Full Cup Friday?

This week has been different than usual. I’m away from home on work, taking students to perform overseas.

So today, rather than share my regular top tips, wins, and preview, I wanted to share a little more about why I started this blog.

As I write this I’m not sure I can give my full self to another Full Cup Friday for this week. With travel, dawn to dusk and beyond work duties, my cup is quite empty!

So here’s a brief excerpt from Jeff Goin’s blogging course “Intentional Blog.” Below are my answers to his question “Why blog?”

I started this blog for four main reasons.

1. To understand my thinking better. The process of writing enables me to ‘see’ my thinking on paper – or in this case, on screen.
2. To connect with the conversations out here, online, around learning, music, education, high performance, and so much more. I have many and varied interests, and honestly, this week, I’m struggling to pin some of these down into a single blog theme. Suffice to say, I do love music, and I do love learning – including sharing these two aspects with others. Which relates to the next point:
3. To find and share my voice, my message. Connected to point 1, I’m working towards finding out just what my voice and message is. As stated in point 2, it’s centered around music and learning.
4. To reach out to people, past, present, and future. Point 2 mentions conversations – and these, at their fundamental level, are spoken dialogues between two people in a shared space. With the advent of digital and communication technologies, the synchronous and space-bound constraints have been removed – but still, nothing beats face-to-face, in my opinion and experience. We’re just blessed that digital can facilitate and substitute for real life when circumstances does not permit the analogue interactions that we would usually prefer.

With that in mind, I’m detecting a shift in my vision for this blog. In some ways it is a narrowing, and in others, a broadening. Narrowing, in the sense that it all boils down to wanting to learn more and more about myself, the world, my place in it, and the people who are here, near and far. Broadening, in that the more people I meet, and conversations that ensue, the greater the range of possibilities, experiences, and ideas that can be considered.

P.S. So, what happened to my book reviews? I still plan to post these, but as life and work has crowded in, I have found that my original self-imposed deadlines have sailed on past – more than once. Hence, the reconsidering of the vision for this blog. Perhaps a book review is too much – but a book summary and / or description of how it has changed or reinforced my thinking, is more apt for myself and for any readers who care to devote time and attention to this.

For the foreseeable future, I’ll continue to post every weekday. Even if it’s short, Seth Godinesque posts.

I’d love for you to share your thoughts on these things, or anything else I’ve written. I promise to read – and hopefully, reply – to all comments, tweets, and messages.