Sharing our stories as we learn and grow in a mission-driven, team-centered workplace.
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.
In an endless stream of administrative job postings, one entitled “Office Experience Coordinator aka Happiness Hero” stood out, especially amidst a global pandemic. But, what is an office experience coordinator supposed to coordinate if we’re not experiencing life in the office?