Own Them

“when the need arises, you take care of problems yourself”

“Grow a backbone, have more self-confidence. Own your decisions.”

I’ve read those lines somewhere a while back and they glued themselves to my brain. I’ve been trying to tell myself that for quite a while now and unfortunately it never made me any more confident than I was previously.

I excel in running away from things, mainly, responsibilities at work. But ever since reading those lines, I’ve been trying to be more of an adult and face things head on. Things aren’t working out quite as planned though. I still find myself running away but not as much as I did. Mainly because I’m now being put into a position of power so to speak, very little power but still, some kind of power of authority.

I’m currently, what we call, a team leader. As the name suggests I now lead one or two subordinates out for fieldwork and call the shots. Not as glamorous as it sounds because it is scary af sometimes. Especially so when you realize that you’ve missed out some information and your reviewer is chasing them. It’s not fun at all.

You’d think that being a leader will cure me of what little self-confidence that I have, wrong. It didn’t do a thing to my non-existent self-confidence. If anything, being a leader actually brought my confidence down because my reviewers have not exactly been kind with their comments and treatment. On one hand, I know that they’re doing it for my own good; to train me to be a better worker. But on the other hand, it’s very taxing on my motivation and self-confidence level.

It’s like you trying your best, doing everything that you can think of. Then after five days you present what you’ve done to your reviewer but they asks so many questions that you don’t have answers for. Then you start to think “omg I’m an idiot. Why did I not think of that? how am I going to solve this now?”. It’s very demotivating.

And because of that I’m more scared than ever when having to make any decisions. So much for growing a backbone. Heh. I do own my decisions. They get me into trouble quite often. Self-confidence wise..well..better luck next time.