With all the talk about moving your desk, I figured it was time to share one way I’ve moved my desk recently. Sometimes moving your desk is simply making a few mental shifts. In other seasons, it requires overhauling your life. The point is to keep working at it.
Episode 19 Show Notes
Episode 19 Transcript
This is Rebecca Clark. Episode 19 Rebecca’s desk This’ll Podcast is for anyone that knows they haven’t yet found and offered up their best work but are compelled to seek it out and do it. Are you ready to be your death? When I was a teenager, my father came back from a trip and gave me a gift, and he often brought back gifts from his business trips. At one point, my mother loved getting a bell from whatever state he went to on these business trips, and we would get some kind of rock candy or chocolate. But this gift was a book, and it was called Notes to Myself by Hugh Prather. I’ve never met anyone that’s heard of this book, but I’ve kept it my entire life. And there’s a quote that I use from it often, and it is. The horizon ceases to be the horizon once you get there, and I love that quote because it’s a great reminder that we consistently seek new horizons. But once we reach them, whatever they are, create more goals and more plans and seek something else because most of time when we arrived, we realize that that was all we could see at that point. But now that we have arrived at that point, we can see further, and most of us want to keep going and discover more or new horizons. I love to constantly seek, and I’m not seeking just because I like change. But I feel compelled to do so well, compelled to constantly improve and seek to be better. And you’ll hear me use the phrase compelled to seek and do better work in my podcast and in other things that I speak about and create, because I’m actively doing that all the time. And I hadn’t shared yet that I have really made a big change recently because I felt compelled to see, and that big change was quitting my job in the fall of 2019. Now it’s crazy that I am in my late forties and I am just quitting a job. When I was around eight years old, we lived in Nebraska, and I remember wanting to set up a lemonade stand. I don’t know who inspired me to do this, but I wanted to do it, so I must have seen some other older child in the neighborhood do this, and I wanted to be part of it. And so my parents allowed me to use wth e cups and the blender and use one of the cans of frozen lemonade in the freezer and set up a little stand outside. And I made a little sign, and I’ll put some pictures in the show notes because we have actual pictures of this lemonade stand. And I had very curious sisters that wanted to be involved and set up their lawn chairs, tow watch. And then there’s a few neighborhood kids and parents that came by and actually bought some lemonade. And I really enjoyed doing it. And I learned in that process some of the challenges of having a lemonade stand, especially when my parents informed me that I was very lucky that I got to keep all the profits and did not have to pay them back for the actual lemonade or the use of the blender or the cups, et cetera. So I learned a lot about business in small ways, without lemonade stand. In the meantime, there were twin girls that delivered the paper, and I decided I wanted to deliver the paper when I grew up. I love that they got to ride their bikes, they got to deliver the papers, they got to come to the door and collect money and they got to punch a little hole in their paper and our ticket saying that we’d paid and that they gave change and all these little things. I thought, Wow, this is freedom and independence and money. I want to be a paper girl And somewhere in that age of nine years old, we moved to Michigan, and it just so happened that we lived in a neighborhood where there weren’t very many Children, or at least not very many teenagers. And the district manager for the Midland Daily News came around to see if there’s anyone that could take on the paper out for that general neighborhood. And my parents saw this as a wonderful opportunity, and so did the district manager until he found out that I was nine years old and not the minimum age of 12 that was necessary for paper carriers to deliver papers. But they were desperate and he went back to the newspaper shop and talk to them and somehow convinced them that This nine year old was tall for her age and willing, and her parents would watch what she did, and I got the job. Then I proceeded to have that paper out from the fourth grade, toothy 11th grade, at which point I switched to a weekly paper like a buyer’s guide and did that for a short stint before graduating from high school. In between this paper out, I also took on some lawn jobs for five long jobs, actually in the neighborhood, and did the typical things that a lot of kids do, like. Sell Girl Scout cookies, maybe one or two years and magazines and grapefruit for the school fund raising efforts. And I was very lucky, because all I would do is go to the people on my paper out, knock on their door, separate from delivering the paper and ask if they were interested in purchasing any of these things. I also got to knock on a lot of other doors, too, because I was kind of a substitute newspaper carrier for three or four other boys that had paper outs right around mine. So we knew we would sub for each other for vacations and that kind of thing. And of course I was lucky because if I needed a sub and we weren’t going on vacation, I could just ask my sisters who were getting old enough. And at one point on this paper out, I divided up the paper out and actually hired my siblings to deliver to certain streets and courts on the paper out and that it was a great lesson to me. And I hope they think that I treated them well because I would always round up in what I was paying them, because it seems so absurdly small. But if you just go deliver five papers every day, and I’m supposed to pay you 39 cents for the week while that found a little small to me, so sometimes I’d put it up the 50 cents or 75 for a dollar, hoping that they would keep wanting