#February writing challenge how to
#February writing challenge professional
#February writing challenge series

Unearth the gemstones in your work and your thinking A Ritual to be Sharedįor the fourth year running I’m not only starting the year with a four-week writing series, I’m asking you to join me in the challenge. I don’t worry about the specifics of what I’m going to create over the coming year because I know as long as I engage with the writing challenge, there will be plenty of raw material to work with. It’s the perfect container for new ideas and has become the backbone of my business in many ways. Over the past six years I’ve made a ritual of beginning my year with a four-week writing series. Stories emerge, ideas take shape, new work is born. When I write consistently something seemingly magical happens. Without that excavation the potential in my work and my business remains untapped. Without the excavation that writing brings I don’t know what I think or what I know. I have all of this stuff swirling round in my head but it’s as yet unarticulated. It was funny to hear it because that’s kind of how I think about writing and what it does for me. It’s how I think.Ī client once told me I was like an archaeologist, helping him dig through his story and carefully dust off the artefacts of significance to make sense of what had gone before. In fact, in many ways I believe the work was able to evolve because of the writing. My work has evolved and changed over the past decade but one thing has remained consistent: writing. I repeatedly see people sharing my writing as a way of introducing someone new to my work and I’m more than happy with that. There will never be a job title or clever elevator pitch that captures it and that’s okay. The thing I’m most sure of is that my writing is the best explanation of what I do and what my work is all about.

#February writing challenge how to

I touched on this in the book I released last year the introduction ends with the line, “Over the years I’ve become less sure of how to give a clear answer to the question “What do you do?” but simultaneously more sure of what my work is.”

Not only do I still not have a clear, succinct answer for this question, I think I’ve actually gotten worse at answering it. “my writing is the best explanation of what I do and what my work is all about” As we strolled – at distance – around the local parks I was repeatedly faced with the question, “What do you do for work?” To which my knee-jerk response is, “How long do you have?” I had my second child last March so I’ve spent a lot of time over the past ten months talking to strangers in the form of other mothers of new babies. It feels like a privilege and it’s been kind of a profound experience for me so far. It’s fun, enriching and invigorating, even when it is challenging. I wish I’d known I could build my business and develop my work like this in the first place. To my delight, people from across the globe show up for consulting, workshops, talks and courses because they are interested in having the same conversations. And somehow this has become an effective way for me to promote my work and sell my wares. In the past few years I’ve written in some detail about not just the Troubles but other topics like intimacy, grief, motherhood, birth, and the landscape of Donegal, to name just a few. As time passed, slowly but surely I went off-piste.

#February writing challenge professional

When I originally began writing as part of my professional life I focused exclusively on digital marketing. People from across the globe are interested in having the same conversations

#February writing challenge series

Last year we compiled some of my writing – including the cultural forces series – and put it out as my first book. I thought those ideas and questions would remain a personal pursuit. I couldn’t imagine how I’d ever be able to pass it off as relevant to business or the interests of my audience. I never thought I’d be able to write about Northern Ireland and growing up in the midst of the Troubles as part of my work.

Through the music of the place I returned home in my head and was able to get into the groove with my writing. Then I was onto The Undertones, Van Morrison, The Cranberries, and whatever other Irish favourites from my teenage years that came to mind.

Next I went down a rabbit hole of Mary Black, Dolores Keane, and Christy Moore: the music my mother played in our kitchen through the nineties. I remember sitting in a bar in Canary Wharf on a Monday afternoon staring out over the Thames and putting my headphones on to listen to A Woman’s Heart by Eleanor McEvoy. I quickly realised I needed to find a way to ‘go back home’. As I started writing my first piece I had a problem I was trying to write about growing up in Northern Ireland but I was in London at the time. A couple of years ago I wrote a series about cultural forces and how they play out in our work.