I haven't blogged a lot lately. Which is directly related to a decision I made a few months ago to share my blog more broadly, adding it to my LinkedIn bio. Which is kind of interesting.
The tool I chose to expose my blog in turn exposes me - and some fairly personal thoughts - to my professional network. And all of a sudden, I questioned every post (and I started and stopped a lot of them). Should I share that opinion? Is that the right way to say it (whatever it is)? What would xyz contact think of what I said? Should I continue to be as honest and frank as I have been?
It's not that I think I've done or said anything wrong - quite the opposite, I'm proud of what I write. But I had to question - do my opinions potentially clash with those of my employer, or my client? And how well should my professional network know me?
The upside and downside of social networking is that it exposes us. Sometimes uncomfortably so. And so I found myself deleting draft after draft of posts. For a while, I even contemplated just skipping the whole blog thing. After all, if it was going to cause this much concern for me, what was the point, right?
But then I decided that one of the things that I like about myself is that I say what I think. No one ever really has to wonder how I feel or what I think about a particular topic. I can be very diplomatic when I need to be, but I prefer being frank and honest. There's good ways and bad ways to be right out there with opinions and thoughts, and sometimes I do it well, and sometimes not so much.
But rather than question myself for every sentence I write, and put virtual handcuffs on myself, I think I've decided to continue to post about the things that interest me, make me think, offend me, make me worry, make me happy, make me money, lose me money.....in other words, worry more about the risk of not saying anything than the risk of putting it out there.
You still won't get me on twitter though.
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