Some of you are already very meaningfully active online. Maybe you’ve already been chatting to strangers and building communities online for years. Maybe you’re the owner of a website on which you post personal or business content. Maybe you have a busy Instagram page, a flourishing YouTube channel, or an exciting Twitter community.

And then many mostly go online to consume content e.g. to read the media or their favourite blogs, to listen to podcasts, or to talk to their in-real-life friends or colleagues over Slack or Facebook Messenger. That was me until very recently.

Overall, I have had very little experience of being online in my life. I created my first email address when I was 14. Around that time, I started hearing friends at school talking about MySpace and chat rooms but I didn’t get the sense that any interesting was happening there. I got my first (dumb)phone when I was 17 or 18, at a time where more than 90% of my peers had phones already. I started using Facebook when I was 21, a few years after it was created, and became quite active on it through the second half of my university years. As my interest in Facebook declined after I left university and started working, I signed up to LinkedIn to help with my career. But my profile on LinkedIn has always been rather barren, and I can probably count the number of times I posted something on there using my two hands. No need for my (or anyone’s) toes.

95% of my friends had similar online experiences to mine so I didn’t really feel like I was missing out on anything important. But more recently, I started getting glimpses of an online world that seemed full of opportunities. Stepping out of my comfort zone as a passive user of the internet to being more meaningfully active online was much more easier said than done - and definitely worth my time.

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I got more and more curious about the online world

Instead of seeing the online world as a world where creative people (i.e. not me) posted their content for both creative people and less creative people (like me) to consume, I slowly started getting the sense that maybe I had content worth creating, and that there was space for someone like me to participate.

Three things played a particularly important role in shaping this internal shift.

The first I want to mention is messaging apps. A few years ago, I met friends who were using those apps in a very different way than I was used to. Instead of ‘just’ using the apps to exchange friendly messages, we were using them as a way of holding asynchronous, high-quality and empathetic debates on complex topics, often triggered by things that popped up in the media. Taking part in those conversations encouraged me to take the time to think properly about these topics, to articulate better what my own thoughts on them were, to share those thoughts in public (or in ‘semi-public’ i.e. within the group chats), and to accept being challenged either immediately or a few days afterwards once my friends had had a chance to think about the topic some more.

This helped me experience first-hand just how much powerful virtual asynchronous open-minded conversations could be in shaping my beliefs and creating a sense of belonging. I also got better at articulating my thoughts in writing, both concisely and empathetically.

The second thing I want to mention is that my partner - who had been tinkering a lot more with blogs and chat rooms and market places ever since he was a teenager - started getting even more involved in online communities than he had been before. Through Twitter, he was meeting a bunch of wonderful people from all horizons, and had built a meaningful community of friends as well as met a whole group people who were excitedly asking him to build a product that they wanted to pay real money for.

Watching him explore this world made me realise how much being online meaningfully could open up opportunities to build new relationships, join communities and even sometimes do business online in a way that didn’t feel simply transactional e.g. ‘selling things on amazon or ebay’.

At the same time, I was working full-time for a FTSE100 company in the UK. I took on really interesting and senior roles e.g. designing an ambitious strategy from scratch for the business, creating a whole new Human Resources team where there had been none before etc. I was learning so so much from doing this work. I had built really useful skills in the strategy and transformation space that I was constantly using to shape and drive cool projects forward. I was also teaching others in the business how to do this kind of work through mentoring and coaching conversations. I was also becoming increasingly conscious of how valuable those skills were outside of the business I was in and outside of ‘normal’ employment. I could do freelancing, mentoring or even go back into consulting for a while. I could help other big companies, or smaller ones. I could help individuals. Asynchronously or not. Pro-bono or not.

But work was all-consuming. I cared so much about the work that I was doing that all my energy went into it and I had very little left to dedicate to things I cared about outside of work, and to think about ‘being’ or ‘working’ differently. I was learning fast, at the cost of what felt like living less.

So I decided to go on a sabbatical (you can read more about this here if you’re interested). I had no clear plan for what I wanted to do but two things were certain: I wanted to stop working to create space for myself to experience more of the world outside of work; and I wanted to see if I would end up being interested in creating something from of my work (and life) experiences that both I and others would find useful and meaningful. Whatever that was.

I also knew that I would need to be more active online to find those ‘others’ in the world, and I found that prospect really exciting.

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From posting nothing to posting something

At the beginning of February 2022, my partner and I flew to Mexico for a few months to kick-off a year of nomadic travels. From the moment I stepped foot in Mexico City, some of the thinking that had been taking place both consciously and unconsciously in the back of my mind started coming together.

