WELCOME BACK…? (Part 1)
(Reading Time: 3.5mins)
July 2020. I find myself sitting at my desk looking out the window of my home office at another chilly Melbourne winter day, and take a sip of my freshly brewed tea and take a moment to reflect on the one thing I’ve actually been putting off for far too long – actively working on my business.
There have been countless times that I’ve sat down to try and write this ‘blog’, and every time I’ve started tapping away at my keyboard, I’ve always hit a wall… and I realised that it’s I never wanted to actually talk about why it was happening. Sure, I’ve discussed it a few times with my immediate circle of friends and family, and by avoiding needing to address it in a more ‘public’ way, meant that it could just stay in the shadows and I could just ignore it.
Suddenly July rolls around, and I can’t ignore it any more. It would be awkward for me to suddenly appear back online in a more active role in my own business without some kind of explanation, so allow me to try and throw some words together to explain myself in a rip-off-the-bandaid kind of way.
Nobody is going to pay attention to you. Nobody cares what you have to say!
For several months between quitting my full-time job in 2019, and actually launching WXW, there was this period of time where I was wandering around in somewhat of a daze. I didn’t know what to do with myself, but at the same time, knew the direction that I wanted to go in. I knew that I wanted to pursue the path of marketing, yet felt quite lost as to what that actually meant or looked like. Maybe it was applying for a job, but that just encountered the age-old quandary of how do you get a job that requires experience, when you can’t get the experience without getting the job… and I ended up spiralling.
It wasn’t until I spoke to a couple of people and they all confirmed what I’d been thinking about in the back of my head, and that was to open my own business… and so after a while of back-and-forth and the constant barrage of what if’s, I decided to just do, and see what happens.
Any business owner knows that steamroller of excitement and nerves that happens in the lead up to opening a business, you start getting everything organised and you’re telling all your friends and family and you start to get blinded by your own excitement about what you’re doing, that you can only focus on that one day – launch day – and nothing else until that moment matters.
For me, my launch day arrived with almost no celebration or fanfare – it was quite anticlimactic, so the high of being officially open for business subsided quite quickly, and then it hit… this giant wave that had been building and building slowly in the shadows, and then before I could do anything about it, it was hurling itself down on top of me and everything I’d worked so hard to create… and that wave was called imposter syndrome.
I had a brand new business and I was all excited about getting started and creating content and advertising and finding clients and being able to be my own boss and do everything on my own terms and almost overnight, everything changed. I remember having a very quiet but very significant panic attack because I woke up in the middle of the night with this overwhelming fear because the voice in my head decided to speak up. “WHAT DO I DO NOW?! Nobody is going to take me seriously. Nobody is going to want to do business with me. Nobody is going to pay attention to you. Nobody cares what you have to say! Who do you think you are? Nobody is going to like what I bring to the table, and the only work that you get will be out of pity. You’re just wasting your time. You’re not cut out for this. Just go get a normal job and stop all this nonsense.”
My problem was all my insecurities from the previous few months had decided to take a front row seat, and give me a very stern talking to.
…and I wasn’t ready for it.