Should I Feel This Nervous

In every career there comes a time when you have to grow up.  Depending on what your aspirations are, some have much more growing to do than others.  I always thought I wanted a simple low key life.  Never got too involved with the tech community, didn’t do much to build my personal brand.

As I’ve grown up and gotten involved with TINYpulse, I’ve realized that to be a true leader that inspires people, my leadership has to extend out into the community.  It’s the only way we’re going to recruit top talent which is the pre-requisite to exponential growth.

So here I am, on the eve of my first major public speech.  4000 are expected to attend an event at the Reunification Palace and 300-500 of those are expected to watch me speak.

I’m freaking nervous.

I had a great plan.  I was going to start on this talk and video five days prior to the event.

But work kept piling up, and small body blows kept coming. My prep plans kept pushing back further and further and my energy level kept dropping.

Then two days before the event I felt like I got hit by a sledgehammer when someone from my company, not sure if it was current or past, logged into our TINYpulse app and left a scathing testimonial to my inefficiency as a leader and suggested that my resigning would be the best thing for the company.

Now that’s inspiration on the eve of the most nerve-wrecking 30 minutes of my professional life.

I woke up this morning and emotion swings immediately started going through my mind.  Anger, Fear, Shame, Defiance, Fight, Flight, Calm.  As I rode into work, calm set in further and I thought to myself if I was going to get through the day that included performance reviews, prep for US trip, sprint planning, movie editing, and slide creation, then be able to deliver my speech on Saturday I had to discover the courage to be imperfect and the discipline to execute.

It’s almost midnight now and this post was inspired by a TED talk I watched to get myself ready, Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability.

I’m hoping that letting out how vulnerable I feel right now will help others find the courage to put themselves out there and do something amazing even when your scared to death.

I don’t know how tomorrow is going to turn out, but I do know that by the time 11:30am hits it will be all be over and I will know that I got up off the matt and gave it my best shot.