Until recently I had been in a bit of a downward spiral. Some of the stuff I had been working on didn’t come to fruition. Other projects wrapped up without any imminent next steps. Strategic networking opportunities felt few and far between.
I started actively searching job boards instead of only passively checking them when something interesting hit my inbox because I could feel myself being sucked into a whirlpool of misery, excuses, and depression. It seemed an easy way out would be securing full-time employment somewhere. It would give me a defined purpose. It would give me a place to go every day. It would give me an identity. “My name is Jenn, and I am an [insert job title here]. I am worth [insert salary] to someone.”
The bad thing about being slow with no particularly promising leads is that you have a lot of uninterrupted time alone. I spent too much of that time fearing the decision I made to wholly take my career into my own hands. That fear led to panic and anxiety which meant the voices in my head weren’t delivering the most inspiring messages:
“WTF did you do?”
“You dummy, you just set your career back at least a year. Maybe more.”
“Who is going to hire you now?”
“You’re getting weird and forgetting how to interact with people. Even if you get an interview you’re going to mess it up.”
There were hours when that narrative got the best of me. And when I looked at myself objectively and unforgivingly I realized if I didn’t get a handle on my narrative I was going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fortunately, I’ve always believed in our ability to influence our narratives. (Not create wholesale change, but that’s another post for another day.)
Looking for a way out I started reading. A lot. Because, seriously, how many more reruns of the Big Bang Theory could I watch? Plus, reading was safe. Since I felt like a failure I was embarrassed to reach out to the people I view as mentors. I know they would have been happy to talk me through it, but I wasn’t in a place to be totally honest with them about what I was experiencing. I need support from someone – or something – I couldn’t let down. Letting myself down was bad enough.
That’s when I found Reinvent Yourself by James Altucher. And I only “found it” because it was free with one of my Amazon memberships so there was no risk if it sucked and I stopped reading after five pages. I ended up reading it in two nights and felt a little better about my professional identity – or lack thereof – so I decided to read Choose Yourself (also by Altucher) to see if it would also benefit me in some way.
Reading Choose Yourself, and not knowing when I would have my next client-based project, led me to use Shopify to test a product idea. Within a week of setting up the website I had my first order. I’ve since received a few more orders. None of this is going to pay my rent, but that wasn’t my goal. I needed to feel like I was taking action. I needed to feel like I wasn’t helpless. I needed some little wins to help change the downward trajectory of my narrative. And I needed to build some upward momentum because gravity is a freaking powerful force.
After a few weeks of consciously working on shifting my narrative by creating opportunities to score some little wins, I’ve generated a tiny bit of momentum. But I’m really scared that if I don’t work at it I’m going to lose it. That fear is compounded because I know just how difficult it is to start moving again once I’m in a state of inertia.
So driven by some combination of fear and fearlessness, I’ve decided June is going to be a month of little wins…