Inspirational neighbours laying the groundwork…

The Assignment today from Blogging 101 is to reflect on the inspirations you have gleaned from your neighbours here in the blogging world.  More specifically to use this post to respond to comments left on others blogs.  Although the assignment is specifically referring to comments I left yesterday, the 10th.  the fact is I have been commenting and reading a number of blogs and consider it only fitting that I make this posting in response to the inspiration I have gleaned from neighbours.

I have three blogs that come to mind, but for the moment I will just write about 1 of them and hopefully later on add to this post or create a new post regarding other inspirations gleaned!!

The one which I commented on yesterday that stands out is MeMees Musings her post was on diving into Social Networks.  I connected with her post on a number of levels.   First of all, I connected on a  visual level.  There was a picture of swimmers stretching in preparation of maybe diving or swimming.  I like swimming so I stayed to read.

I could relate to the some of the swimming analogy she presented, but the part that I really related to was her hours and hours of struggle over what seemed in theory a simple task at hand.  That’s the same thing I’ve been dealing with.  There have been no hard assignments and even the assignments she mentioned for herself (she’s in blogging 201) didn’t seem that hard until I considered trying to do those same assignments myself.  She mentioned one of the assignments he had had was  to ‘audit my brand’ and like her, I thought that wouldn’t be so hard.  Then I read the post she linked to as a good example and yes there it turns out there is far more to doing an audit than meets the eye and the ‘Juicer in chief‘ at the flavored lemons website definitely has a great example of truly auditing your work.

As much as I admire and appreciate the Juicer’s website, Memee’s website, is the one that started my wheels really spinning.  When I left my comment for her she replied in depth with some great tips for me to remember.  Key tip –‘always include myself as a part of the audience’.  I thought I was including myself in the audience…but then again, now that she’s mentioned it, maybe I’ve been too focused on engaging the visitor.  It is, as she mentioned, draining to put all the energy into writing for others.  When you truly write for yourself then, you are writing from your soul, and it is heartfelt and not as draining as trying to invest the energy into making others happy or pleasing others.  I don’t live my life trying to please others so there is no need to take an activity which I am enjoying, such as blogging, and turn it into the burden of pleasing others.