Speak Up

Over the last couple days I’ve noticed some improvements and some areas that could stand improvement. As a person well on their way down the road of this journey I am able to appreciate how far I have come instead of getting upset about how far I have to go. I just take note and keep going.

Some areas I am better in are interjecting my own ideas and speaking with confidence. I wouldn’t call this a strength of mine yet, but I have started leaving behind my attitude of only speaking up if I have some drastically different idea, or if something really needs to be clarified… all of the cases where I didn’t feel it was necessary to interrupt others or change the line of thought unless it was really important. No! I can be in the conversation, too! I don’t have to sit back and let the extroverts high-jack the entire conversation. Even if some of my comments are talked over, I can still get in there and make a few comments and show that I, too, am aware of what is going on. I may not have anything new to add, but I will express that I am on the same page as the rest of you.

I also noticed I still need to speak with a little more command, because a few times today I declared my own hypothesis about something, only to later have people say it right back to me because they had just figured it out for themselves. I must not have said it with enough confidence originally. That has happened to me quite a lot over my life, and normally I take it personally. But this time (these times, really) I did not. I made a mental note that I need to speak with a little more authority, and that I can trust my judgment a little more than I give it credit for in some of these scenarios. And you know what, even if I’m wrong, in cases like this, it doesn’t matter. Good ideas are good ideas. It shows you are thinking analytically. It shows your thought process. It can still impress people. I’m talking about work right now… let me make that distinction. You shouldn’t go around trying to impress people in your personal life, haha.

I also worked on communication, which… if you’re experiencing a problem that you don’t understand to begin with, it is hard to make any logical sense when you are conveying the problem to someone else… Again, there was room for improvement today, but I think I did a lot better. And I spoke up more in the conversation about it. All in all, I did pretty well today on those fronts. Not perfect by any means, but some great progress.