I’ve sent out resumes and applied to teaching positions, but I haven’t even heard back on volunteer positions. At this point…I can’t give yoga away. It’s very tempting to give up, but I’m not going to. Instead, I am reaching out and starting my own free class for friends and continuing to learn and grow. This is the tough part in trying anything new…that time of discouragement.
I remind myself I’ve faced this before.
I had a tough time breaking into network engineering until I got my big break and there were plenty of times I doubted myself. I remember sitting with my fresh and shiny new network certification and sending out my resume and getting…nothing. Then, by chance, I happened to get hired by a company to do something else…the week after they’d fired their network person. There I was, with the network certification and they had a need and next thing I knew, I had that big break. There often seems to be a chicken and the egg time where you don’t have experience, so no one wants to take a chance on you, but you have to find a way to get experience…so someone will take a chance on you.
Even when it comes to asking to teach a couple of yoga classes a week in your free time…for free.
This is the tough time in any new endeavor when self-doubt can eat you alive. Maybe you’re starting a business and you aren’t get seeing profits. Maybe you’ve written a book and you keep getting rejected by publishers. Maybe you’re training for a goal like a marathon but you just can’t seem to add on the miles. It’s easy to lose hope when you feel stuck. It’s easy to assume something just isn’t meant to be.
However, the only difference between me and someone who is actively teaching yoga right now is that they kept going until they found the opportunity to get that experience that led to more opportunities. Maybe they were in the right place at the right time, but more likely they faced some rejection at first and just kept trying. Most authors have a story of rejected manuscripts before their best seller. Most runners have stories of races that just didn’t work out. Most business owners have stories even of businesses that failed before their big one succeeded. You have to be willing to live in that feeling of failure and the vulnerability of risking failure over and over again to eventually be successful and that’s easy for me to forget when in my networking career I’m comfortably past that point.
So…I’ll keep sending out my resume for yoga teacher jobs and accept that there will be rejection for a while. I’ll keep finding those smaller opportunities where I can. And…I’ll keep believing that eventually this will just be part of the story of my success when I’m actively teaching and helping people in my “free” time.
Are you working on something and feel stuck in that failure period? Or, are you putting off trying something because you’re afraid of rejection or failure?
Geek Yoga 