Publishing in Public: A 30-Day Challenge

Photo credit: Gratisography

Hello there, world. It’s me, Jill.

Lately, it feels a little bit like I’ve been hiding. I left my position as founding director of a university military & veterans resource center 78 days ago.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and also one of those things that just had to happen (though I’m still not exactly sure why — yet). This isn’t the first time this has happened; over the years, there have been many times in my life when I somehow found the courage to make the most difficult decisions, even though every logical reason pointed to the fact that I should keep going in the same direction:

• In 1995 I joined the Army during my freshman year of college. At the time I was doing well, my upper-middle-class upbringing gave no indication that the military was in the cards for me. Additionally, I was not particularly athletic or adventurous. My final decision came down to a coin flip (you can hear more about this in my TED Talk), and joining the Army turned out to be one of the most impactful and ultimately positive decisions of my life.
• In 2011 I got divorced. I won’t go into the details here but suffice it to say I could’ve made the choice to stay in the marriage, or at least fight harder for it. Eleven years and one AMAZING second marriage later, I’m glad I didn’t.
• In 2020 I closed down my company Distel Wolfe, which designed and operated custom scavenger hunts for clients like Nike, Pfizer and Home Depot. But the pandemic had other ideas. Though we had options to stay in business (like taking federal/state grants & loans or pivoting our business model), I chose to shut it down instead. A few months later, I was hired into the most satisfying and impactful job I’ve ever had.

I’ve also ended good-enough relationships, business ideas and projects, all of which had great potential. It was as if a wiser and more grown-up spirit inside me knew that those things wouldn’t work and took over and ended things (before my more timid, fearful self could start calling the shots).

I’ve been figuring out my life in the 78 days since my last day of work.

I’m technically on short-term disability, having left because my vision loss was causing me more stress and frustration in the role than what I could reasonably deal with. Since leaving, I’ve read a lot (A LOT) of books (here’s my Goodreads profile if you want to connect there), meditated, gone for many, many walks with my dogs, traveled, and basically tried to stay connected with the people and organizations that give my life meaning.

Most of all, I’ve tried to give myself some grace. I’m going through a tremendous amount of change right now: transitioning through middle age (I’m 47), transitioning from a working professional (who am I without a job or a business?), and the very big transition of losing my vision. But it’s not easy or simple.

Recently, I’ve noticed that the longer I go without a vision (in the sense of having a plan, an ability to move towards something impactful and positive) for my future, the deeper I fall into despair and confusion. I’m re-reading Brendon Burchard’s book, High-Performance Habits (which I LOVED when I read it t he first time ), and this early passage really resonated with me:

“Uncertain what they really want, achievers often choose just to keep at it. But at some point, if they don’t get very clear about who they are and what they want at this stage of their life, things start to unravel.”

Right. My life is slowly unraveling! Despite all the reading, meditating, journaling, and even traveling I’ve done over the past two and a half months, the fact that I have no clear vision of what I want to do next is causing me a lot of underlying anxiety.

Oh, I have ideas. ENDLESS ideas, projects, thoughts, creative daydreams. But not much clarity.

But whatever happens in the coming months and years, I know it involves writing. Yes, I am writing a book. But I’m not ready to share that writing with the world. Yet.

I know that in order for the book to be successful, I need to build a platform. I need people to know and understand who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish (or at least engage with) my ideas). I’ve known for a while now that I must start “publishing in public,” putting my writing and ideas into the world. I’ve done it in the past through personal and professional blogs. I’ve also done it by writing for other publications (i.e. HigherEdMilitary.com).

But for some reason, I’ve experienced tremendous fear of “shipping” my work this time around. I keep changing my ideas, messaging, who I want to be, who I want to talk to, and how I want to impact the world. It’s frustrating and demoralizing, and as I’m writing I’m just now realizing that this is what transition feels like. Unsure, unsteady, like walking across a rope bridge with no handrails.

So how do I move forward?

Enter my 30-day writing challenge

For the next 30 days, I have committed to every day writing one post and hitting submit. There is only one goal: move beyond my paralyzing perfectionism. I will publish regardless of whether I think my writing is good or bad, makes money or not, self-serving or beautiful. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I hit publish and share it publicly.

I got the idea from another one of my favorite books, Tara Mohr’s Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead. My god, this entire book is incredible, but one chapter in particular keeps haunting me: Chapter 4: Unhooking From Praise & Criticism (Mohr writes publicly about this topic in Hooked vs. Unhooked).

Mohr is me. I am SO hooked on both praise and criticism that I have stopped taking risks publicly with my personal writing for years. I’ve become fearful of doing the very thing that I love (and have loved all my life), the only thing that will take me to the next level in my professional career, all because I can’t move past my unhealthy need to gobble up praise while avoiding criticism.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. And so I am also following the advice in Mohr’s book, Chapter 7: Leaping (which she writes more about here, here and here). According to Mohr, a Leap must meet these five standards:

1. Gets you playing bigger NOW (not later). ✅
2. Can be finished in 1–2 weeks. ✅
3. It’s simple (can be described in a short phrase). ✅
4. Is out of your comfort zone. ✅
5. Puts you in contact with the audience you’re trying to reach. ✅

So here I am. Leaping. Publishing something I wrote and not making it about whether or not I am a good enough writer/reader/creator/human being who has everything figured out. It means not getting bogged down in details like SEO or the design of the website or whether it makes any money or if anyone shares it.

I’m just figuring out who I am and what I think and accepting that the process will likely change me.

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” — Joan Didion

If you want to follow along on the 30-day journey, for now, you can follow me on my new Facebook page, where I’ll post each day (through May 18 — once I get 30 days under my belt, I may decide to slow down). Or if FB isn’t your jam, you can just come back here daily.

For now, I’ll leave you with a collection of quotes I’ve been gathering around perfectionism; maybe they can help both of us:

• “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not yours to determine how good it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open.” — Martha Graham
• “Take your good fortune and lift your life to its highest calling. Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.” — Oprah
• “The opposite of fear is love — love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off.” — Steven Pressfield
• “For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we’d like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn’t well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it’s going to work. It’s about throwing, not catching. Starting, not finishing. Improving, not being perfect. No one learns to ride a bike from a manual.” — Seth Godin

No more hiding. Here’s to the leap!