to do it. And it was good practice for me to delegate, So I’m engaged in all of these little entrepreneurial efforts growing up. But as you graduate from high school, the focus is on going to college and getting jobs that prepare you for college and that kind of thing. And so I seem to lose some of the entrepreneurial spirit and was always searching for someone else to pay me in a job situation. And it started off hourly. And then, of course, in my twenties I moved into salaried employment and side, A variety of experiences in teaching and in corporations and the last 16 years in the government arena. And in the last 10 years, probably I became very well aware that there is a distance between my youth and my entrepreneurial endeavors and who I had become. And for some that would be OK, right? Saying, Wow, I’ve come a long way. I now have a stable job. I’m paid. Well, I have great benefits. I have six weeks of vacation, Another four or five weeks of sick time. Got holidays. I got all this time off. I’m in leadership positions. I’ve worked my way up the ladder, and yet that was not right for me. Of course I say it’s not right. It was right for me. I learned a lot. I grew, I challenged myself. I learned how to lead and manage and step back from leading and managing when it’s appropriate, and I have to make mistakes and learn and grow from those mistakes at the same time. I know that deep down I’ve always wanted to have a big idea or create something and run my own business and be more independent and be ableto work in the way that I work best because I don’t fit neatly into a box. And I know most of us don’t. But some of us fit even less neatly into boxes. And so I wanted to honor that about myself. And in the years Rives, in charge of managing the production of online courses, I started to branch out, and in my spare time at night and on the weekends, I would be learning from entrepreneurs about sales and marketing. And I created a couple of my own courses, and I wrote a couple of my own books and it was exhilarating. And even though the course is in, the books I wrote weren’t actually the main topics or areas that I would probably choose to focus on. If that was my full time gig, I chose those because they did not interfere with what I was doing at work and because I managed contracts and I dealt with budgets and had some leadership and management roles. I did not want there to be any conflicts of interest. And so I started producing and creating and spending time and money on this, and it is very important to me. And it was right when we were doing this large system implementation, a large learning management system implementation and I had to make some choices, and the first thing to drop off was entrepreneurship. Now I’m a firm believer and being an entrepreneur which is acting like an entrepreneur in a government or corporate, were teaching whatever setting you’re in. If you’re a salaried employee, you can still act like an entrepreneur in many ways. Bring forward your good ideas. Try to make things better, prove improved processes, help the bottom line. There’s some ways to apply that within an organization, and I consistently, I think, have tried to be an intra prin u’re within my organizations. But as the system implementation move forward, I was learning a lot dealing with the challenges of going through that and you’ll hear about that kind of thing in other episodes. But all of a sudden that cognitive dissonance started up again, where I realized I was moving in one direction and the dreams and the kind of spiritual nudges that I was getting were in another direction and that I did somehow resolve that. And even though every day I was learning and growing and working through challenges, I started to realize again that perhaps I should be experiencing that learning and growing and challenges in a different setting in a way that served myself and those I was supposed to serve and set me up for the future that I know I’ve always wanted to create. And so I started toe honor those feelings. And sometimes when you have to make a big change like this, where you go from a very stable source of income to a very non stable source of income, this brings up all kinds of fears and anxiety. And what am I thinking? This is crazy and you start to talk yourself out of taking those steps. But this also means you can talk yourself into it. And what really helped me along the way is that I kept many reflections and journals and lots of audio recordings of my feelings the last few years and as I listen to a few of them, I realized Wait a second, the same inspirations air coming to me over and over again over a period of 34 10 15 years. It’s time to follow those inspirations and see where they lead. And so that’s when I said Okay, it’s time to move my desk. It’s time to make this change and I gave my work of very large heads up that I was going to leave and I made sure that I did the best I could. You know, the time to wrap everything up, help recruit someone else and put the organization in a position to move forward without me and completely let go. In a perfect world, some of us think that I will just do my day job and at night I’ll create this new business and when I’m creating a study income stream, then I can quit. Well, that’s not how real world works. Sometimes, Sometimes you can do that and if this was five or six years ago, I could have done that. But I had other priorities at this time and started to see that there are multiple ways to approach this, but based upon my goals, my energy level and other factors, I was just going to have to leap into the unknown and figure it out. And so it’s been interesting that as of this recording, I am two months out from leaving my job and I’m still here. Isn’t that crazy? I’ve survived two months without my job, and it feels crazy and scary to make some of these decisions at the same time. Every decision I make toward the inspirations I have felt makes me more comfortable and knowing that somehow I will figure out how to create value for those that listen to me or have worked with me before and want to work with