A few months ago, I wrote about my return to business writing as well as one way of framing the service. However, I still felt a block about promoting it to my friends and peers at LinkedIn: should I write about the Consistency Journal, or should I write about my business writing services? 

The immediate thought that came to me was, “I would be confusing readers if I did both.” 

Eventually, I chose to announce the Consistency Journal first, figuring that I’d need many more people to know about it in order to get enough customers, whereas I only needed a handful of clients in order to sustain my practice. You can read that intro post at LinkedIn, which I also republished at this blog. 

It was an acceptable solution to my writing block, but I knew I was missing out on building awareness for my business writing services.

Two things happened recently: 

I was invited to join Guild95, where I met Mo Akif who made time to chat with me and start a content strategy.

I also got to consult with an experienced strategist, who conducted a tutoring session with me about integrative thinking. They recommended that I read two articles to prepare, Strategy & Integrative Thinking as well as Your Personal Playing to Win Strategy, as well as to write down three drastically different winning aspirations. As we refined these, I also learned that it was possible—and actually necessary—for me to test multiple strategies to figure out what would work. This session took around two hours, and wow, it made a huge impact in terms of how clear my path forward looked.

Both of these events created the conditions for me to finally decide to sit down and make it work somehow. That’s what Creative Doing is all about; working through a block with the understanding that you only know how to get through it after the process, not before.

The post is here, and here’s some detail on the writing process I wanted to add. I had pulled a couple of references, neither that totally represented me but had elements that I liked. I’d written up a fragment, which documented the moment a friend asked me if I was available for business writing and editing work, which I didn’t feel great about. I dropped this context into Claude, then asked it to prompt me with some developmental editor questions.