When What’s Compelling You Is Not What You Want To Be Compelling You

So what happens when you’ve got multiple goals? How do you prioritize your time and energy? And when the goals require a continual stream of new ideas (blogging, making art, writing songs, for example), what do you do with the fact that ideas are flowing in one area, but maybe not so much in others, and not in the area you’re most interested in growing right now?

Welcome to my world.

Right now, the outlet I’m most excited about (and if you’ve been here before you know I’ve got a lot of them) if this blog, Living A Creative Life. Yet the posts I’m feeling most compelled to write are for my other blog, The Dating Queen, not LACL.

Since TDQ is a secondary outlet for me (I figure I’ll probably always have more to say about living my creative life than about dating, especially since, god-willing, I hope not to date forever), my publication goal is twice a week. For LACL, though, my goal is to publish as often as possible. Ideally every day, though that’s not always realistic.

So what do you do when what’s compelling you is not what you want to be compelling you?

You could follow the most compelling call in any given moment, which is historically what I’ve tended to do (and part of why I’m a Renaissance Woman now, in fact).

Granted, this tactic can be rather crazy-making, and is not always the most sensible choice from a financial standpoint. But it does have the advantage of capitalizing on the passionate fires that are burning right now. Momentum is nothing to sneeze at.

Or you could ignore the call of your currently dominant passion and just power through on the other stuff that isn’t compelling you as much. Which is pretty much what discipline is all about – doing something not because in this moment it’s what you want to do, but because it will help you reach a larger goal down the road. (Example: if a musician only played her instrument when she was utterly and completely excited about it, she’d probably never get very good at it.)

Of course the problem with this is that you potentially miss out on a bunch of forward momentum from hearkening to the voice that’s calling to you the loudest.

In this particular case, though, I found a middle solution:

Just blog about it.