I run into a very interesting dilemma every couple of months or so.  It goes a little something like this.

I regularly update my media kit so that I have something at the ready for the various inquiries that come my way.  I have an Excel sheet in which every couple of months I chart my blog’s numbers.  And while the numbers are steadily increasing, they are by no means increasing in direct proportion to the amount of effort I put into my blog.

I hired someone to do an assessment of my blog; based on this person’s feedback, I would be able to take a step back and fix whatever it is that was holding my blog back.  This person is an amazing professional who was wonderfully candid with me.  The conclusion: my blog’s voice isn’t what people were looking for.  So either I would have to change my voice, or I would have to content myself with the numbers that I had.

It’s something that I had considered in the past.  I want to share thoughts and reflections on personal development and community building with others because I know there are many, many around the world who ask themselves the same questions.  Similarly, I want them to start sharing and exchanging their thoughts both in the comments section and by email (with me or with each other) to further these important conversations.  So maybe I should consider writing in a way that would trigger more interest in the masses.

Long time readers of Sahar’s Blog can probably pinpoint when I did these experiments—and how massively they failed.  Because ultimately, I spent so much time trying to speak with a certain voice I thought was appealing that I lost perspective on why I was blogging in the first place.

This isn’t a lesson that is only important for bloggers to learn.  Authenticity is something that we are early on encouraged to abandon as we pursue various unattainable goals or try to fit in.  But the more we pursue these objectives, the less we have time to nurture our true selves.  The biggest challenge, of course, is that in the heated, one-minded pursuit of material wealth, we forget about our spiritual well-being.

There is thankfully a way to achieve balance.  I haven’t quite figured it out, but I do now that I am more balanced today than I was a year ago, and I intend to continue trying to become increasingly balanced.  When it comes to blogging, I know that things have changed on my blog and will continue to change as I take the lessons from popular blogs and apply them to my own as long as they correspond to what I believe in.  So for example the idea of consistency in look and style (which translated in my case with simple headers styled in a specific way) and regularity (which translated into a clear editorial calendar) have helped me focus on the ultimate goal of my blog: to begin an online conversation on how we can improve our communities.  It also makes me quite excited to see where this blog will eventually go—and hope that I will not again be distracted by statistics.