense. I realised that over the period of running a company and working in government and shutting myself down, I’d lost the joy of writing.
Rediscovery
The most recent chapter of the story is: I joined an amazing company called Kraken Tech, and Kraken holds psychological safety, authenticity, freedom, and responsibility as core values. People are welcome (and challenged) to be authentically themselves.
In a community of people aligned around a mission, I felt safe enough to be more authentically myself, and the early expression of that was in writing. I became one of the most prolific posters on the company Slack, where we generally work in public. It was the thrill and delight of my unsuppressed, unrepressed brain being able to express itself again, having fun with ideas and words, all of the things that inspire me to write.
That’s brought me to the edge of something. Kraken renewed my joy in writing. It helped me notice and name my neurodiversity. It helped me realise that communicating with people had this transformational effect—and that that was something that brought me life enjoyment and drew me into becoming a coach.
Good enough
So this has brought me to the current point: can I take this authentic expression of myself, with all of my curiosity and experience and naivety and wisdom, from the relative safety of Kraken to a public audience where not everyone’s going to agree, and not everyone’s going to get it, and not everyone’s going to enjoy it? And how do I remain fine with that?
When I speak with others around writing and my inhibitions, I get caught up on my perfectionism and how I believe it when people tell me, “I must have a clear, concrete content plan or content strategy, and I must direct people into the sales funnel, and I must market myself with my personal brand as being an awesome executive coach.”
And then I found myself drawn to various places where people were just unabashedly themselves online. They had many interests, took risks (or rather, said no to the risks of being risk-averse), and I enjoyed these encounters. They were wrong sometimes, and I saw how they enjoyed that possibility. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t enjoy being myself, being wrong and growing wiser.
Your audience will find you
I went to one of Jason Fox‘s Rekindlings, a sort of salon of ideas about the metacrisis. The guest that night was David Pecotić, a poet and “prince of serendipity”, and he tweeted about strange mythical connections. I admired his willingness to be completely seriously odd in public.
I asked him, how do you take the risk? He seemed to think there wasn’t a risk—that being onesself and inhabiting one’s world preceded risk, and the choice was how to manifest one’s existence.
Someone in the audience said to me: the thing is that if you have an expression, and you make that expression, then your people will find you. Don’t worry.
And I realised I’d been hooked into what (social) media trains you into thinking is your people finding you—numbers and hits and followers and attention. Engagement, comments, thumbnails, ragebait. “Viewers want more toxic behaviour!” I’m not the first to think that’s a con.
I believe we’re moving into a world where what what it looks like for your people to find you is not that they follow you or like and subscribe, but that they walk alongside you. They’re not depending on an algorithm to connect with your content. They’re seeking it out. They’re seeking you out. A smaller audience, yes, but with so much more heart.
Allowing your audience to seek you out, without forcing, is a gesture of trust. It’s not a gesture of brand, of marketing, of money in Facebook or Google’s direction—it’s a gesture of trust.
My intention
My intention with all of this is:
- To write more.
- To write for a small audience.
- To write with the possibility that what I’m writing is only one perspective and can be expanded.
- To write as myself. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m not trying to control what you do with my writing. I’m also not going to focus on a well-defined niche. I’m just going to write and trust that everyone who arrives has done so because they needed to.
So here goes. Welcome.