By Irene Conlan -

Google and I must be in some kind of contemporary dance. For the last two or three months this blog has been traveling around Google landing on pages seemingly at random. I’ve been trying to figure it out and, along the way, found some self improvement lessons – quite a surprise. I never know where the lessons are going to come from and I didn’t expect one from Google.  Let me explain.

For a long time I was on the first page of Google and the traffic to my site was steadily increasing. Then sometime in September the traffic suddenly diminished. I wasn’t doing anything different so I started posting more articles. I came back to page one. Again in October the blog disappeared.  I went through Google page by page searching the key words “self improvement” and finally found The Self Improvement Blog on page 86. Holy Cow, what happened? I was using a lot of Ezine articles then so I started writing original articles as often as I could. (I love Ezine – some of thearticles are fantastic).  The blog returned to page one within two weeks. This happened again in November when I used several articles on 3 – 4 consecutive days.   On Tuesday of this week I used an Ezine article because the schedule went bonkers and I didn’t have time to write. Well, guess what? Today I’m on page three of Google and my traffic is down.

So I did my “What am I supposed to learn from this?” exercise. It’s very simple. I try to get quiet – into a meditative state if possible (sometimes my mind is too busy to shut up) -  and ask the question, “What’s the lesson here?”

I didn’t like the answer but what I was ‘“Be your authentic self.”

Fine. How do I do that?  Well, how do I do that for the blog?

Write your own stuff – every day – at least one original article.

Hey, give me a break now and then.

Have others write original stuff for you.

Oh.

“Be your authentic, be original, be consistent”.  Those are the lessons that came from this.

Talking about being your original self and using articles that have been made available to me by experts and non-experts through an online article service doesn’t seem non-authentic to me. Actually I had never given it any thought. I’m not an expert in every facet of self improvement – no one is – but I do “get it.”  If I’m talking about  others being authentic, then this blog has to be authentic – new, different, unlike every other blog on the Internet.

And, since one of the big self improvement issues is being your authentic self we need to address it in an authentic way.  We need to work on asking and answering the questions:

• Who are you?
• What about you is different from anyone else you know?
• What about you is special, unique? (Don’t give me that “I’m not special” stuff – I don’t buy it).
• What do you love?
• What makes you happy?
• If you didn’t think you had to be like someone you know, or like someone told you to be, or like some movie or TV star – how would you show up in the world?
• What would happen if you stopped conforming and became the free spirit that you are?
• Is it safe to be different?
• And to paraphrase Willie Wonka, “So many questions, so little time.”

And so today I commit to posting all new articles. Not necessarily all by me, but all original (Would YOU like to write an article for the Self Improvement Blog? You are invited to do so).

In 2010 let’s adventure together in the pursuit of the authentic self. Sounds like fun to me.

Thanks, Google. I know you didn’t plan the lesson but lessons come from all kinds of situations, don’t they?