I knew there was a lovely community of creative and supportive people on Twitter that I was interested in joining. Writers, video-makers, artists - you name it. But I didn’t feel like I could introduce myself to this community just yet. Call it imposter syndrome if you like, but I didn’t think I would be able to contribute meaningfully to the conversations that were taking place just yet.

So I started where I felt most comfortable starting. On my own. By getting things out of my brain and onto (virtual) paper. I was writing about things that I was interested in, and things that friends and family might be interested in reading about, now that it was less easy to chat. I wrote posts about Mexico (posts about hiking trips and visits to cool archeological sites), posts about things I had been asked to share multiple times by friends and colleagues in the past (recipes, places to visit in France), and posts about things that were on my mind. The important thing was: I was proving to myself that I could generate content at the pace of one post every three days, and I was teaching myself to write better in the process.

For the first six weeks, everything I was writing stayed on the hard drive of my iPad. Posts sometimes made their way out and into my family and friends’ inboxes. But lnowing that only a carefully curated list of people would have access to any of my content took off any pressure of producing something good entirely, and it helped me stay prolific.

Once I had written a dozen posts, I started feeling like my system wasn’t working for me anymore: sending the various posts to people individually was a bit of a hassle, and I was worried that I was putting pressure on people to read me.

That’s when I got a strong impulse to create my own website, a website that I could upload my writing onto and that people could go visit if they were interested. I also liked that the extra step of uploading a post on the website for all to see was a form of encouragement for me to up the quality of my writing even more, to make sure it was good enough for anyone to read.

So I created my website; and got really excited as soon it started taking form.

It looked so good. I loved the pretty format that I had picked for the website, and I loved seeing all of the posts next to one another. And interestingly, every time I looked at my website, I was getting a weird sensation that I was looking at a reflection of myself in a way that I had never seen before. All those (rather random and imperfect) pieces of writing were so obviously mine, and seeing them next to one another felt like looking at myself.

Once the website was up and running, I started feeling much more comfortable at the idea of showing up further in the online world. After all, I had a body of ‘work’ to point to, I was much more aware of the kind of content that I seemed to want to write about and I felt much more confident that there was indeed content that I was comfortable putting out there. It’s like I had suddenly realised that I did have ideas and experiences to share with people that weren’t about work.

So I discarded the old Twitter account I had been using to lurk around and understand the knots and bolts of the platform and I created a new account.

I paused, trying to figure out what my first post could be. I thought of a few posts - and discarded them because I didn’t think they were good enough. I wanted my first post to be good, or at least not dramatically bad. After a few days, I got tired of my own censorship and decided to post something. Anything. Just to get started. So I posted about the inadequacy that I was feeling in taking my first step into being visibly active online. I also posted that I had decided to lower any expectations I had on my tweeting for at least my first 100 posts.

And I got the warmest welcome I could have hoped for.

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Where I am heading next

This was a week ago. I haven’t posted much on my this website since then because I was playing around with different ways of engaging on Twitter.

The writing skills required to be a meaningful follower and poster on Twitter are very different from the skills I developed writing for my website, of course. Each platform you use has its own codes and ways of working. But the mindset I’m approaching posting on both Twitter and my website with is the same: post about the things you are interested in and want to create connections with other people over, whatever those things are. Take part in conversations on Twitter. Start new conversations. Write a short post for your website. Or a long-form article. Anything. The important things is that you put content out there and see who comes knocking on your door in response. Worse case scenario: no one is interested that time around. Best case scenario: other people also find those things interesting, funny or nerdy… and you can connect over this.

The other thing I have noticed is that - similarly to my website - I like looking at my own Twitter timeline. I don’t mean this in an self-aggrandising manner; my timeline is tiny for the moment and it does not always sound funny or smart. Still, I like it. It’s got a fun and vulnerable first post, a nerd-post about flamingos, a serious post about sabbaticals, and my Twitter bio (at the top) also mentions that I’m interested in business strategy and human relationships in general.

Somehow, my timeline and website both feel more complete than the usual views I get of myself e.g. a glance in the mirror on a bad skin day, a piece of good writing I’ve produced, a conversation that went badly and that I’ve been ruminating on. In some way, both my timeline and my website reflect everything I have posted about back at me at the same time which allows me to identify with the ‘whole experience of me’ rather than just the ‘experience of me at a specific point in time’.

I am starting to see how powerful the journey I have just embarked myself on can be. Using those platforms in a meaningful way is inviting me to create a real and unapologetic reflection of my self online, and to get to know myself better in the process. And - weirdly - I like what I’m seeing, which is giving me confidence to keep going.

So I’ll keep writing, posting, and engaging. I have no idea where this online journey is going to take me but I am really curious to see what comes next!