How I Forgot My 10 Year Blogging Anniversary

A very Happy New Year and I hope you had a wonderful and peaceful holiday season and are super pumped up for an amazing 2017!

As 2017 rolls in, I am reminded that I have just recently passed my 10 year blogging anniversary.

This is remarkable to me because I was always one of those people who couldn’t really stick at anything.

I had a job as a trainee chef, diesel engineer, truck driver, chef again and then I fell into sales.

I wouldn’t say I was stuck in sales even though I remained there for twenty years, I more languished there.

Well, I Guess The Money Was Good

If you are remotely efficient as a sales person, especially with new business sales, companies give you large amount of money and heap lots of praise on you.

Even though the money and praise filled the void somewhat, there was still something missing.

Sadly, no amount of money diminishes your stress levels or erases the low-level feeling that what you are doing isn’t really going to have anybody erecting a statue in your name for services to humankind.

Like I fell into becoming a chef, an engineer, a truck driver and a sales person, I also fell into being a Life Coach if I’m being perfectly honest.

I started by taking a stress management course at Sheffield University in 2004 in an attempt to lower my own stress levels.

It wasn’t very effective, so in early 2005 I signed up to do my first Life Coach Training.

Even though I thought I was taking the course to learn the skills rather than become a full-time coach, it immediately felt different, a lot different.

It was fun, I could see a way to actually do good in the world on a daily basis, and I didn’t feel like I was merely going with the flow and taking the easy way out.

It was tricky to begin with as there wasn’t really a beaten path to follow as there is now

Sure my training helped, but that only really helped me become a competent coach; there was no training that I was aware of that would help me actually acquire clients.

I Made A Lot Of Mistakes To Begin With

As such, there was a lot of hit and miss in my early days as a coach. In fact, more miss than hit to begin with if I’m being truthful.

Then I got into a groove. I started to find a few scattered resources that could help me with my marketing and help me avoid the mistakes I had been previously making by trying to do everything on my own.

Another thing I did was to start and reach out to other self development bloggers to obtain advice. Surprisingly, a good number were amenable and I started to build friendships I still have to this day.

One of the things I did on the advice of a friend was start a blog to attract clients and build up the authority with Google.

For five years I was like a whirling dervish, cranking blog post after blog post out, sometimes as often as four or five times per week.

Now I rarely post more than once per week because I have fine tuned what I need to do and for the most part understand what will and will not help me gain clients.

Note: I’ll tell you more about what that fine-tuning involves in a newsletter very soon.

A week or so ago a friend was making a big deal of hitting their tenth year blogging anniversary.

‘Wow’ I thought, ‘That is impressive’ Then I started to count back and it suddenly dawned on me that I blew through my tenth anniversary in September 2006 and never even noticed.

To begin with I was a bit frustrated with myself for forgetting, but that feeling didn’t last long.

The Real Reason It Passed Me By

I hadn’t noticed because I was enjoying myself and my focus was on helping clients, not looking for milestones.

I suddenly realized I can stick at things, I just need the right things to stick at. Work that engages me, invigorates me, and motivates me.

Up until 2005 I’d had none of those things and I was trying to maintain my enthusiasm and desire purely by building a nice bank account.

A stable bank account is nice, but it doesn’t help you get out of bed in the morning, it probably won’t help you enjoy working on weekends, and it will never tell you, ‘Thanks Tim, you really helped me and I’m so glad I hired you’.

Do you metaphorically (or even literally) spring out of bed in the morning?

If not, what are you going to do in 2017 to change that?