Today I was officially made lead for a team of 7 (including myself) at work. This is a step in the right direction for my career, but it makes me very nervous at the same time. Will I be able to lead effectively? Will I be able to protect the team from the managerial details that all companies have? Will I know when to follow their ideas versus when to push my own instead? So many questions, and while I hope I know the answers the only way to know is to go through the experience.
And there it is. The experience, the journey, the road you travel. Whatever cliche you want to call it by, it is what life is generally about. One of the things I think I've learned (or at least I hope this is right), is that the path you choose is more important than the place you get to. People make choices everyday. Most of the choices are mundane (what do I want for breakfast?), but some of them can have a profound impact not just your own life, but many others.
The challenge in life is making good decisions when you are presented with choices. Notice I said good decisions, not "right" decisions. In some cases, there may only be one right
decision (usually those would be make a left instead of a right at Albuquerque). In most cases, things are much more ambiguous. When those choices are in front of you, you need to make the decision that is easiest for you to live with.
One of those choices is recognizing who you are. Everyone recognizes parts of their personality, but most people don't really know themselves. For example, both Dave (friend at work) and I recognize that each of us get bored with new cars after a couple of years and need to replace them, but this is the type of observation that a casual observer could learn. The more difficult question is why do we get bored with new cars so quickly?
Unfortunately, I don't know why I am like that. This is part of the reason I wonder how I will fare as a leader. I've never really been in that position before, and I haven't seen enough of my personality when put under pressure to know.
Something I do recognize is that when I get stressed, I need a way to vent the steam. Big vacations (Italy, Hawaii), weekend trips (Las Vegas, Zion), and just relaxing on weekends all help with this. So long as I spread them all out I can stay relatively stress free (it is amazing how sitting on Kahekili beach in Maui with a Mai-Tai can relax you), but sometimes I need something to make me focus on something completely different. To that end, I will likely go sky-diving again some time in late September or October. One of my other friends at work (John) has said he wants to go too. This is probably a pretty good thing, as AM isn't exactly excited about jumping out of an airplane again in her lifetime.