When Will I Be Ready?

As you read this, I will have just completed my very first university course!  When I graduated high school I was terribly intimidated at the thought of going to university - the large class sizes, the less personal experience (versus high school), and honestly the idea of not being able to handle it all.  So I took some time off to figure out what direction I wanted to go in and then went to college for ECE.  I really enjoyed the course and felt like it was the right decision for me at that time, despite the fact that I knew I would never work in the field.  The decision to not attend university was one that felt right at the time, but came back to haunt me years later.  I noticed as I moved through my career that I started to wonder if I had made the right decision after all.  Perhaps I should have pushed past the feelings of concern and went "for the life experience" as so many had advised.  Instead I carried around a sense of regret and a feeling of having missed my opportunity entirely.

Fortunately as I have gotten older, I feel like I have also gotten a bit wiser (in some aspects of life).  I started to realize that just because I made a decision many years ago, I didn't have to live by that now if circumstances had changed.  There was nothing holding me back from going ahead and earning my BA if that is what I really wanted to do.  Well, nothing except myself and the stories I had spun about my ability to do this in the first place.  Instead of letting myself get talked out of it, I applied to Queen's Arts and Science Online for their BA Psychology program, and was accepted.  Big sigh of relief there...but then the realization hit me.  Now I needed to actually go ahead and start.  

What amazed me was how quickly the old stories came to the surface.  Things that had been buried for 30+ years around not being smart enough, not being able to handle the pressure, fear of failure and disappointment...yikes.  No wonder it had taken so long to actually decide to do this in the first place!  I decided to dip my toe in with a writing course and before long found myself feeling like I actually belonged.  I found myself enjoying the feeling of learning and stretching my brain and even the stress of assignments was exhilarating.  I have already signed up for my next two courses and know that this journey will be filled with ups and downs and I am ready to face them all.

The most important lesson that has come forward has been the importance of embracing a learning and beginner's mindset.  It is so easy to talk ourselves out of trying new things or stretching beyond our comfort zone by saying that we aren't ready or we don't know enough to be successful, or need to prepare more.  If we can reframe that to accept that we are coming to this experience as a beginner and are here to learn, it makes it easier to let our guard down.  There is vulnerability in putting ourselves into situations where we may not immediately be successful, and that is where the growth happens.  Falling down six times and getting back up seven.  Allowing ourselves to nudge up against those comfortable edges and then push past them a bit to see what happens.  We don't need to take huge leaps of faith all of the time; small ventures past our set boundaries can reinforce the fact that it is not always scary to take a chance.  And these are the moments that allow us to rewrite our narratives and add in new endings that embrace the new possibilities that we are discovering.  

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