This came up in my Facebook memories the other morning. I posted it a year ago. I think I probably posted it as a reminder to myself as much as to other people. Women especially. We do this and we do it far more than we ever should. We apologize for being more. Or for even daring to think that we could be more.
Yesterday at my day job, we were in a massive time crunch, and I was called on to do a task that I had never really done before. I wasn’t good at it when I started. In fact, I completely sucked at it. I was soooo slow and just that made me sick, but I just kept going because, well, I had to. It’s not like I could just stop and whine, “It’s hard!” It was repetitive work, but by around piece 150 (out of about 500, oy vey), my boss said upon looking at my work, “I can tell you’re getting better.” Whew!
So, the other morning, before I even saw this reminder, I saw a comment to me on a Facebook thread asking for a link to the new shop we just set up the website. This was in a group of women entrepreneurs that I’m part of. Women who, I’m sure, have their own ideas about what their personal strengths and weaknesses are but who, nevertheless, have the appearance of having their shit together. I shared the link but had to make a CONSCIOUS effort to not include verbiage along the lines of “it sucks, but it’s what we’ve got right now” because that’s my default. To apologize.
Well, fuck that. This venture of ours is less than 2 months old. We hit 3k followers on Facebook the other day, and people are finding this website/blog, too. We put up that shop and got a sale within the first few hours. Could it be better? Yes. Could it be worse. Oh, hell yes. We could’ve just not done it at all. But we did. And we put it out there. Personally, it makes me just as clenchy as having to make a one-on-one sales call, but I won’t apologize for it. Over time, we’ll improve. The important thing is that we didn’t just throw up our hands and cry, “It’s not good enough!”
We all start at the beginner level at anything new that we try. Hopefully, we’re still experiencing that gut clenching, awkward “new” feeling from time to time. That’s called growth, and it’s not a bad thing. So, go to our shop and buy one of our shirts or mugs or water bottles or whatever and wear it, drink from it, do whatever with it while you apologetically dream big and DO big. Because, at 50, I’m so done with being small. Aren’t you, too?
~ Karen