Caryn Reddick: Success Statement

 

 

A little over a year ago, I made one of the bravest decisions of my life.

I decided that I was going to focus full time on running my own business.

Sure, I’d been dancing around it for almost a decade, coaching as a “side hustle” as Pamela Slim would say. But deciding to do it “for real” – as in getting up in the morning and focusing on it all day – was a very scary thing.

The funny thing is, although the changes I have made in my professional life have often been a challenge, they are nothing compared to the effect these changes are having on my personal life.

Let me back up…

I believe that most of us have two personas: personal and professional. For some of us they are very different, for others they are almost identical. During the first 20 years of my career, both of my personas were completely intertwined.

I was one of those annoying people who couldn’t talk about themselves without discussing what they did for a living. I *was* my job title.

That changed a year ago, and at this point I’m finally 90% comfortable with this change in my professional persona. I coach people through this process, and I’ve seen it work magic. In fact, I was feeling a bit smug about how well it worked.

I thought I was almost done with my own transformation.

Wrong.

 

 

Although I preach about it all the time, I *still* forgot about the other half.

My personal persona.

I massively underestimated how much changing my professional persona would lead me to change my personal one. All of a sudden, I’m challenging assumptions that I could never have imagined questioning.

Even answers to fundamental BIG questions are no longer clear, like…

• What do I like to do?
• What do I NOT like to do?
• What kind of people do I enjoy being around?
• What risks am I willing to take?
• Who am I willing to upset in the process?

As it turns out, this whole personal persona shift is much more frightening than I imagined.

So… I’m going to do what any good blogger does. I’m going to share my progress in this blog.

My goal is to share where I’m at, how it is going, and what assumptions I’m challenging at the moment. Sometimes the challenges will be large, other times they will seem trivial.

 

 

But it really doesn’t matter how large or small they are. I’ve learned that even small changes are like dominoes… each of them are tiny, but they have the potential to affect hundreds of others.

I appreciate your encouragement and hope you will get to learn from some of my mistakes.

Here’s to a year of challenging assumptions and becoming someone new!!

Filed under: Business, Career, Challenging Assumptions, Coaching, Decision Making Tagged: | Challenging Assumptions, Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde, Pamela Slim, Personal Persona, Professional Persona, Side Hustle