After leaving IBM in May, I started a blog — mainly to tell my family and friends about my new life.
I enthusiastically wrote my first piece “Education for Grown Ups: Learning Micro-fields with An Intellectual Guide”, showed it to my writer friends, and asked for their reactions.
“Your writing sounds like corporate IBM speaking!” “Where is Lilian in the piece?” I was shocked and carefully pointed out all the I’s. But no one seemed impressed. Never having taken a writing class I was quite puzzled by the phrase that kept coming up “You need to find your voice.” What could this possibly mean?
I decided to try an experimental writing and coaching workshop — the “Inner Child Writing Camp” being developed by life coach Betty Ming Liu, a former journalist who teaches writing and journalism at the New School and NYU in New York city. In addition to me, two women (one in Germany and one in New York) signed up. We met on Zoom over five Thursdays, each class lasting 3 hours.
I emerged from this workshop more open to looking within my emotions and to examining them with my life experiences. Writing has become more intuitive and less ponderous, closer to speaking, and a lot more fun.
This workshop moved through foundational writing skills. We used photographs of ourselves to emotionally go back to different times in our lives. We did exercises to explore who we were in the pictures. And we wrote short pieces about events in our child’s lives — starting with writing a letter from our grown up self to our baby self.
Then something unexpected happened. Looking at photographs and writing about events that happened to me as a child, I started to relive my child self, feelings emotions and experiencing meaningful events and relationships from that time.
Our teacher/coach asked questions. I looked within my emotions and thoughts and examined them with my adult life experiences.* I learned to speak and write with more clarity of thought and feeling. I have more courage. I began to find my voice.
I am impressed with the power of this writing and coaching workshop and welcome your comments on your experience taking writing classes and workshops. I also welcome your take on how writing can change a person’s self awareness and perspective.
*This writing and coaching workshop focused on moving forward. At times it was therapeutic and was always energizing. It helped me gain new perspectives on what happened in the past and grow — others had a similar experience.
Lilian Wu 
That’s quite a coincidence! I have been trying various things in my writings and this is kind of the technique I got into with Tales from an American Childhood. It might be worth thinking about why that seems to work so well. I look forward to reading more.
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Lilian~thank you for sending this . I started writing a book for myself several
Months ago … then found myself blocked . I feel this is very interesting and I have to ask myself ?? Why ? Why have we met ?
Thank you again for opening this up for me 💕
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I wonder if you may enjoy joining a writing group — in person or on-line. At first I thought a virtual course would be just so so. But something interesting happened when I took this video conference class. Usually in a class “I” am invisible to myself. But in this group video class I saw
myself along with the others. It helped me get out of myself and express myself.
I hope you continue to write your book.
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Lilian, I’m just catching up to your status as “IBM Emeritus”. I’m glad to see that you’re blogging on an open platform. I’ve added your blog to my list on Feedly, so I can keep better track of you.
I’ve been blogging at http://daviding.com/blog/ since 2005. It took me a while to figure out what people wanted to read. Originally, I combined my professional and personal lives, and used a WordPress plug-in for e-mail subscribers. A sister-in-law eventually told me that she only wanted to read about family and travels, so in late 2006, I got agreement from my cofounders at http://coevolving.com/blogs/ (Doug McDavid and Martin Gladwell) to repurpose that web site alone for all of my professional content.
By late 2009, I found that my photoblog at daviding.com was getting a full year behind in camera post-processing backlog. In May 2010, I started experimenting with using my smartphone, posting directly to http://daviding.tumblr.com . By April 2011, I figured out that if I posted my photos to Flickr, I could easily repost them on to Tumblr, which could then be syndicated to Twitter and Facebook. In October 2011, I switched daviding.com to be a monthly recap of photos accumulated on Flickr and Tumblr.
In July 2017, I discovered the Mailchimp RSS-to-email feature at https://mailchimp.com/features/rss-to-email/ , and now have an easy procedure for subscribers who don’t use RSS readers. Once per month on daviding.com (and even less frequently on a separate coevolving.com subscription list) seems to be enough to keep people in touch.
My four sons have all written on open blog platforms, particularly in the years when they were studying in China, away from home. Son #4 graduated earlier this year, and just started his full-time job. He’s been active on other social media, and we’ll see if he continues his prior history at http://ryaning.com/blog/ .
I’m looking forward to reading more from you in the future. With online social media, blogging seems to be a good 21st century alternative for keeping in touch.
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David, thank you for your thoughtful comments. Let’s have a call to catchup and discuss our ideas on blogs and education for grownups like us!
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