Sharing our stories as we learn and grow in a mission-driven, team-centered workplace.
When I started my career, the goal was to stay with the same company for the rest of your working life. You fought to hold on to your job, even if you didn’t really like it. After a couple of bad work experiences early in my career, I found a company that treated me like a person, with appreciation and respect. Saying yes to a job at Jonar was the best decision I have made. That was 26 years ago.
After graduation, desperate for a job, I fell into the hot, sweaty, cheesy world of pizzas. While I enjoyed four years of the carb hustle, I always had an appetite for flexing my creative muscles in a professional environment.
When I first started managing people, the common wisdom was that the less certainty someone had in their job, the more that fear would drive them to produce. I was told that familiarity bred contempt and that I should never open up to my employees.
This is the story of how, just six months after graduation, I became the Senior Manager of a team of 10 business analysts - all of whom had more experience than I did. As if that wasn’t daunting enough, there was a person on the team who constantly doubted my capabilities and underestimated the value I brought. That person was me. And that's how my relationship with impostor syndrome began.
From the innocent age of 3 to the adult age of 23, I was in a serious relationship with the school system. But with graduation lurking around the corner, I knew it was time to embark on a new adventure.
A couple of years back, I had a rough year. During this year of hell, I was fairly certain that the universe had firmly fixed its rectum directly above my head. And the universe had taken a laxative. In other words, the shit just kept on coming.