Recognizing Change

It’s always sort of amazing to see how incapable people are of recognizing change as it happens. We need milestones as points of comparisons to make us realize something is different.

This morning I got my daily email from 4sq & 7 years ago, a service that tells you where you checked in the year before on this day. One year ago today I was in a car with Peter Shankman (at that time better known as @skydiver) cruising down the highway outside Chicago to go jump out of an airplane. I lived in Michigan, was working for a company I didn’t feel held much of a future for me, was bored out of my mind on most days and went to Chicago for the weekend because I let my new friend talk me into crossing something off my bucket list.

It was one of the best days of my life. It was the day I realized I wanted to live my bucket list, not talk about it. A year later, I’m living in Chicago, loving my job, spending time with awesome friends, doing a ton of photography and skydiving on weekends. I’m a graduate of the Freefall University AFF Program at Chicagoland Skydiving Center and on track to become a licensed skydiver this summer. One year. I decided what I needed to change and I made it happen.

Sometimes things happen to you or around you that force moments of reflection. And sometimes you have to force yourself into it because you know you need to come out the other side doing things differently. If you even noticed I hadn’t posted anything here in well over two months, you were witnessing the time I took to force myself to recognize change. And, to redirect.

I was spending most of my free time worrying about the content I was creating for one website or another. I needed to step back from the blogging life to look at where I was now compared to where I started when this little writing project came to life. I needed to re-evaluate intentions. My pursuit of being such a widespread content creator was driving me crazy and had become about something completely different than why I’d started.

I talked with colleagues and friends about the types of things I was doing that seemed to matter (and the ones that didn’t). I talked with my mentors about the industry I was attempting to contribute to and how it all seemed to be getting stale. I asked if I was making a mistake by abandoning this stuff altogether. I found myself on a steep learning curve in my new job and needing to focus harder. I stopped making excuses and started getting serious about fitness. I started devoting weekends to jumping out of planes and making new friends who would change my perspective on life. I made time for free time. I went on photowalks. I explored my new city.

And I had enough people ask me why I seemed to be disappearing from the online circles in which I was so active for so long and if I ever planned to come back that I finally knew for sure I was actually contributing something.

So here’s the deal.

• I’m not going to worry about SEO or link love or Google rank or any of the things that seem to be important to a lot of other bloggers and I’m just going to write stuff that matters. Stuff that helps people or makes them think about something in a different way. Stuff that encourages people to get out of their own way or gives a voice to young professionals just trying to figure everything out. Stuff I need to publish somewhere because it’s cathartic to just to write it. Stuff that shows my point of view to people who might want to work with me on something. Stuff that points out positive examples of what’s going well in this industry instead of another post about why a company screwed up. Good PR for Public Relations.
• I’m going to pick back up with the Influencers Series on this blog, because getting to know people offline and learning about what really inspires people I respect really matters to me, and if analytics don’t lie, those posts really matter to other people too.
• I’m going to keep writing for Ragan’s PR Daily, but more in the form of posts you see here. I’ll leave the daily news snippets up to other editors and focus on contributing pieces aimed totally at helping young PR professionals.
• I’m still going to occasionally contribute to Social Fresh, because I believe it’s one of the most legitimate resources out there for serious social media knowledge sharing.
• I’m not going to write about skydiving here anymore. It’s a separate part of my life and I need to keep it that way to maintain sanity. But I will share videos, photos, stories and milestones in a place dedicated to my journey in a place way more appropriately titled: beyond the bucket list.
• I’m going to dedicate a more serious online presence to my photography. Because taking photos makes me happy, and occasionally makes me money. And I like when those two ideas overlap.

If I wake up in six months and feel like that isn’t working for me, then I’ll change it again. Because it’s my life and my time and I’ll do what I want.

And now I’m going to encourage you to do the same thing. Step back from your projects. Take a break and force yourself to look at how you’ve changed. Get a bit of perspective on what you’re contributing and where you’re ready to cut things out to make time for what you really care about. Hopefully you will find yourself totally on track toward your goals and loving what you’re spending your time working on. Hopefully you won’t let things overwhelm you the way I let them overwhelm me for a while. Recognize change and don’t be afraid to act on it.

Don’t wait for a milestone. Create one.