One of the best personal development tools for me is writing. Whether it’s creative writing, writing on a blog or writing in my journal.

Writing on a blog

I realised quite early on in my personal development journey that writing is important for me, as I wrote a lot of blog posts and thought a lot during a 30 day challenge in 2012 and the year or so that followed.

So it was only natural that the next time I realised I wasn’t quite where I wanted to be, I turned to writing again. I’d been back from maternity leave for about a year, back to freelancing rather than going back to my job. I was consistently finding work, but something was still missing for me. I  had a chat with a coach I knew, and she suggested picking up my blog writing again, to see where that lead.

It turned out to be a very good suggestion, as a few blog posts in, I realised I was missing a certain kind of activity. I was missing what I now call “untangling”. The process where I listen to someone’s idea, ask a load of questions, and help them figure out what’s next.

So when I realised that, I decided to put the service out there again, see if anyone needed help. I was excited when a couple of people contacted me and asked for my help with specific projects they were working on (or trying to work on, but not getting as far as they wanted). I gave it a new name, and a new brand image – and Ideas Untangling was born. More on that later…

And of course blogging is also helping me now, as I write this series of posts it’s making me look at everything from a slightly more distant, bird’s eye viewpoint. Making me think about the lessons in the things that happened, rather than the bits that I felt were significant to me at the time.

Lessons from journaling

Alongside my blog writing, I was also journaling – making notes for myself on how I felt about the work I was doing, and trying to delve into the reasons why things were working or not working.

When I did my “untangling” sessions with the new clients, I remembered one of the things I’d observed when I did it a few years previously. That for me it didn’t feel complete if all I did was have a 1:1 call. Even adding a follow-up call a few weeks later didn’t feel like quite enough. So for one of my clients, I suggested trying some accountability for a few months, to help her and to allow me to test that thought. The experiment worked. I enjoyed the extended time with my client, and she was able to complete the first part of her project while I was working with her. Using that insight I’d identified during my journaling, I was able to add on a new bit to my services that helped my clients and felt right to me too.

Creative writing

As well as blog writing and journaling, creative writing is the other type of writing in my creative self care toolkit. But it is the one most likely to drop off when things get busy or complicated. Not long after I’d started offering my new services, life took a strange and unexpected turn. A global pandemic. I was lucky that I didn’t have an ongoing project at that point, so I was able to stop working for 3 months and focus on looking after our daughter, who was 2.5 at the time. During that time I had no mental or emotional energy for being creative, other than setting up painting and crafts activities. So I didn’t write on a blog or do anything creative for me. Those activities didn’t come back until I was able to get back into working again and until things were a bit more “normal”. I go through phases of writing creatively, but even if I stop for a while it seems to emerge again eventually.

And finally back to journaling again

When we came to the end of 2020, like many people I was glad to see the back of the year and all it had brought. I was so caught up in surviving it that I didn’t create much writing, and shared even less of it – but the one area I could still control and analyse was my freelance work.

Journaling often helps me to figure out which bits of my freelance work are enjoyable and which bits I really would rather not do. It’s been an evolving process to pick apart the subtleties of the types of work that are on offer and the types of teams and team dynamics. I did a couple of contracts during the second part of that year, and noticing how I felt about them was important, as was figuring out why I liked or didn’t like them. So when similar opportunities have come up since, I’ve been able to decide whether I want to pursue them or not.

In those first couple of years back in freelance life, writing was useful in keeping me accountable to myself – making sure that I was thinking about why I was doing specific types of work and helping me look at the options available to me. I did some important thinking in that time, and ended 2020 with some positive outcomes as well as some frustrations.

Do you use writing to help you figure things out, or do you do a similar thing with talking instead?