In college, I told my professor that I wanted to be an English teacher, but I felt like I would never know enough to be ready to teach. In my head, teachers were human beings who knew everything about whatever they were teaching.
"You'll NEVER know enough," she said. "I took a master's degree because I had so many questions and I felt like a master's would answer those questions. Then I had more questions, so I did my PhD. I ended it with even more questions. The truth is, you'll never know enough.
And you'll never know if you're ready until you do it. So just do it."
I didn't become an English teacher like I originally planned. Facilitating the Writing Letters to Leaders workshop is probably the closest I'll get to it for now. I evolved into becoming an environmental educator several years ago, which is a pretty cool job.
I remembered this conversation recently because I'm at a strange space in my career (tbf, am I not always?) where I'm figuring out what's next and I have an endless stream of questions: How do I scale? How do I make environmentalism part of everyday life? How do I accomplish all my big dreams with such limited resources? How long will I do this for? Am I ready? But shit, what if I'm not?
But what if I am?
Time to take the plunge and grow fins along the way. 🤞🏽