THE BIG DEBATE

. BLOGGING .

The sun has come out and my mood seems to have totally rocketed, it’s amazing what a little sun does to your mood and general well being. On the wellbeing point, it’s something i’ve been thinking about more and more lately, particularly following a series of inspirational talks at work yesterday from the Huffington Post & Arianna Huffington herself. As a very ambitious and career focussed female, it’s great to hear from other successful women but also be reminded of how important it is to maintain your well being on the road to success. After all the more physically and mentally ‘on form’ we are, the better we perform. So i’ve vowed to spend a little more time looking after myself, getting an extra hour sleep at night, praising myself for my achievements, looking after my tummy & cutting out the things I know makes it worse, spending time with my loved ones & generally focussing on the happy things in life (Thanks to Susie Pearls talk, i’m now already feeling bubbly & more consciously happy).

Happiness is infectious too, so if we all spend a little more time being grateful for the little things in our lives that make us happy & spend more time celebrating happy moments and channeling positive thoughts, rather than dwelling on the few things that really piss us off we’ll all be more positive … and healthy with that too. As you can tell, yesterdays inspiration talks seriously rubbed off on me and actually it was a really pertinent time for this to happen. There’s been lots of ‘chat’ amongst the blogosphere about the way our ‘industry’ (yes we’re now an industry!) is progressing and whilst the opportunities are endless right now, it does seem this new ‘business’ mode can give us a whole world of contradicting emotions – happiness, excitement, pride, the feeling of being overwhelmed, tired, and sadly self depreciating. This emotional rollercoaster can take it’s toll on us bloggers who maybe don’t do this full time or haven’t rocketed to the same success us others, and whilst we’re nothing but delighted for the success of others, there’s no point denying it does become a new benchmark for us to compare ourselves to, and if you’re anything like me (ambitious and constantly striving for perfection and success) then this new benchmark can make us a little self deprecating and in my case really hard on myself.

But in light of my new ‘mindfulness’ i’m changing my attitude to this, I work so so hard on my blog, and I juggle my full time career, family, friends and boyfriend with it all, and sometimes that’s nothing short of a miracle. So rather than spending my hours woe-ing that I wasn’t featured in X magazine article or involved in X collaboration or that I don’t have 27,000 followers and 100k subscribers to my instagram, i’m going to spend more time celebrating how bloody hard i’ve worked, all the fabulous brands I do get to work with, the incredible magazine features I have been included in, the events i’m invited to and every single one of you readers that do tune in, leave me comments, like my posts, as well as the fab people i’ve met and the great hobbies i’ve developed throughout my 2.5 years blogging (photography & journalism). If I was to ask my family, friends and colleagues about my blog, they’d do nothing but rave of all that i’ve achieved. So it’s about time I, and you, do the same.

I’ve read and heard a lot on this topic, and I think it gives us a good moment to take check of what we’ve achieved, where we’ve come from but most importantly WHY we blog. It’s a time to go back to the roots of why we even started our own blogs, for me it was a place to talk about my uncontrollable shopping addiction, love of clothes and my space to share how I like to style my looks with people that actually cared (clearly this was just me for a long while). Any ‘perks’ were exactly that, a perk, and definitely not the reason I started mediamarmalade.com. One of the best things about blogging is the fact that we’re a like minded bunch of people who share similar passions and hobbies, and in my mind that’s what it’s all about, and it’s important we all remember it and stop being so hard on ourselves if we don’t quite ‘match’ one another. We didn’t start for commercial success and there’s no point setting benchmarks based on other people, if there’s one thing to keep in mind it’s that integrity is what makes a blog, there’s no point trying to conform to how others do it, because that just defeats the entire purpose, plus it doesn’t debut the real ‘you’ which is what we all tune in for isn’t it? It’s absolutely easier said than done, but from here on in, we all need to spend more time congratulating ourselves than beating ourselves up. Success in the blogging world is subjective and undefined, so there’s no point chasing an intangible measure. Instead get back to your roots, blog what you love and write what you feel . A blog is about you, whatever you may be!!

I have to say I didn’t intend to write all this (this was originally a Friday outfit post …) but there you go, it’s what a blogs for, and it’s what I felt like ;)