Fear as a Compass

I’ve written many times about the resistance. I thought I was watching out for it. It turns out even the most vigilant can get caught in its trap.

I’m in my fourth week of being back to work from maternity leave. Through this transition (including when we were figuring out what my job would be), I’ve had some very emotional reactions.

At first, I chalked it up to this being a big transition for me and an emotional time moving from spending every day with my daughter to seeing her much less. Then something else happened and I thought it must have been a hit to my status or need for recognition.

These reasons made sense when I shared them, but something about it felt weird. They didn’t feel like me.

So I struck up the courage to talk to a mentor at my organization. With some rambling through tears and a number of attempts at answering “what is it you need or is bothering you?”, I finally found the bottom buried under layers of resistance.

Within this decade of my career, I want to be leading a charity. The voice in my head kept saying “everyone knows what your ambitions are, they aren’t giving you the opportunities you need because they don’t think you’re capable.” I was afraid to speak my hopes out loud and have them be rejected by those who have worked closest with me over the last number of years. I let my ambitions get buried under layers of fear and resistance until I was reading into everything as a knock on my competence and potential.

Once I claimed my dream I got a tonne of positive reinforcement. Affirmation that this is a possible career for me and support in terms of learning opportunities to help me get there. This whole journey has been a lesson in the importance of advocating for yourself. It’s not something that comes easy to me. I prefer the more humble route. However, I’ll only get opportunities to step into the leadership positions I want and make the change I hope to see in the world by advocating for myself. I need to remember that for some of us the resistance/fear can drape itself in humble.

Somewhere along the way of ramping down my professional life for maternity leave, I forgot how to dance with the fear/resistance.  I lost some confidence and let the fear take the lead.

Now I’m feeling ready to grab fears’ hand, look it straight in the eye and dance.