Journey From Corporate to Writer….
Who leaves their 16 year career to write a book?
This girl does…
Last year I made the decision to leave my corporate job to pursue my dream of writing.
I spent nearly my whole career in corporate learning. I loved it. I started out as a corporate trainer, then lead a team of trainers before jumping into a new role where I measured the impact of our training programs against things like employee productivity, customer satisfaction, and ROI. I loved what I did and who I did it with.
Even as I scaled the corporate ladder, there was this pull in the back of my mind to write and publish a YA paranormal romance story that I’d written back in 1994.
When I was younger, I would run from the school bus to our family computer to write short stories. I was boy crazy at the time, so my stories always involved a boy crush. I remember sitting on an old wooden chair from my grandmother’s house that creaked when I leaned left and writing until my mom called me for dinner. My imagination came alive during that time and my heart sored as I wrote about young love as a teenager.
I wrote on and off until college graduation. After that, my priorities shifted to scaling my career and writing sat on the back burner.
When I made the decision to leave my career and journey into the unknown as a new writer, I was both excited and terrified. Terrified that I had made the worst mistake of my life (and career), but also excited to finally give this dream a shot.
I had to push through so much fear as I started this writing journey: What if I suck? What if I am a horrible writer? What if I’ve made a big mistake?
Part of me wished I hadn’t told so many people that I left my job to write a book. It made it real and so much more was at stake if I failed to produce a novel at the end of this.
I don’t think I realized how much resistance I’d have to writing. It took several weeks to get my first 2000 words on the page. Even then, I continued to drag my feet for the next two months as I battled fear of failure and wondering if my book would be good enough.
Pushing through the fear was like trying to walk against a retreating ocean wave. The pull of fear sinks you deep into the sand and you have to exert more energy to take a single step forward. This became a valuable lesson for me. I needed more energy to push through my own resistance.
One of my favorite self development experts, Henry Ammar, teaches how to identify resistance when you’ve reached the edge of your comfort zone. Henry explains it in a simple, yet powerful way. The circle is your comfort zone. About one inch outside the circle is your goal, what you want to achieve. The more you push through the resistance, discomfort, and fear, the bigger your circle (your comfort zone) grows until you’ve pushed it so far that the goal is finally inside the circle. He explains that awareness of your resistance is key and the reason to keep pushing.
So that’s what I did. I recognized my resistance, acknowledging it for what it was (fear and discomfort) and I pushed through it. I pushed through it when I sat down to write, I pushed through it when I didn’t know what questions to ask authors at signing events, I pushed through it when I went to my first writer’s critique meeting, and I began to expand my comfort zone with each uncomfortable task I tackled.
There’s something that happens when you start to push through the discomfort. It’s like you unlock a part of yourself that has laid dormant. The more I pushed through the resistance, the more I started to believe in myself. When you believe in yourself, you become a force to be reckoned with.
When people ask me about the last few months, I describe it as drinking from a fire hose. But I wouldn’t change any of it. I’ve learned so much about the process of writing and about myself.
My advice to you, my writer friend, is to keep writing. Keep learning. Know it will sometimes be uncomfortable, but being outside your comfort zone is where your dreams come true! You don’t need to know the next five or six steps ahead, you just need to know the step right in front of you. That’s it.
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www.MeganCrawfordWrites.com