2 major things happened to Life Coaches Blog last month, it got mentioned on Lifehacker twice; first on how to give good compliments, second on the Bruce Lee guide to getting things done.

My traffic exploded and my earnings quadrupled for those days alone, staying at triple the norm for a few days after.

It was a major step of my dream come true.

But here’s the secret: when it happened I couldn’t deal.

I froze up. My ideas went dry. When I realized that suddenly what I wrote was reaching out to a whole lot more people, I questioned what I had to say that deserved such attention.

A classic case of self-sabotage at work.

Hey, I guess I’m not perfect after all

What helped was something a new friend of mine wrote in an email; do you wonder if you’ll pass the mark? she asked.

You’ll pass the mark when you reach the mark.

What Is The Heart of Personal Development Blogging?

2 years ago, Yezhong and I were going through another phase in our life coaching development. We realized how hypocritical it was to encourage people to walk the good walk, but not to do it ourselves.

We decided to cut back on the life coaching and focus on taking the powerful skills and techniques we’d learned and putting them to use on ourselves.

It didn’t mean that we had to be better, richer, happier, healthier or sexier than anyone else. It did mean that we had to lead lives congruent with our own goals and values. It meant we had to stay true to our own paths and be taking steps everyday down our consciously chosen paths.

It meant we had to walk the talk and lead the way.

When I started Life Coaches Blog, I still had lots of experiences to share from my life coaching history. In fact I was hungry to share everything I had learned and gained from my years of practicing NLP, hypnosis, life coaching and personal development.

Something interesting happened as the months went by. I began to run out of stuff to write about. Then I realized why.

A blog, if it’s to run with any success at all, is a continuing dialog between you and the world. If you stop growing, you stop that dialog, and you wind up with nothing new to say.

The heart of personal development blogging is to keep growing. Keep your own personal growth going and you’ll never run out of fun, interesting things to say.

Life complements blogging, not the other way around.

Why Most Personal Development Blogs Fail

I abhor hypocrisy. I abhor people telling other people how to lead their lives. I never do that here. I offer suggestions, ideas and experiences about skills and strategies that I’ve found useful and interesting, but I never tell anyone how to lead their life in a way I haven’t.

Which is a sad failing in a lot of personal development blogs. They tell people how to lead their lives, they lay down the law about how things should be…when it’s painfully obvious they’re leading where they haven’t gone.

Lessons Learned From The Life Coaches Blog Journey

This blog is 15 months old, with at least 1 to 3 posts almost every week. I can’t even believe I’ve written so much sometimes. I remember so many late nights spent writing when I should have been sleeping, writing when I could have been off relaxing (this is one of those nights – I gave up a movie gala for this).

But this is part of my mission; to use the power of words to help people.

Honestly, there are days when I’m tired and I feel like throwing the towel in. Especially now, with a new writing job and longer traveling hours, my free time has been cut short. And my focus this year on leading a fuller life has got me going out there leading and enjoying my life instead of staying in here and writing about it…and I’m loving it.

But that’s when I remember my mission, and that even though giving up Life Coaches Blog would be the easier thing to do, it would also be the smaller thing to do. I will always be growing, and I still love life coaching. I’ve shared this before, but the main reason I left was because I couldn’t make it financially sustainable, which doesn’t mean I’ll give up on doing it (I still consider special cases and do the occasional unofficial coaching session).

And I remember the real truth about this continuing dialog between me and the world; no matter how many people read these words, in the end I’m only writing for an audience of one: me.