Where I'm at Now: Authenticity in the Moment

I haven't blogged in awhile. I don't write that to apologize, or to try and appease my seven followers. In fact, I know from reading all my blogging-blogger friends that I should never apologize for gaps in publishing. That being said, I am at a point where I can look at my journey and feel good about where I'm at. For any of you who read my career exploration posts during the last year (University of Me, and Straddling the Introvert-Extrovert Line), you know that I began my exploration into the L&P field last year. I meandered through eLearning and Instructional Design, facilitation vs. development, and a crazy foray into an unsuccessful Flash class.  All of sudden, in July, I knew something felt off. Instead of forcing  myself to find a job in eLearning or Instructional Design, I backed off and attempted to let my inner self figure it all out. During that quiet transition, I wrote the post, Listening to Myself, then I withdrew from the blogging and Twitter world.  I felt sort of inauthentic and strange that the eLearning person whom people had come to know wanted to pursue a different direction.

I realized that the entire time, I had wanted to focus on organizations as a whole. It is what I love, and what I do best. And yet I was terrified to admit this. Every OD person who I'd encountered seemed to have an MBA, and I knew this would be a crappy fit for my energy-empathy-compassionate-non-finance-thinkin' self. So instead of trying to figure out how to be an OD person without an MBA, I moved on to the things that I felt I could do without going back to school. My education degree would help me get into ID, while my library degree had offered enough technology experience that I could fake things. 

But in July, I hit a wall, and I realized that I don't mind doing ID or eLearning, but I like it because of the context of developing organizations and making them better. 
Once I embraced my joy for this, I stopped trying to put myself in a box, and instead I got inspired to go back to school and become even better. I'm in love with my current program and my inspirational classmates. I'm learning that I can always open a new door, and that branding myself once doesn't mean that I'm stuck with that definition forever.