a new fear

A crazy thing happened to me last week.

Most of you know I work part time, and I enjoy it. It's fun to work a bit, and my little guy loves his daycare/preschool, so I've been liking our routine -- even if I am a bit tired or the blog is a bit neglected.

I have this friend from my old ward in Seattle who is wildly ridiculously successful. He had a company he sold for like a billion dollars (OK I have no idea how much, but "having a company" and "selling it" are both successful things), and now he has a new company that is also thriving like crazy. He is a marketing/PR person and his specialty is social media. He leverages Twitter, Facebook, etc., for his clients.

I have a couple other friends who work in his industry, and we've talked about what they do before, and they proceed to use language that is hard for me to follow. "Creative" is a department in a company. "Traffic" has lots of connotations when it refers to the Web and more. Etc. I get lost.

I have done a couple "professional" things with this friend, helped him out on occasion when things were interesting. I never got paid, it was just for fun really. Most of it was Church-related.

So. Imagine my surprise when I got an email from him this last week, saying his firm was landing a new client -- an LDS client -- and he was wondering if he could talk me into meeting with his HR director about a full-time gig. He needed me slash I'd be the perfect person for the job slash the job was mine if I wanted it! Or something like that.

Whooooooa baby. I contemplated it for awhile. On the one hand, I love my current company and feel very secure and happy there. They like me enough to let me do part-time things with no professional pressure. This would be much different -- I imagine I'd work a lot, more than just 40 hours, and maybe travel. I'd have to bust my butt to make it.

Another thing was the job description. At my current company, yes, I'm in a technical field which I'm not trained in (architecture, engineering, and construction), but my job is a lot of technical writing and finding statistics and keeping a database maintained -- all things I knew I could handle from Day 1. This new job, ha!, I don't even KNOW what it includes. I don't think I'd be able to keep up or figure it out or do it well. Maybe for the first time in my life, I realized I was being offered a chance to do something and I wasn't sure I could succeed.

This made me think about myself a little bit. I like to succeed, I like to win. I've always had an idea in my mind of what I could do, what I couldn't do, and I've stuck with it. I kind of like the easy road, because it means instant success. Who doesn't?

I remember worrying about grades in high school and going over my grade in my senior English class and realizing I was headed for a B. That was unacceptable to me, so after class one day I went to my teacher and asked him what I could do to get an A. I didn't know what it meant at a time, but he basically said he graded on a curve, and if anyone in the class was getting an A, it was me. And that was it -- I didn't have to fight for my A. The teacher said I was getting one, so I was happy and left it at that. Even though I technically didn't have an A.

I was reading the BYU Magazine the other month and there was an article about Jimmer Fredette, the incredible basketball player who made a million points per game and won awards all over the country for being awesome. He talked about when he was a kid and he was just learning how to play and getting good at it. He'd go play at the gym at Church at night with his friends. For one drill, he'd dribble the ball down the hallway (in the dark) and his friends/teammates would jump out of classrooms and scare him, and he'd have to keep dribbling and keep going. In the dark.

He and his team came up with this idea because it would make him better. It was something that was scary and hard but he knew if he persevered he'd would ultimately improve.

That really hit a chord with me -- because I don't like scary. I don't like pressure. I like to do things I already know how to do, when I know I can do it well. I like getting the A without actually having to get the A.

I know part of this is silly, I mean some things I have no idea how to do but I do them anyway. Take being a mom for example. No instruction course there! But something in my brain said it would be OK, I was sharp enough to figure it out, and I went ahead and did it. Potty training is kind of the same thing. I know it'll be awful, downright awful, but yeah, it'll work. I'm sure I can handle it (we'll see).

Then there are things I do because I know I can do them, but I fail. Sure I'd like to lose 50 pounds (haha!), but I haven't. Why not? Plenty of reasons. All of which are dumb yet valid in my mind. I know I can eliminate those reasons and actually do it, if I tried harder. So I know I can succeed, even though I haven't. (And believe me, if there was an easier road, I would take it.)

So we're back to the job. I see his job, and I think in my head, I have no idea how to do this. I would fail. Really. I can conceive of a realistic situation where I could pretend I knew what I was doing and other people would buy it!

I suppose it's a moot point, because my life isn't set up in a way now that going back to work would work. I had to pass, grudgingly, although my friend did say if I ever want to come back to work full time I need to call him. Shane has said he'd love to quit his job and stay home if I made enough money, but I've asked him if he'd take Wesley to Kindermusik or on walks around Greenlake and would he do all the grocery shopping and cleaning, and he kinda shirks and knows he wouldn't. I'm better suited to be the mom at home.

So that leaves me sitting here, contemplating my life, and realizing that if something has an easy road and a hard road I usually choose the easy road. And what does that say about me? It's been kind of a hard thing to face, because I want to think I'm brave and confident and capable, but maybe I'm just too afraid of legitimate failure.