Episode 4: Fear
This journey scares the crap out of me.
I’m 41. My wife and I have a mortgage to pay. We have two dogs. What the hell am I doing trying to reinvent myself at this stage in my life?
It’s simple: I’m pursuing joy. And while taking a leap like this is scary, I’m finding it’s a good kind of scary, like rock climbing, and as long as I’m patient and thoughtful about the process, the fear and risk can be mitigated.
During my job search after being laid off, it dawned on me that I was likely going to have to take a significant pay cut and take a sales position, something that didn’t thrill me. I didn’t like the idea of starting at the bottom of the corporate ladder again, and I didn’t like the lack of reliability of income inherent in commission sales.
And then it clicked: between this realization and my wife’s urging to do something that made me happy, I figured if I was going to make less money and have to sell something, well...I was going to sell me. And I was going to do something that brought me joy.
I’m not sure if I would ever have pursued this if I hadn’t been forced to. There’s a lot to be scared of: failure, not being able to pay the bills, creating problems for future employment should this not work out.
But I was, in many ways, forced to take an unbiased look at my life and career.
When my position was eliminated a year ago, I didn’t give much thought to doing anything other than going right back into sales management, running sales operations and focusing on marketing work.
And if I’m being honest, I wasn’t terribly happy. I thought I was, or maybe I was trying to convince myself that I was fulfilled by my work...but deep down, I knew that this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I knew I was taking the safe route.
I did what I thought I should do, I reached out to my network, I applied for jobs, I worked with recruiters, I scoured the internet for opportunities. I had been unemployed before back in 2009 during the recession, and I figured that this time, with the economy doing relatively well and having now 10 years of experience in sales management that I would quickly land a new position.
That didn’t happen.
I had interviews with only two different companies over six months. I applied for many positions, several through friends. Only heard back from two. Most of the time I got the canned message of, “Despite your impressive qualifications, we decided to pursue a candidate whose experience more closely matched what we were looking for.” Not exactly a great rate of return.
Additionally, I had started driving Uber to help supplement the unemployment I was getting from the state. Unfortunately, during the last week of November, Pennsylvania decided that driving for Uber constituted me starting my own business and denied my unemployment claim and demanded I pay back the two months I had already received.
(Side note for anyone who is on unemployment in PA: The state courts had ruled earlier in 2018 that this was not true and that driving for Uber or having a side hustle in order to earn money while looking for a job did not disqualify people on UI from receiving benefits. I guess that memo didn’t reach some of the right people.)
I appealed the decision, but I wasn’t going to get a ruling for at least two months, and that meant I had zero income stream.
So, with hat in hand, I took my wife’s uncle up on an offer to become the cook at his hamburger joint for the closing shift. I had no money at all coming in now, and I needed to make sure that I was doing my best to get the bills paid.
I was miserable, and I was scared. Was this it? Was this my future?
All of that time in college, getting my MBA, working in corporate America, and here I was, a step above working at McDonalds.
I was mortified that someone I knew would show up at the restaurant and see me working there. What would they think of me? Would they see me as a loser? That’s certainly how I saw myself.
The other thing that was holding me back was my general lack of patience. When this whole journey started, I was essentially working three jobs: voice over, cook, Uber driver. The thought of having to do this dance for more than a couple of months weighed on me, and made me rush through attempting to get up and running full time. And when that goal didn’t materialize right away, I started to panic. Did I really make a wrong decision here?
Then, a few things happened that straightened me out. Not in any particular order:
I started listening to the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast. He has some great messaging about overcoming judgement, having patience, putting the years we have left in perspective, and marketing. It really resonated with me and got me thinking about things in a different way.
I found a new therapist. This is immensely helpful. There’s nothing wrong with seeking outside help.
I finally decided to get medicated for my ADD. I’ll go deeper into that in another post, but by addressing this issue, I’ve been able to be more focused throughout the day, and to accomplish more.
A guy I train jiu jitsu with, Sean Brady, got signed to the UFC. He’s been a professional MMA fighter for five years now, with two more under his belt as an amateur. Seven years for him to finally make it to the big leagues, and his career has just gotten started. He worked his ass off every day, sometimes pulling jobs with his family’s landscaping business, and is only just now starting the biggest part of his career. Five. Years. Yeah, I can wait a little longer to get this voice over thing up to speed.
The truth is I was putting entirely too much stock in what other people thought about me, and I had spent too much time chasing the wrong things.
Who cares if someone had an opinion about me flipping burgers? I was doing what I needed to do to seek a greater joy. Once I was able to shed that, things got much easier.
And once I really internalized the message of being patient (after hearing it from multiple sources over and over again), I felt a huge burden lift off of my shoulders. I didn’t need to make it right now. There will be voice over gigs in the future, and it’s unlikely that it will be just one that catapults me into a full time career. It will be a lot of little steps.
And I’m now willing to make them all. I’m going work my ass off to see this goal met.