Go Ahead and Sign It, Would Ya, Dear?

Photo by Pixabay

If you’re like me, you can get overwhelmed with all the recommendations that come your way or land in the chatter of the communities of which you are a part. Podcasts, books, YouTube videos, courses, workshops, songs, memes, TikToks, Medium articles (cough) — there’s some very magical stuff in there….but just because the message landed for someone else doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s meant for me too. Someone recently shared with me a podcast episode — very sweet! Before listening to it though, I asked what takeaways had been especially impactful for her so that I could listen for it and/or what specifically in the podcast had made her think of me. I wondered why it mattered enough to me that I would even ask her, and what came to mind was the analogy of a greeting card. All of these great things out there — these packaged gems — are like aisles of greeting cards. A “card” caught someone’s eye and they “bought” it and gifted it to me in the form of a recommendation. Now I’m staring at a greeting card with a sweet — but hardly personal — message. If I’m wanting to spend my time consciously, I may not know whether to invest my time in listening to yet another podcast or not.

I’ve had this show up the other way too. In a group chat when a friend shares a link to an article, prefacing it with a few sentences on how it shifted her perspective on something or what it added to her…