Head down, creating

Beethoven got so involved in conducting his Ninth at its premiere that he got a few bars off and didn’t realize when the music had ended. One of the singers had to turn him around so that he could see the audience’s rapturous response, which he could not hear. (Image by Valdas Miskinis)

Shortly after I returned home from a semester spent closing my school out-of-state, I was struck by a realization.

It was a Sunday morning and I was walking to the local high school to meet up with a new friend for tennis. Standing there in the sunshine, I made a fundamental identity shift.

I said to myself, “S**t! I’m a writer!”

Here I’ve been, sharing my words with you every day. But I thought of myself as a teacher, coach, or small business owner — not a writer. And definitely not a “content creator.”

But only a few days into my new life, I realized that my new life wasn’t new at all. It’s been brewing for awhile, and my self-concept just had to catch up.

Five posts per week for three years is 780, plus I’m 22 weeks into my fourth year of blogging for an additional 110. If we assume an average of 600 words per post, that’s over half a million words. That’s enough to fill several books. I guess I’m a writer.

But I’ve never written a book. And I really don’t know how. But I’m opening the door to how I might approach that, along with writing in other formats. And for the first time, I’m thinking about where else I could share my work besides right here, on my website.

It’s as though I’ve been toiling away, head down, a dark, cool basement. Now, I’m coming out, blinking, into the sunlight. I went so deep into not caring about the outcome that I forgot to even think about the outcome. I’m that grandma absent-mindedly crocheting cotton washcloth after cotton washcloth in front of the television who now has to figure out who to give this pile of washcloths to.

Honestly, it’s not a bad problem to have, and I know I’m not alone in this tendency to favor “head down, creating” mode over strategy, planning, marketing, or even sharing. But every so often, it’s good to reevaluate.

It’s so hard to see what we have. We take ourselves and our skills and accomplishments for granted. That’s why the sharing part is so important, so that we can receive feedback and see our work reflected back to us. In fact, it was my friend Neil who spurred me to reevaluate my writing habit when he said, “Have you thought about Substack for your daily email?” In fact, I had not — and a door was opened in my brain.

By mid-career — which is where most of my clients are — we have a body of work, even if we haven’t documented it particularly well. We have methodologies we’ve developed, frameworks for simplifying complex ideas, and a number of case studies, regardless of whether we’ve looked at them that way. And having been around the block a few times, we have meaningful life experience.

All of these things are valuable. They’re valuable to us if we want to make something out of them. And they’re valuable to others, too, who don’t know what we know.

True, we may have to learn how to package what we know in a way that allows people to find it and connect with it. We might need to learn how to make it interesting or appealing if we don’t already have those skills. But the core is there.

One of my favorite things is to listen to my clients riff on ideas they’re passionate about. They get into a topic, lose their self-consciousness, and eloquently share their wisdom. While I relish having a front-row seat to these performances, I would love to see them reach a larger audience. And while making that happen isn’t easy, they already have everything they need to do it.

Those of us who enjoy creating should never stop. But when we make space for not just creating, but also sharing what we make, everyone benefits. And then, we can take it a step further and think about what else we could build with the pieces that we already have.

That’s what I’m working on this summer. What about you?