Firstly, hello and welcome.
I have always wanted to do a blog but have always been too afraid to share my thoughts, opinions or feelings. What if people don't read it? What if people didn't like or agree with what I was saying? What if I completely suck at it and fail? Worse still, I offend someone and the legal letters come. True story. Oh the pressure.
We've all been there. Where the self-destructive and negative self talk prevents us from doing what we want to do. It completely destabilises us from doing something we love because we are afraid of failure or the end result. It stops us from the learning opportunities - just having a go and giving it a try. The fear just paralyses us to not act and stops us from being the best versions of ourselves we can be.
My WHY
Not many people know or are aware of this but the last 3 months I have been in excruciating amount of pain. There were days I could not physically get out of bed or move a muscle due to my cervical bones impinging on my nerves - on my best days I would just experience numbing and tingling sensations from my neck down to my arms but on my worst days, I experienced complete paralysis.
It was my mental and emotional health that suffered the most because as a workaholic, all I had (or thought I had) was my career, my work and I felt that I had lost a sense of who I was and what I was about. However being in and out of hospital, doing months of treatment, specialist and doctors appointments, it offered me a lot of time and self reflection, sitting and waiting.
There was a particular time in my career that I reflected on that absolutely devastated me and left me feeling anxious and stressed. It was only during my health issue that I had realised that I had not dealt with or truly acknowledged what had happened and how it had completely affected me. I didn't want to seem weak at the time nor give it any airtime but mentally and emotionally, I really should have (dealt with it) because it compounded to and added to my health issues...but THAT particular experience is a whole other blog post.
That's the reason why I decided and wanted to do this. I wanted to be brave, to have courage and to use my precious time wisely - spending it with people I love and doing things that I am most passionate about, knowing and finally accepting that failure in life is inevitable, and that no matter how hard I try (tried), life wasn't (and isn't) perfect.
Trust me, for a control freak and perfectionist like me, that realisation was hard to handle and swallow. What do you mean, I am going to fail and I do not have complete control? I realised that by doing this (the blog), whether a failure or not, it wouldn't be the worse thing that happens or happened to me in my life and that it certainly does not and will not define who I am and what I am about. It is simply something or one of the many things I do in life. That fear and self-destructive negative talk I started with and had, started to dissipate.
What the blog is about
In fact, the more I looked back on my many failures and the worst thing that happened during those moments, every single embarrassing failure or negative experiences I have had in the workplace and in life has been my greatest learning opportunity and asset. It allowed me to grow, to learn and importantly, it has led me to the success I have experienced and enjoyed thus far and this is what majority of my blogs will be about and what I talk mostly about.
Leadership failures and successes
My experience with people, culture and employee lifecycle
Sharing new workflows, business processes, improvements and customer experience learnings
Finally, just personal experiences, thoughts and feelings on anything to do with what I am passionate about. That's a lot by the way.
I just want to share my experiences, to provide some guidance, advice and thought leadership in the hope it helps others. And if it doesn't, at the very least, this has been utterly and selfishly therapeutic for me.
So strap yourselves in, come for (and enjoy) the ride and please forgive me in advance for my many failings, grammatical errors, naivety and newness to the blog world, I am only human. Oh and be kind, that's all I ask.
Thank you for reading and especially for your time, it is the most precious gift after all.
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Have something to add or share? Share it in the comments below or if you have an idea for a blog post or something you specifically want to me to talk about, send it to joana@simplescalablesolutions.com. Would love to hear from you.