I was speaking with a fellow blogger the other day. He said a mutual friend recently told him that she could tell when his blog posts were “more for him than his audience.” In other words, she could tell when he was working something out personally through his writing. I thought that was a great compliment.
Vulnerability shown in your work will rarely hurt you, but will almost always resinate with the authenticity people are seeking. More importantly, most struggles/challenges aren’t totally unique to any one person. As you are working through yours, a small insight you share might be a major breakthrough for someone else going through a similar thing.
The work might not be for everyone, but for those it is, the connection you make will be better and deeper than with something that is more guarded and geared toward mass appeal. Most of your audience will appreciate the authenticity and humanity, even if the message isn’t exactly what they were after that day. Meanwhile, for some, your post will be the right message at just the right time in their life. It will feel as though you wrote your post just for them.
To me, this is the most important work we can do. There is literally nothing more gratifying than igniting a light that helps people when it is needed most. As content creators obsessed with authenticity and connection, it is easy to forget that vulnerability is a crucial ingredient to achieve both. If you avoid and fear it, your work will suffer and you will miss out on the very quality connections you are trying to create.