Gary Bloomer | SHAKING THE TREE # 259
Many years ago, and when asked what he wanted to do for a living, a now deceased friend and former schoolmate of mine announced he wanted to become a piano tuner!
I’m sure his parents thought he was bonkers. But instead of talking out of it, they encouraged him.
He found his resonance.
Literally.
It seems that today more than ever, as content creators we’re drowning in data streams and subscriber counts, in video views and click through rates and a thousand other things things vying for our close and personal attention. As a result, we have become slaves of metrics and zombies of the algorithm.
While all of this has been happening to us we’ve forgotten something simple and powerful and intangible: we have forgotten how to listen for the quiet tick of inspiration; we have forgotten about the quiet, powerful whisper of our intuition.
It seems we’ve outsourced our intuition to a series of online dashboards, and offline woes. Will be be good enough? Will be be heard and seen and relevant? Will people like us enough to comment, to share, or perhaps, even to buy something?
But along the way we’ve risked losing our most potent creative instrument: the ability to sense resonance. This might sound like a woo-woo, airy-fairy notion and something that’s a bit wild and out there on the fringes. But it matters.
Resonance is not a metric. It’s a frequency.
Rather than simply attracting eyeballs, resonance is the subtle, almost imperceptible, intuitive hum that any given thought or idea gives off before a single word is written or before a single frame of video is shot.
It’s the feeling that something has weight, depth, presence, and value, and the potential to truly connect with another human being.
While analytics tell you what worked, resonance drills deeper by telling you what matters.
Think of it like this: you can use a sophisticated sound meter to measure the tone of a any given piano key. But what the sound meter won’t tell you is anything about the quality of the note, the purity of its tone, or how long it lingers in the air.
Resonance is the lingering tone.
It’s the part of human connection that echoes in the heart long after a video has ended or a page has been been read or has been closed.
So, how do you learn to listen for resonance?
The truth is that the tone is there—it’s always been there—it’s simply that you’ve lost the the ability to listen for it, to feel for it, and to recognize it.
To reconnect with resonance you need to cultivate your sixth sense by acknowledging the two great mufflers of observation: the chasing of trends and the fear of the quiet.
Chasing trends is like trying to listen to your friend asking a question while standing in the middle of a roaring heavy metal concert. Not easy. The sound of your friend’s voice is there, it’s simply overpowered by the other layers of sound.
You can see your friend’s lips moving, but you you can’t hear a word they’re saying.
In terms of the idea that truly resonates, time and again you’ll find that it’s seldom the one that’s jumping up and down, waving its arms and screaming for attention on the trending page; rather, it’s more likely to be the quiet, persistent thought in the back of your own mind that feels true to your experience.
The fear of the quiet is just as dangerous.
Resonance often appears in the spaces between all the things we do throughout the day. That’s why flashes of inspiration are more prone to come to you on a walk, or in the shower, or during the drive when you’re listening to the radio and aimlessly making your way through traffic.
The bad news is that if your every waking moment is filled with input—podcasts, social scrolls, Netflix binges, news, phone calls, emails—you don’t give yourself an inch of room in which to receive any other signals. In effect, you are a radio that’s never tuned to the right station.
The solution to listening for resonance, to retuning your radio, so to speak is that you must actively and intentionally create mental quiet. You must grant yourself permission to step away from your phone and your computer, you need to turn off the news and stop checking email and instead, pay attention to the stillness in your own mind.
Pay attention to the ideas that keep churning, surfacing, and returning, unbidden. The ones that feel a little bit dangerous, the ones that feel a little bit vulnerable, a little bit true. That nervous flutter in your gut isn’t always anxiety; sometimes, it’s the vibration of something resonant trying to get out.
The test is simple, yet profoundly difficult: does this idea feel like a secret you’ve been waiting to confess? Does it feel like a question you genuinely need answered? Does it scare you a little with its openness, with its truth, and with its honesty?
If the answer is yes to any or all of these questions, you’ve found it. That is the idea you must pursue.
The beautiful, counter-intuitive truth is that content born from this kind of resonance is what ultimately performs best. Not because it was designed to, but because it was designed to connect. It’s the sort of content that has a depth and a meaning that algorithms can’t measure but humans can’t ignore.
It’s the difference between a catchy jingle you’ve forgotten in an hour and a piece of music that gives you chills every time you hear it or that bring you to tears with its beauty and that becomes part of your life’s soundtrack.
The analytics will tell you the what. But they will never tell you the why. They will never capture the single, silent tear a reader sheds when your words name a feeling they’ve never been able to articulate. They will never measure the sense of solidarity a viewer feels when you voice a struggle they thought was theirs alone.
Your dashboard is a useful map. But your intuition is the compass.
Stop staring at the map so intently that you forget to feel the pull of true north.
Learn to look for and cultivate those moments of quiet. Listen for the hum of a half-heard melody. And have the courage to step up and step out to create from that place of deep, resonant truth.
The world doesn’t need more content. It needs more resonance.
As always, thanks for reading.
—Gary
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P.S. If you found this useful, share it with another creator who needs an ego check (in a nice way). Want more unfiltered takes on content creation? Join my newsletter. No fluff, just the stuff that works.
Next time on Shaking the Tree: Building a portfolio of varying selves
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Originally from the U.K., Gary Bloomer is a writer, branding advocate, marketing specialist, and an award-winning graphic designer.
His design work has been included in Creative Review (one of the UK’s largest design magazines). Since 2009, he has answered over 5,000 marketing and business questions in the Know-How Exchange of MarketingProfs.com, placing him among the top 3% of contributors. He lives in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.