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In part one of this series, I wrote about how I was using this blog to get my website up and running, regardless of how unfinished it might be. In part two I listed all the steps that together form my process for publishing the blog.

In this third part of the series I go into some of the reasons why this has worked for me. While my process may or may not work for you, I hope you will at least find some principles here that you can apply to your own. Here are the biggest reasons the process works for me.

This process empowers me to start by reducing the expectations I place on myself.

I know I perform better as a writer without the pressure of expectations weighing me down; this process removes that pressure.

Barbara Sher, one of several people often referred to as the inspiration for the term “life coach,” spoke of reducing anxiety by reducing the sense of danger that gives rise to it.

By reducing expectations, I reduce the danger that I will fail to meet them: it is easier to begin when I improve my chances of success.

Another way I think of this is in terms of expanding my comfort zone. The old notion of “leaving your comfort zone” is to me misguided, as doing so invariably increases the sense of danger that generates anxiety.

By stretching my comfort zone a little at a time – without ever leaving it – I am always expanding the area in which I can operate functionally without undue anxiety.

Once I have started, this process allows me to continue without experiencing overwhelm.

When I show up to work each day and walk away with a pocket full of small successes, I am not just motivated to return the next day, I am inspired by my success. This inspiration helps me do better work each day and, a little at a time, the whole thing grows and improves.

This way I ramp up to a full scale process in a way that is always manageable. It allows me to feel my success by earning the small gains I intend to make and do make by showing up and following the simple steps I have laid out.

This process generates the outcome I seek to create.

Over time, finished pieces emerge. As these accumulate, I have confirmation by way of demonstration that I am capable of sticking with the process of making this blog.

This allows me to work as little or as long as I want at this process, as my intention is to titrate this work and succeed by the compounding of incremental gains. When I do spend a long time at it, it is because I have found flow and am riding the wave while it lasts.

It is important for me that I am never required to spend a long time working on it. So long as I show up each day I intend to and move the process forward by any substantive amount, I am making progress and furthering my aims.

[several months later]

As with parts one and two of this series, the first portion was written months ago while I was snowed in at home. The process was put on pause for a few months, and then I picked it up again where I had left off.

My process has, of course, changed. The principles that gave the process its shape, however, have not. I am not writing nearly so intensively as I was in January, in part because it doesn’t suit my schedule. But I have found a rhythm that works.

I am able to publish a new original post every week without burning myself out in the process. I have created a vehicle for sharing my creative work and am employing it on a regular basis. As I am regularly publishing original creative work, there is new purpose to the creative practices which feed this publication.

I have also gained a clearer vision for what I want the site to be beyond the blog, and I have found myself making unexpected progress improving the functionality of the site as well.

What I am taking away from this experience is that by creating a process that plays to my strengths and avoids my weaknesses, I have been able to launch this site successfully by creating an active blog.

How the rest of the site unfolds will be an adventure, and one I am excited to be on.

The most recent unfolding has occurred in the process of editing this article. I have realized that the pressure of expectation has returned to my process.

This has come primarily from the rigidity of the schedule I have set for myself, and also from my historical ambivalence about expository writing. In order to continue to succeed with this project I need to change the demands I am making on myself.

This website is intended primarily as an outlet for my creative work. While writing articles can certainly fall under that heading, for me it is always secondary to visual art, poetry, and music. Expository writing is most useful to me when in service to these, my primary modes of creative expression.

I was excited to write this series of posts back in January when I was snowed in at home. It gave me purpose and let me create my own light at the end of the tunnel of snow, something to work toward and look forward to. When once again I find myself excited to write in that way, I look forward to returning to the process.

Writing every month only because I have set myself that task is all but guaranteed to spoil my love of writing. Because of this I must, for now, set it aside as a practice. I have not yet decided what will replace the monthly article published on the new moon, but I will figure it out over the course of the next month.

I have made this website and blog structurally flexible in order to serve the mutable nature of my creative practice, as I need a great deal of flexibility in order to maintain flow in my creative work. So, while the process is already changing, this is precisely why flexibility is built into the structure of my approach.

Meanwhile, through the process of writing these articles and publishing the blog, I have not only gained clarity in my vision for the site, I have begun to see new elements of flow in the space between this blog and my other creative projects. I look forward to following the new golden threads involved with some of these elements as I move forward into the great unknown.

[Here are the links to part one and part two of this series.]

There is a new post every new moon, although at this point its nature remains undetermined… please stay tuned!