Growing a Substack

Letting it Bloom

Photo by imsogabriel stock on Unsplash

Growth on Substack is usually talked about in numbers— how many views, restacks, subscribers. I discovered different kind of growth—transformational, as powerful as seed to sprout to flower. Until I started Listen First I hadn’t shared my writing with many people, let alone-the public. In the early 2000s I started a blog on Wordpress, but never made it public!

I have changed in the intervening 20 years but it is in the last 2 years on substack that my writing life has gone from seedlings to armfuls of surprise color. I started writing about listening and listening skills—a personal passion that connects people to one another with empathy —with a green Gingko leaf as my logo.

That was just the beginning of the story.

As I wrote about listening, I began to understand it is a huge multi-faceted topic. We don’t just listen to each other, we listen to the natural world and we listen to our own hearts to find our way. We listen to sound and silence. Listening is above all else about giving our attention and making connections. A community of readers shared the ways listening impacted their lives and this organic place, my substack, began to transform into a new place.

For over three months, I have worked with the gifted Nan Tepper to both rethink the substack and its organic transformation and to tap into her design expertise to reimagine the substack itself. Nan has a knack for of drawing out your thoughts, in your own words. She is a gifted Listener.

I am so excited to share the results with you, I think it is stunning.

• First a new name: A Time For Listening. Listening is still the heart of the work, but that word Time expands into a title that can hold all of it: listening, attention, caring, empathizing, sound, silence

• How to portray this blossoming transformation: One green gingko leaf turned into a kaleidoscope of colorful gingko leaves, swirling on their Logo button and breezily blowing off into the title Wordmark.

  Thank you Substack, thank you readers, thank you Nan.