Reflections on 2 Months of a Day Job
Two months ago I started a new office job for the first time in seven years. This wasn’t something I planned. A job advert popped up and I thought “that sounds fun”. The deadline was the next day and I rushed in an application at midnight because at least I could be in the running while I thought about whether it was something I wanted to do. Between then and the date of my interview I vacillated back on and forth about whether I could go through with it, if it came to it.
Texting a friend my pros and cons she gently asked “are you actually in a position where the only option is to take this job?” And I was. I had just moved home, I had removed all my offerings from sale, I didn’t have a plan for what I was going to do next. I needed this job.
So now you find me two months into a maternity cover contract as Head of Marketing at an independent theatre. I work part time, so my week is bookended by two days working on my business. I am enjoying it. I like being in the office, the people are friendly, it’s fun to walk around the bowels of a theatre to get from one place to another. I enjoy the work because it’s all the things I like most – finding solutions to problems, generating ideas, creating plans. There are also other things I didn’t expect…
Confidence
I knew my confidence was pretty low before I moved back home. I didn’t think I was employable, that I had any skills that would be good enough to re-enter the workforce, nor did I think I had what it takes to make my business profitable again. I tried to ignore this, I pushed it down and lived in a daydream world as much as possible but every now and then, when I started to think about the future, it would rise up and strangle me, this feeling of having nowhere to turn, of slipping into a chasm.
In the run up to my first day I was so scared. I was scared that I was just very good at talking a good game and there was nothing to back it up. I was scared of being found out, scared of being a disappointment. I was scared that I wouldn’t know what I was doing, that I’d have no good ideas.
As it turns out, having this job has been the best thing for my confidence. It is wonderful, to be asked a question and hear the answer coming out of your mouth – that you don’t even need to think about it, you just know. For colleagues to see a piece of your work or listen to an idea and think that it’s great. To find yourself becoming a person they come to for advice. To come up with and put in place processes that make things work better.
Without this job I don’t think I could have started one-to-one work again. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to believe I could help people without spending every day consistently knowing my stuff and helping the people I work with. It’s helped me to see what I do from the outside, and see how much value there really is in that.
Organisation
I had a tendency before to let things drag on. When I lived in Wales and had nowhere to go or to be there was no urgency. It didn’t matter what day I did something, there was always the next day or the day after that I could do it instead. The days and weeks blended together in a smudge of moved deadlines. And then, over night, I went from having seven days a week to do what I wanted with my work to having two. It was a challenge I relished – if I could run this business profitably in two days a week, what possibility does that hold for my life at the end of the contract?
All the experience and teaching of time management I’ve done over the years actually made this transition quite easy (which helps with the confidence, being able to see that what you teach is still working in this new context). A better word to use than easy would be instinctive – I have been prioritising and managing time for so long I knew what to do without thinking. I’d got into bad habits before in my excess of time but I got straight back to pinpointing the most effective activities and letting other things go. Now things have to happen so they do; there’s no space to flap around overthinking, so the podcast gets recorded in one take and things are ticked off without emotion.
Openness
Getting a “proper” job - being employed, having somewhere to be at 9am for 8 hours – was always my worst case scenario. Now it’s happened and… it’s great. It’s not bad at all. It doesn’t negatively impact my own work too much, it just means I need to leave more time for things, and actually it positively impacts my work more than anything.
This has opened up so many options for me. Before I was completely narrow-sighted – everything had to come from my business, and I gripped it so tightly that I was choking it. Now I can see how good life can be with lots of different approaches to work. How taking the pressure of my business being my only possible source of income ever helps me to treat it with more light and excitement, to let it be playful and try things because I’m inspired to.
I’m now open to the idea of doing other contracts or part time work, and I’m playing with the idea of consulting and freelance. I think the main thing is that I’m no longer pressuring myself to have the perfect, self-sustaining business that is everything to me. I don’t think that was healthy for me, to so all or nothing.
What I knew, for the last year or so, was that I needed a little financial space. I used to say to my friends “I just need to make 5k and then I’ve got room to think”. I was crashing from launch to launch trying to get myself that space and never succeeding, which meant I had to launch again and on and on it went in an increasingly desperate cycle.
I knew I needed a big change in the way I worked but I didn’t have the safety or thinking room to figure out what it was. That’s what this job has given me too: the space to stand still and meet who I am now. To take in what this new version needs, to heal the responses and triggers of the old and build things back up in a way that is flexible and free. I am grateful to have it, and I am also grateful it will end. I am looking forward to coming out the other side and seeing what has been built.
