Day 22 — Self-Authoring with 750words.com
Blogtober — Day 22… “Cu Cu Ka Choo!!”
The difference between journaling privately on 750 words and writing 750 words publicly has been quite the eye opening experience.
Somehow I’ve felt and perceived the pull to write to someone… rather than to myself. With myself. By myself.
Today I will write for the reader, and also myself. I’ll do this on this very topic.
The 750words.com site I’m writing this on now, and will later spell check via Google Docs, then format and make pretty on Medium, then my robgronbeck.com squarespace site, was introduced to me by Steve Brophy in February 2019.
I started using 750words.com November of 2019. One reason was I had been writing in a Moleskin journal on a mostly daily basis. I’d write my morning workout, how I was feeling, my sleep, HRV, RHR, with the goal to fill one page. Pretty simple right?! Exactly. Simplicity. Achievability. Got to the point of automaticity.
Then, for some reason, I truly cannot recall why I tried 750words.com. I noticed initially I wrote for longer periods of time with at least triple if not quadruple the word count. There’s only so many words you can fill on a page handwritten.
I noticed I went deeper with thoughts and covered more themes in my life.
Being fairly handy on the keyboard, I can barely not quite touch type… I’d punch out my 750 words in about 25–30 minutes. The awesome thing about 750words.com, for me anyways, is I could go back and check that right now and the site would tell me. Amazing!! Also it stores the mood, main themes, keywords, as well as my psychographics. Never seen that before anywhere.
Oh, and since then I’ve written 175,000 words, and will reach 200,000 probably by month’s end. Again, I could check but now I’m locked into writing, I want to finish without leaving the page. I get a badge or sticker if I do!! There are all kinds of rewards for streaks, speed, and much more.
So, with that out of the way let’s move onto self-reflective, expressive and self-coaching writing for oneself versus writing to share.
I’ve noticed a ‘missingness’ in my mental, emotional and cognitive processing as I’ve been ‘writing for others’. While I’ve been weaving in some of my personal reflections to aid my explanations of certain themes, topics and technologies I’ve sought to balance the personal and the public, I’ve missed those mundane conversations which I’ve been censoring from y’all.
That missingness has meant perhaps I’ve not reflected, processed, or performed double and triple loop learning which is a key part of my own personal development.
Taking stock. Reframing. Looking at the words I just wrote and asking myself, “shit, did I just write that?” “Is that what I really think?!”
Damn… sometimes astonishment at my cynicism, and sometimes astonishment at my inner genius.
Right now I feel a strong integration between the two… I’m actively reflecting on the public versus personal writing for me, and for you.
Now… I LOVE getting to share stuff I’ve learned over the years… Most of it I aim to have practiced, have experienced multiple times, or had a significant enough impact on me to warrant being shared. For explanatory purposes only.
Yes, I’ve written about personal bests, increases in this metric or that, as much as I’ve written about drops, flops and failures in those metrics.
My intention is to hopefully convey my deep down, in the dirt stance when it comes to anything I explain.
Breath and biofeedback? You know I’ve gone deep and continue to practice daily. I’ve got a tonne of stories to tell. And yet, my daily writing practice is not to rehash all those old stories and experiences.. I’ve probably already done that… it’s to review, dissect, and integrate the recent past… with the historic past.
WHOOP, HRV, recovery etc? You know I’ve written a tonne on this. I’ve been on the WHOOP train for almost 12 months now and have gained much from it. Still learning, and while writing about it generally for others, I miss out on reflecting on what I am noticing from day to day, week to week, month to month. Like I did yesterday. A deep dive into self-coaching.
That is where I want to finish up but expand on a bit more before I complete today’s post.
Coaching has been explained to me as a balance between supportiveness and challenging. That is the sweet spot and each person will require a different ratio of each.
Here is where journaling and 750words can be remarkable for self-coaching.
- Support includes emotional and cognitive skills/capacities like empathy, compassion, forgiveness, encouragement, positive regard and praise for effort.
- Challenge includes emotional and cognitive skills/capacities such as ambition, future envisioning, setting boundaries, accountability, stretching the self-concept, and questioning the status quo.
I believe with written daily journal practice we can both support ourselves when we need it, and challenge ourselves too. We see our thoughts, feelings, and musings in front of us.
Then, we can review what we’ve written, our thoughts, our trains of thought.. and see what destinations they are landing us to.
Can we question ourselves more?
- Are there specific questions we could ask to both encourage self-compassion and self-determination?
- Can we use our writing to pick 3–4 key themes in our lives, or 1 big event, and write about it in a supportive and challenging way?
I believe we can.
A friend, colleague, swim (accountability) buddy and awesome coach Georgia Ellis is someone I think of when the term “self-authoring” comes to mind. Not her words. Yet riffing on that:
…I do consider 750words can be a space to practice self-author-ING… as what does an author do?
THEY WRITE!!
So we can begin to write and rewrite our own past, present and future stories… we can write our own “notes of encouragement” we may not be getting externally… we can also “send a rocket up the clacker” when we need it too… a riff on mental toughness warrior David Goggins’ “daily mirror” practice.
Today I really enjoyed writing this… it flowed… Some days it doesn’t.. and that’s OK… sometimes it’s energy or sleep or burning out thang.. sometimes it’s over analysis as has been the case when I think, “what can I write about today?” Too many options show up for that question and as such the paradox of choice kicks in… and we procrastinate.
The theme today though has ONLY emerged from the experience of 22 days of writing as part of the Blogtober challenge… publicly posting each day… which I chose to set that standard of 750words minimum… others haven’t… but that’s their goals… plus like I said 750words has that streak tracker and keeps me accountable so if my Gardener’s Blogtober crew asked for proof that I was doing this… heck if I want to keep myself accountable.. Well there’s no way to lie or hack 750words. It’s either done, or not, or half done.
