Well, Daryl’s arrival on the scene at Anecdote has really put the pressure on me now he has published his maiden blog post. Here I’ve been for several months and nothing from me but a deafening silence. For people who have actually met me this is entirely out of character. I have opinions on everything and hardly hesitate to express them. At length. Just ask the two friends who walk with me at 6am in the morning.

So what’s been going on here? Some of it was the steep learning curve inherent in every new job. And you want me to write a blog post too? Sure, just wait until I have a better understanding of how things are done around here, and what exactly is the software I need to use? And how do I put them together? Um, maybe next week. And then a lot of the technical barriers were removed when I maintained a project blog for eight weeks early in the year. But still nothing from me on the Anecdote blog.

It was clear that there was a serious amount of personal effort going into all this blog avoidance. And after some thinking and reflecting about this uncharacteristic coyness I uncovered some deep-seated and entirely irrational beliefs. The first was my late Granny’s exhortation to never put anything in writing that might come back to haunt you. The dear old lady was referring to the quaint old habits of letter writing and journal keeping, where your well chosen and pithy words about Great Aunt Maud’s appalling behaviour at Christmas dinner might be deliberately read by someone only to happy to report them back to Great Aunt M for the sole reason of seeing you cut out of the will. My interpretation of this ancient family wisdom meant that the idea of putting my pronouncements on anything out to the great universe of the internet for comment – well, just don’t go there.

And the second reason was closely aligned with the first. I have spent the last several years in HR roles that have required me to endlessly repeat my Granny’s message in an organisational context. Email privacy is non-existent, even deleted messages can be found, don’t use client or employer provided access to the internet for researching your next car purchase or worse still, surfing inappropriate sites. Then, just as I had finished giving myself a good talking to about the silliness of this particular point of view and committed publicly (well, to Shawn and Daryl at least) that I would get something out there this very week, I found this.