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If there’s one thing my decades of living has taught me, it’s always to be open to inspiration because it will strike in the weirdest of places!!

Take yesterday.  After vanquishing the Freight Train of Blogging Frustration, it was time for me to take my kids to beginners karate.  Now, we’ve been attending for many months; it’s a superb program!  Phenomenal senseis, excellent class instruction, lots of opportunities for growth and the like…it’s truly a parent’s dream.  And being the hip mom that I am, I choose to walk the walk I talk to my kids…and I take karate with them!  

In the past didn’t bother me to be the only mom in a class of single-digit children.  After all, I had my older kids there too!  But now I’ve  advanced to the point where I’m beyond beginners….so I’ll simply sit out during beginners class and just bring my blog notebook with me.  After all, it’s a great opportunity for letting my mind roam freely and seeing what MacGyverisms might emerge.

Yesterday was truly a miracle of creative leaping for me!  It was a perfect lesson of how you can apply utterly foreign activities like karate (or sewing or rock climbing or teaching children or training wolves or … you get the idea) to blogging…and how you can help crystallize your own persona online.

Let me offer a bit of background first.  There are two senseis (karate teachers) for beginners - one of them (we’ll call him Sensei Smile) could compel a grin out of the Sphinx, while the other (Sensei Motivation) could inspire Spongebob SquarePants to take on Cloverfield.  Sensei Smile was teaching the kids in the blue room, while Sensei Motivation was instructing in the red room.  I was sitting at the ring in between and started mulling over the stark differences between the two:

• One got results by humor and laughter
• The other got results by motivation and pride

Both were equally effective in getting the kids to learn.  I started listening to the various snippets of conversations:

"Okay now we’re going to do something really fun!  We’re going to be butterflies!  Who can flap their knees the best?  (that was during the butterfly stretches done for warmups."

"LOOK SHARP!  How you appear here in the class is how you’ll react in the outside world!"

"We’ve got a great thing planned!  The Mega Tunnel of Doom!"

"You want to be able to defeat the Dark Ninjas lurking in the corners, right?"

etc.etc.etc.

And as I was watching, it was as though I totally zoned out of the here and now and was analyzing it from afar.  These two senseis took into account what would motivate their particular students to deliver their best performance possible.  They used their own signature catch phrases, taught with their own particular dynamic style, and just all around made attendence there extremely enjoyable for the participants.

How could I apply that to my teaching?

What is it I do that’s unique?  Definitive?  Something that people would say, hey, that’s written by Owlbert and Barbara Ling?

Why, it’s my humor of course…and my own unique MacGyveristic tendency of taking common technical ideas and reworking them so anyone, even their Aunt Bertha, could understand.

That’s been my trademark now ever since I started teaching back in the late 1980s.  But did my blog showcase that ability?  Heck NO!

There was NOTHING that made people think…hmmmm, there’s something different about this site, let me hang around and explore more.

So I started writing…feverishly.  My pen flew across the pages as I took common ideas and started creating sections that were flavored with my own style.  My blog is still a how-to blog…but you can now tell it’s a how-to blog that teaches visitors unconventional ways of attaining their own personal blogging goals.

Ways of which MacGyver would approve!  Things like, Preventing the Mega Tunnel of Doom from devouring your blog visitors!  And, Embracing the freight train of blogging frustration!

This, of course, is a Good Thing.   And yesterday, instead of hanging around for the next class (Adult Self Defense), I zoomed home and started bringing my conception to life.  What you’re reading is the results.

And it shall only get better and better.

* * * * * * * *

Let’s now turn the topic back to YOU.  I wrote how beginners karate enabled me to view my blogging from a unique perspective.  What about you?  What are your hobbies or passions…and can you apply them to your own blog persona? 

• Do you thrill to extreme adventuring?
• Do you instead have concrete opinions on politics that make mere mortals quail?
• Perhaps you eat, breathe and sleep the excitement of college hoops?

No matter what your passion is, can you transfer its

• Motivation
• Excitement
• Pleasure

to your own personal blog…and start to flavor that blog with something no one else can reproduce….you?

It’s something on  which to think.

ThankYouVeryMuch!

Owlbert

Related posts:

1. Pushups of Profoundly Painful Profit!
2. What being kicked through the air taught me about blogging - When your blog is attacked
3. How like, to like totally damn, like, your blog readership to, like, hell
4. Reclaiming YOU at the end of your rope - Forget about SuperParent or SuperBlogger or …
5. Getting slapped upside the headed courtesy of your pitifully dull blog writing voice

(By the way, if you have any questions about the topics in this posting "What beginners karate taught me about blogging", do comment below - I'll try to clarify any issues).

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