I’m a fairly private person, and if you already know me then you won’t have seen me share too much on social media (beyond holiday photos). I’m an introvert, and I’m perfectly fine with that. Why on earth then, am I embarking on a venture to write and publish a blog, along the way sharing things about my life? Really good question.
I’ve been procrastinating about writing this for several weeks. I left my desk twenty minutes ago, in the middle of the morning because I just ‘had to’ straighten my hair. Two days ago I looked through hundreds of old photos just to avoid committing words to laptop. I’ve got pages and pages of notes about what I want to say, I’ve been writing them for about a year. Yet, there is a discomfort for me in putting it out there. It feels awkward and I worry what people will think. Thankfully, putting this up on the site and pressing the button to publish is not in my area of responsibility – if it was then I would likely go the shop and buy chocolate, drive around for a bit, and then clean the house instead.
In reality, I do know why I’m putting it out there though, I’ve known all along. Rachel and I are quite different in many ways, but in this aspect we are the same. We want to help people, we hate seeing them stuck, we know for sure that we can use our skills and experience to help people out.
We’ve managed and coached hundreds of people over the years, and we absolutely love seeing them grow, overcoming whatever their challenges and setbacks were, and we feel such pride from the small or large parts we have had in building their confidence to get stuff done and move on to the next thing, however big or small that may be.
We also continually work on this for ourselves – identifying new goals, strategising how to work on them, and building our own confidence to move beyond where we are, to feel like we are succeeding. I’m not saying this is about continual job promotion – it can be anything. We build strategies for anything in life that we want to conquer.
We have been stuck, and we have had setbacks. We’ve helped each other, we’ve leaned on our network. We’ve had mentors, been mentors, paid for the leadership coaching, had the counselling, listened to thousands of hours of podcasts, completed courses and personality tests, and read countless books on leadership and personal development.
So, we knew we wanted to help people but we had no idea what form that might take. We were a bit stumped, but we didn’t let it stop us. Suddenly, the years of corporate life kicked in – we needed some data-driven decision making.
We started to survey our friends and family about their work and life experiences, the challenges they’d had, and what had them stuck in ‘Lifes Treacle’ at that point in time (the name actually came much later and is probably a blog in itself). This turned into a survey which 130 people kindly filled in for us. The results gave us insights, but the responses to one question in particular really surprised us.
“Having confidence and believing in myself”
When asked to select the Top 3 of a set of multiple choice answers that they felt applied to them for “What have been your biggest career challenges to date?” – 50% of people selected “Having confidence and believing in myself”. This was the highest answer. I filled out the survey and I selected it too, and a lot of people would look at my CV and probably think I’d done ok for myself so far.
Confidence then! It became the theme around all of our planning. We can definitely help people with that, we’ve been doing it for years. We just needed to work out how to do it differently, how to do something in addition to the day jobs, how to help people who don’t work for us, or even know us…. and here we are starting a blog as the first step.
I really hope you like our site, I hope you resonate with some of what we write about, and I hope it challenges you and motivates you to get out of the treacle that’s holding you back.
Is there something new that you’ve been wanting to do for a while, but you haven’t? What are the stories you’re telling yourself about it? Do you know if they are actually true? If you think it’s going to help solve a problem and make your life even a tiny bit better then challenge yourself and build a plan to get it done. Let me know in the comments what you’re up to. Me, I know I can definitely help more people by writing this than I can by straightening my hair again. Time to send it off and think about what to write next!
This is looking good
Great post!