Without being aware of it, I have been trapped by rules that kept me stuck in the process of publishing content for a long time.
The blockage isn’t about creating and publishing articles on my blog. It is about sending the information to people who may be interested in reading them — in newsletters and social media channels.
These were the rules involved:
- I have to post once a week
- I cannot post more than once a week
- I need to be consistent with my messages
- I must respect the reader’s time — not waste their time
I had to make a couple of mental and emotional shifts to unblock myself.
The Fallacy of Consistency
Marketers have been emphasizing the importance of consistency.
They say:
- The minimum you have to post is once a week, so people know you exist.
- So people remember you
- So they know that you are still active
I have touted the same things myself — and even used that as a rule to try and make me produce more, so people have the opportunity to find out about me.
But this consistency rule doesn’t really work for me. It doesn’t sit well with the rhythm I work with. Because sometimes I write more, sometimes I write less. Sometimes I’m more reflective. And sometimes, when I’m deep in the doing, I don’t extract myself at all, but I have a lot to talk about when I surface.
So I don’t work well with a rule that rigid — it prevents me from talking when I wanna talk; it forces me to talk when I don’t wanna.
Consistency on a deeper level
Marketers have the desire to treat people like Pavlov’s dog — salivating for more.
I don’t think you have to post every week to be consistent. Frequency is important for sure, but consistency is not only about frequency.
The consistency comes with:
- how you continue to do your work
- how you continue to show up
- how you continue to show your work
- how you stay in communication with the world
Really, it’s about being in sync with yourself, with the work, with the world.
Consistency in communication is necessary not because we want others to listen to us. It’s because we get out of sync if we stop communicating — that’s when everything begins to fall apart.
The Fallacy of Taking
The second assumption that blocked me greatly is the belief that sending messages = taking up other people’s time — the more I write, the more you have to read, the more rude I become.
I didn’t even notice this assumption was running my system until my AI caught me on it.
When someone opens your email and reads it — who’s doing the taking?
And I realized that the act of sending emails, or social media, or any other kind of message, isn’t a selfish act of taking someone’s time.
Because:
I don’t feel like I’m taking anything from them. Because, they don’t have the obligation to read in the first place anyway. If they do, they do. If they don’t, they don’t.
So I understood that I’ve been making myself responsible for how others interact with my messages — something I cannot be responsible for, and have no business doing so.
This changes the dynamics of many conversations in my life.