WRITING
I have now written over 50 of these blog posts. I started in mid 2019 and initially just put something out every few weeks. However during COVID I made the decision to commit to weekly posts. Other than taking a break over Christmas and New Year I have managed to do that. As such I now have a ‘back catalogue’ of over 40,000 words on a surprisingly wide range of OOHC-related topics. While I didn’t necessarily connect it to the blog at the time, around then I also took the decision to journal daily (be it more along the lines of daily scribbles than the published diaries of Winston Churchill!). This is something that I now recommend to all of those who I mentor.
Some of the blog posts are on long-held beliefs and the need for OOHC to always be of a high quality is a regular theme. However, other posts will be sparked by OOHC research I am doing or reading, books, world events, or conversations with some of you and others. Writing and sending out these blog posts on a Monday morning has become an important part of my week – and as I’ve come to learn, my thinking process too.
I wasn’t a great essay-writer at school or ‘university’ (on leaving school I couldn’t actually get into a university and did my degree and subsequent social work training at the Paisley College of Technology – now the University of the West of Scotland). I used to get very jealous of my friend Suzie who (as I remember) could start and finish an assignment within an hour. She usually knew little or nothing about the topic and certainly rarely bothered to read anything. However, she did know enough about how to write an assignment and what the lecturers were looking for in order to get a pass. For her one hour of work she would usually get a B minus. For my days of work I usually got a B – not fair!
As a residential worker writing was primarily about the daily log to record (I suspect very poorly) the day’s events, ‘case’ reports, and developing materials for our young people in relation to my additional transitioning from care responsibilities. When I first moved into management, the focus of my writing was minutes of meetings as I independently chaired the bulk of the regular children in care reviews in our area and subsequently all of the inter-agency child protection conferences and reviews. With the next management role it was mainly leadership team and council committee reports, policy documents and strategic plans. On my move to New Zealand and my Department of Child, Youth and Family national OOHC leadership role, I must have done more than trying to tame the email beast (although that’s largely what I remember!) and since then as a researcher and consultant it was until recently mainly long, long, long reports that were likely considerably longer than they ever needed to be. And having been in some form of tertiary study through a fair bit of my 30s, 40s and 50s, I’ve written an academic assignment or two as well as a doctoral thesis, and more recently a few articles and book chapters.
However, despite all of the above, producing a finished piece of written work has never come that easily to me, and it can often be a tortuous process. However, that’s kind of the whole point. For me, the power of intentional writing, whether it be a blog post, LinkedIn article, daily journal entry, email, agenda, meeting note, to do list, proposal, plan or report, is that it helps me to both capture existing ideas (we lose so much if we never write it down), build new ideas, make new links between these ideas and what else is happening around us, systematically develop my thinking, and potentially raise important issues and ideas that might otherwise never see the light of day. Intentional writing also helps us to both reflect on what we have learnt, and to rise above our current ‘day-to-day busyness’ and be more future-focused. Oh and one more benefit, knowing just how busy most of you are, is that I reckon it makes you more effective and efficient.
Are you harnessing the power of intentional (or indeed creative) writing? And how might intentional (or creative) writing better help children and young people in care or those transitioning from care?
I’d love to hear your thoughts! You can email me at: iain@betteroutcomes.co.nz
Kia kaha (Stay Strong).
Iain