Confidence in the Starting

The confidence didn't come first or at a perfect time

Two weeks ago I was two weeks behind in The Uncommon Business A2A program, the ten-week certification I'm working through right now.

Not a little behind. I had two kids graduating that month, one from eighth grade into high school, one from high school into college. My older daughter was packing to move across the country to Kentucky. And on top of all of it, I had to get a lawyer involved just to make sure I got my time with her on graduation weekend, because the weekend fell on his custody time and he wasn't giving it up. That whole mess is actually what led me to start building Seren, the communication tool I'm working on now for parents navigating high conflict co-parenting. But that's a story for another day.

So when I checked in on the AI program and saw how far behind I'd fallen, the anxiety came up fast. I told myself, it's going to be okay, you just have to check in. So I did. Some weeks that meant actually sitting down and studying. Other weeks it meant just opening the tool and practicing on the side, building a prompt, asking it a question, staying in it without the pressure of "catching up." Once I finally had real time again, I sat down and caught up an entire week of material in a couple of days.

Here's what I noticed while I was doing it. My process the whole time had been: read the notes first, do the homework, watch the live session, go back through the notes again, then sit in the support channels and listen, even the advanced one where half of what they're saying still goes over my head. I'd let it run in the background while I did other things. Slow, repetitive, nothing efficient about it.

I was talking it through and someone pointed out that I hadn't actually fallen behind. I'd set down roots. While other people were keeping pace on the calendar, I was building something underneath it, so when the material got harder, I had more to stand on than the people who were technically on schedule.

I'm 52. And I see this all the time with women my age, what people call grey divorce. You give yourself to your family and your kids for decades, and then one day you're on your own, and somewhere along the way you got told, directly or just by how you were treated, that you didn't have much to give outside of that. That you hadn't built anything of your own.

I don't think that's true, and the only way to find out was to start. I'm 52 years old learning a brand new skill in the middle of two graduations, a custody fight, and a move across the country, two weeks behind a ten-week certification, figuring it out as I go. The confidence didn't come first. It's coming because I kept showing up.

You don't need the confidence to start. You build it by starting.

Becky