At last!!! I got my blog done!
In this day and age, creating a blog is as easy as one two three. You get a website, a hosting service, and a domain name. If you want it to be under your own name, you pay for it, if you don’t mind the hosting name showing up before your name, then you can get a free one.
Writing a blog? That doesn’t sound difficult, right?
If you can write somewhat decently, you can write any of your daily experiences and discoveries, or post pictures with some personal comments, just like you do in Instagram and Facebook.
Or if you don’t want to write, you can record a video, or use a speech-to-text app, to create content you can post as a blog.
And for this project, Toastmasters have hired the best people to give us step-by-step instructions on how to write a compelling blog.
So technically, writing a compelling blog shouldn’t be difficult.
A ten-year-old could do it.
But for me, it takes 20 long years to finally produce my own blog.
I’ve been wanting to make a blog since iPhone was first introduced when blogging was an interesting new idea. Now we have iPhone 14 and still no personal blog for Miranda…
It’s not because I didn’t know how to do it.
I am resourceful enough to google it, YouTube it, or ask someone to show me how to do it.
It’s not because I have nothing to write about.
I have some thousands if not millions of words written, accumulated over decades, ready to be transposed unto blog posts.
And it’s not because I lack the resources or ideas to make it compelling.
Every day, I come up with at least 2-3 topics I could write about I’ve got everything that one would need to write a compelling blog.
Except for one thing:
COURAGE.
Courage to overcome my fear of judgment of how people will think of me, how they would grade my effort.
Courage to walk through the fire of my own self-limiting beliefs that I’m not good enough, that no one would find my story riveting, or that my blog wouldn’t be as well designed as the blogs I admire.
Courage to show up as I am, and let people make up their minds as to whether what I write is their cup of tea or not. Actually, that’s quite fair, isn’t it? No one wants to be forced to like something.
I have wasted 20 years to self-doubts that led to inaction, of aborted ideas, tools turned obsolete from un-use, thousand of dollars in apps, books, courses.
If each of my waste could have a form it would look like a junkyard full of cars nobody wants anymore.
At last, enough was enough, was enough.
Something’s gotta give.
If I were to have courage, I have to be courageous.
I choose to walk my talk.
Yesterday morning I jumped into the deep end and committed to doing this project and presenting the result at tonight’s meeting.
Today I am a proud owner of a blog: blog.mirandarumi.com, the blog you’re reading now.
I repurposed my speeches for this path as blog posts. I can’t believe I hadn’t really thought it all these years.
It’s not perfect, it’s a work in progress
Eventually I’ll revise it for more general audience.
I have three people to thank for me completing my blog at last:
The first one is Ping Hendra, my mentee. He completed his whole path, 16 speeches in 6 weeks. This inspired me to do it myself to see how I could stretch and challenge myself.
My commitment to the goal and the purpose of why I’m doing this pushed me to do the speeches and projects at a brisk pace and made me want to challenge myself to do the blog project.
I am also grateful to my Program Quality Director Agus, for setting the 11:11:11 project as one of the requirements for the Triple Crown Award. In the beginning, I thought it would be too difficult. But now I’m enjoying myself immensely, challenging myself on a regular basis. I’m already two-thirds of the way, an accomplishment I’m quite pleased with.
I admit I had been sitting on my Distinguished Toastmasters laurels for far too long. I became complacent and my progress in public speaking had come to a halt.
I am forever grateful to Toastmasters, who seems to understand so well what I and a hundred thousand other members need to develop and grow personally and professionally.
And finally, thank you Cendana Toastmasters, for graciously giving me the opportunity to give this confessional speech here, and be the witness of my personal triumph.
For those of you, who resonate with my struggle of self-doubts, unworthiness, fear of judgments, I invite you to take the leap.
Being able to say: “At Last”, is a sweet reward and victory when we are able to defeat what we have allowed to defeat us for too damn long time.
At last!