Celebrating One Year
Your favorite posts, five emerging themes, plus what's next for SGNR -- spoiler alert: your input needed!
It’s been one year since I relaunched Some Guy Named Rae—and what a year it’s been!
I first published SGNR in December 2009 and wrote sporadically until 2016. Then life happened and I stopped posting, seemingly for good.
But with encouragement from many of you, in June 2024 I moved SGNR to Substack and started writing again.
And here we are—52 weeks, 55 posts, 211 subscribers, and 17,000 views later. 🤯
💡Reader Survey: What do you like about SGNR? What new types of content would you like to see? Please take this quick survey to help shape the future of my blog! 🙏
Five Themes Emerged
One of the main reasons I started writing again was to share insights gleaned from one-on-one mentoring conversations with a broader audience. I often write about whatever’s top-of-mind in the moment—reflections from these conversations, things I’ve read, or my own experiences that week.
Despite this go-with-the-flow approach, five clear themes emerged in my posts over the past year:
Leadership Mindset
Leadership Practices
People Leadership
Career Growth
Culture & Inclusion
Each of these categories contains at least one of the Top 10 posts from the past year, although 70% of your favorite articles fell into just two categories: Leadership Mindset and Career Growth.
Mindset: The Foundation
Leadership Mindset focuses on fundamental approaches to authentic, inclusive, and effective leadership. Three of the Top 10 articles were about leadership mindset:
Practices: The Tactical Toolkit
Leadership Practices provides specific strategies, techniques, and tactical skills for leaders. One article about leadership practices was in the Top 10:
People: Building & Leading Teams
People Leadership provides insights for building, managing, and developing teams and individuals. The Top 10 included one article about people leadership:
Growth: Navigating Your Career Journey
Career Growth covers topics related to navigating career transitions and your professional journey. Perhaps not surprisingly, this is a hot topic! Four of the Top 10 articles are about career transitions and growth:
Culture: Creating Inclusive Environments
Culture focuses on creating inclusive environments and organizational culture. Although only one of the Top 10 articles fell into this category, it was the top viewed article of the year—by a huge margin—and is one of my own personal favs:
Looking Ahead—Your Input Needed
I’m grateful for the many conversations I’ve had with you all—my friends, colleagues, mentees, and SGNR readers—that have inspired posts over the past year. Thank you!
As I look to the future, I'll continue to share these insights but am also wondering:
What leadership topics are you most interested in reading about?
What additional content or content types can I add that you would find valuable? For example, I’ve been playing with creating downloadable assets to go along with posts, like this PDF guide* for What’s the Problem?
Is there exclusive content you’d be interested in paying for?
How can I best help you forge your own authentic leadership style and career path?
I’d love your thoughts on these questions! Please take a few minutes to complete a short Reader Survey and help shape the future of this blog.
I appreciate your feedback—and you!
*The PDF has been shared with all subscribers whose email is associated with a Google account. If you can’t access it, please let me know so I can add you.