me again or find value in something that they see that I’ve produced. And so I know that one of the things I’ve done in the last couple years is to keep a lot of reflections as I go through this process of change, because I wanted to make sure I remembered the process and remembered the ins and outs of fears and emotions and thought, processes and results involved in making changes like this any time we move our desk, whether it’s physically or mentally making changes, because it is like a crazy stock market, right, the ups and downs, and sometimes it steadily rises and you feel great. And then you bought him out. Something happens where suddenly you don’t believe in yourself. You don’t think it’s worth making the change. Why not just put up with it a little while longer, and then you slowly go through the process of rising again, And it’s all part of the process, just recognizing that there are gonna be ups and downs. And, you know, I know I have to remind myself there were ups and downs every day on the job. So what’s the difference? You know, like I’m used to going through ups and downs. It’s just this time it feels like there’s more on the line and is there really well, I don’t know. Time will tell. I just know that sometimes taking that leap forces you to give very clear on what you think you want and bounce back when you start doubting yourself because you have to. There’s no other options. There’s no safety net. One of the reasons I felt it was very important to keep track of this process of personal changes because so often in books and online, and when people are speaking about their personal change, you’ll hear these very extreme experiences. So, for example, you hear I was homeless. I was living from my car and I had this. Ah ha. And you know, now I’m this uber successful person. I’ve got this wonderful home or family or job or multi $1,000,000 business, and I’m always left to go Wait a second time out. I need to understand a little bit more about what happened in between that point where you were in your car and you had an inspiration. Then what did you do? What steps did you take? What was that baby step you took? And after you took that baby step, what was the next baby step and how did you work through that? And how did you go from your car to that first hotel room or to that person’s basement or two, that rental where someone gave you a chance, and then what person did you talk to? That nudged you in another direction, or what person did you talk to that gave you a chance to share an idea. And then they discovered you had some more ideas to shared and they gave you a chance. There’s this whole set of stories in between the rags to riches experience that I’m not sure is told enough. And sometimes when we tell it, it seems like it’s behind closed doors, right? There’s there’s a price to find out all the steps involved. But quite honestly, I don’t think most of us keep track of the entire journey and wouldn’t really know what happened in that process and would have to guess unless we made a record of it while it was happening. Because I can tell you that I’ve forgotten a lot of things I’ve done to change just in the last two months. But luckily I’m a record keeper, So I I have a few things. Actually. I’m gonna share about how I now track my two DUIs and calendar and everything differently now that I’m in a totally different way of working. And so all of this to say I have recently moved my desk and in order to share some of these stories, I realized that I did need to move my desk before I shared some of them. Now I have done this in many ways throughout my life, right? I think I shared that in the first episode that just like you, I have switch to different jobs. I’ve made a case for myself doing something else in the same job and getting a raise and taking on different responsibilities. All of those kinds of moved desk being in my late forties, it feels like a very large lead to give up all those things I sought after toward fulfilling a lifelong dream and to somehow trust that this journey will catch me up and even propel me ahead of where I would have been if I’d stayed in organization and in a role right already started topping out on my ability to get more salary increases or to take on more responsibility. But now the world is wide open and I don’t have a title now and I don’t have a set salary. I don’t have set benefits. I’ve already forgotten that there’s actually holidays because I enjoy trying to do what I’m doing so much that I forget that in the past, I would look forward to holidays as a day where I could do what I actually wanted to do. And now I don’t need a break from what I’m doing. So so proof. There goes the six weeks vacation, you know, But who cares? I’m doing what I want to do. So I felt like this was an important episode to have at this point, to just share a little bit about me in a more personal way of how I have actually moved my desk because I’ve done it very recently and hope to be an example of what is possible no matter what age. And I know that a lot of people my age are at that point in life where they are thinking, Wait, um, I accomplishing what I want to do in my life. Can I make a change? Is it too late? And I just want to encourage you to think it’s possible to make whatever change I want to, no matter what my age is, whether I’m 17 24 32 42 57 75 even 93 which I believe is the age that my grandfather asked me if I would go shopping with him to buy a cell phone because he finally realized it might benefit him. And I made a little tutorial for him and he learned how to use it. And I called with him on a regular basis for a little while to make sure he could practice with someone that was safe to practice with. It’s never too late to move your desk, so thanks for letting me share a little bit more, and I look forward to hearing your stories. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to another episode of Move Your Best Show If you enjoyed listening. I was love if you would take the time to give a five star review and share the podcast with friends that are seeking to find and do their best.
