Naturally, as a blogger, I’m spending some of my time learning or reading up on how to be one. Like any new thing, it’s a challenge. On a blog I read pretty regularly, ProBlogger.Net, there was a post very recently called “Don’t Just Have a Blog - Learn to Think Like a Blogger.” I realized the lessons shared there, of which the author, Darren Rowse, pulled from his personal trainer, can be generalized in a way that can help anyone in any endeavor. It has taken me a while to get into a groove with blogging and I’m still not completely there. The key is that most things that we do naturally were on some level learned. Creating habit out of what you eventually expect to come naturally takes some creative work.
Don’t just live - Learn to think as though you are living
1) Goals and Planning - Use goals and numbers to help quantify the changes you are looking to make or to help acknowledge the life you are already leading. For blogging it’s deadlines, number of words, when I hit publish, and things like this. In life, it might be counting your steps to take ownership over a route you have had trouble taking or counting towards or away from different goals.
2) Structure and Routine - This is the movement from numbers into internalizing the life you are living and hope to live. Finding this rhythm is important. You will meet your goals and plan intuitively by the very nature of it fitting into your every day life. At first it means creating the rhythm for yourself, with the essential elements of your life structured together (including the goals you met before and lessons learned from them). As it develops it will change and morph, but this foundation will provide a blueprint any time life steers you off course. Done right, you can get a sense of going with the flow.
3) Spend time with other people who live life the way you want to live life - The long winded title for how to socialize yourself. We are what we eat and we are who we are with. Since we are the culmination of our social core, cultivate it. Make it representative of your daily rhythm. Find harmonies and combinations that make (1) and (2) easier. If you began with goals that came naturally to you, then this will just seem like an easy boost. Use this as an indicator to see if you might need to reevaluate.
4) Education - Learn who you are. Learn what you want to be. If you surround yourself with the necessary information, you will always have the continued capacity to act. I have an Economics/Business degree, so I have subscriptions to The Economist and Fortune. I write poetry, so I read poetry and subscribe to Poets and Writers. There are different ways to create a learning space. So latch onto a project at work, talk to the right friends, read a related book, and dig dig dig…
5) Experimenting - If at first you don’t fricassee, fry fry a hen. Keep going and keep doing. You won’t make unconscious quick decisions unless you’ve made them a hundred times before. Take everything that you are are getting from the steps before and USE IT! Doing it different makes you more versatile as a human and at a task. What you once agonized about, will become just another trick up your sleeve.
6) Making Mistakes - Do it wrong! I’m not wishing poorly on you, but just recognize that a mistake is a chance to learn. Live in the now, not in the past or future. Hold onto a mistake in a way that you use it as a stepping stone but not as though you are being stoned.
Some of this will be hard! Don’t be afraid to settle and make some decisions.
In time as I did these things (and mainly as I just practiced blogging) my thinking changed. As it did so did my blogging itself.
Darren ProBlogger.Net
So I’ll conclude with,
In the time you live your life, just your everyday life, your thinking will change. As will your life change too.
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