My stress has started keeping me up at night and it’s odd how the first thing to go is the thing that helps me the most: running. I usually do a rest day during the week but not usually two in a row . . . y’all I worked in my pajamas (though my leadership meeting!) until after 1 pm today when I had a break and made myself put on real clothes and be a human. It helped, of course. Showers and jeans can do that some days.
There’s just a lot to do and then one small thing on my to-do list was giving me some major nerves last night and today: leading a live product training. These are training we put on twice a week for any of our clients to join that just demos the basics of the system. We had some shift in responsibilities and I ended up being the only viable person who could do these right now, partially to evaluate them and see if we can align them closer with our client education goals. All good. I led one on Tuesday that was mostly best practices than product demo and I’m very comfortable going through a deck talking about candidate experience and enhancing your careers page.
This is a lot of work jargon . . . point is I wasn’t as comfortable spending a half hour doing an inital walkthrough of the product. Not that I didn’t know the system, I do, but that I didn’t have time to prepare until last night and my brain started getting hung up on the right words to use and what if I’m asked something I don’t understand and what are the right things to cover that is going to be practical and actionable . . .
These trainings are embarrasingly low attended (part of the reason I’m getting in there to fix this so we can provide more value to new users) so there really wasn’t any pressure to try things out. But I could not turn my brain off, even after spending time finding the right demo account and practicing different ways to go through it . . . on and on.
I swear I woke up this morning telling people how to add a prescreen question to a job post.
Team, I have a million other things going on. This is a pretty behind the scenes one as far as most people are concerned but I care about doing a good job and keeping the committment and this whole month has been a ball of extra hours and stress so I think I was cracking just a little.
As you can imagine. The training went fine. It wasn’t a big deal. Of the very few people there they said it was valuable (unprompted in the chat) and the only question asked for more video resources which I happily linked. And then my whole week suddenly got lighter.
If there’s some lessons to pull out of this:
- Things are usually way less of big deal than we make them out to be
- Trust our talents and our knowledge
- I need to handle the stress in my body
I’m totally on it.
With Love,
Natalie