There´s a blog I´ve been following now for 4 years, A Beautiful Mess. Visual blogs are my kind of blogs and I fell in love with the colorful photos and strong personal style that it had, and that it still has.
A Beautiful Mess was popular already four years ago but during the last couple of years it has become SUPER popular. That´s why, when I decided to dedicate the beginning of January for studying blogging, Blog Life was my natural choice.
I haven´t regret my decision. Blog Life is an amazing course for all who are interested in making their living out of what you love.
I´ve studied together with my US blog reader Erica Monttinen who started her blog Finn and I last year.
After the first week Erica asked me what has been the most important thing that I had learned so far. After answering to her I kept on thinking about her question. I realized, that the most important thing for me was in Elsie´s, the creator of A Beautiful Mess, video interview. She said:
“…in the end of the day I´m writing a blog that I would want to read.“
It was just one of the many things she said but somehow it was very meaningful to me.
To be able to be nothing but yourself, to do your own thing no matter what it is, and to do it exactly in a way you want requires a huge amount of self-knowledge and self-confidence.
My first years of blogging have been all about searching for that knowledge and confidence. The process has been something I didn’t anticipate. Full of realizations about myself, good but also painful ones. Taking steps forward but also backward. After my first year I made stopped searching and reading new blogs because I was so uncertain about my blog. For long I talked about my blog only when someone asked me about it. I was afraid that I’d be criticized and I would stop blogging. Or that I would start to just mimic others because of my own uncertainty. I was afraid to compare myself with others and I didn´t want to see how much better others were at blogging.
I wanted to protect my fragile self and my blog that was just founding its soul and form. I wanted to grow over my fears and uncertainty in peace, so that someday, I would be able to just do my thing, and feel good about it.
People are much stronger than they know.
They have more creativity inside them than they realize.
Passion combined with persistence can help people to go further than they can ever imagine.
It doesn´t matter if you fall. It matters that you stand up after that. That you use your mistakes as learning opportunities and that you keep on going.
Those are only some of the profound life lessons I´ve learned on my way.
At the same time, I´ve felt that in some strange way all my struggles have taken me closer to what I´ve always searched for.
And the closer I have got, the better I have felt. More me. And more confident.
You sometimes need to close your ears so you could know you and grow your self-confidence. But it´s important to do it the other way around too at times; to open your ears to voices around you. Because when we are alone we easily start to think that we are the only ones who are struggling. And our burdens make us to give up. At that moment it’s important to see that we’re not alone and that our struggles are more common and more human than we know.
For my confidence it was meaningful to hear the story of A Beautiful Mess in Blog Life this January. To be able to hear from Elsie how she had struggled during her first years as a blogger and felt uncertainty about herself and her blog. It made me to realize that my struggles haven´t been nothing else than a normal part of the process. Part of searching what’s my thing and growing to be confident about my way of doing it.
We are the most fragile and uncertain in front of the most meaningful things. But those same things can be the source of great happiness, strength and persistency. We just need to be honest to ourselves, trust our skills to grow and have the courage to be nothing more or nothing less than our natural self.
This morning when I went skiing on the lake I felt it. I felt that it´s time. Time to let go of one phase and move on the other.
I have let this blog develop in a natural way and found it a good way. It´s a good way to continue. But now it´s time for a bigger step. It´s time to start to put all the ideas I’ve been developing and thinking into action. Including the ones that I haven’t dare to do yet. It’s time to step out of my comfort zone.
So from the next post on you´re going to see some new kinds of posts that are a part of renewing this blog. And there’s a new blog layout coming too on 1st of June. I hope you stay aboard and enjoy all the new things you´re going to see!
Confidence is indeed worth searching for. It makes all the difference.
It gives us the courage to show our uniqueness to this world and make the difference.
And that is pretty cool thing! Definitely worth working for. For life.
