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Health & Fitness

Putting Yourself Out There

Putting yourself out there from a perspective of professional opportunities.

The message that is the title of this post is in movies, TV shows, books, and from adults.  They all preach the importance of getting out of your comfort zone and taking a chance.  Sometimes I wonder if it’s because the world is overpopulated, making it impossible to move around without tripping over others; only by coordinating our movements with others, making connections with them, can we navigate.  I know that might come off as negative, but I don’t mean it like that.  I just mean to say that it seems like we must walk with other people, and I’m not just talking about in one’s personal life.  It’s also necessary for one’s professional life; networking, for example, is big now, a good way now to make connections and relationships with people with the same interests and direction as you.

I guess I have finally started to accept this, because I recently signed up to run a meeting of writers that I go to.  You don’t know me personally, so you don’t know that this is an interesting step for me; I don’t normally sign up to do things like this, at least not voluntarily.  However, I decided that it would not be so bad, as I had similar experience running a student group of writers, though running those meetings seems easier compared to what I’m doing now.  With that group, all I had to do was get people to share and get the rest to comment afterwards; now I must come up with an actual topic to discuss, so I have a bit of work to do.  Strangely enough, I don’t mind this extra work I’ve taken on, though maybe I will feel differently when we come down to the wire.  When volunteered I believed it would prove to be worth something.  When I continued to think about it, I realized it was a chance to grow.  As I said earlier, I had run a group of student writers; this could serve as a next step of sorts.  On the subject of building relationships, my fellow group members, who have been doing this longer than I have, and I will know each other better, which could help with getting advice and critiques from them.

I connected this outlook on running the meeting to an outlook on putting myself out there in general.  I realized that only by seizing such opportunities to grow, to become more experienced, will you hold weight in the field you wish to pursue.  If I want to become a freelance editor, for instance, I should get editing jobs wherever I could, to boost my credentials.  This also ties into the whole building relationships idea, as it increases the chance to get work when those you work for recommend you to others (assuming you’ve done a good job for the initial person).  Furthermore, the more you do something, the more confident you’ll be, and confidence is crucial in pitching yourself.

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So I urge all of you to put yourselves out there and take opportunities as they’re offered.  I’m going to attempt to be better at that myself.  I will reach out and make connections and build relationships.  I learned in a class that studied the stages of human life that we get more personal satisfaction from the meaningful connections we get from friends and family.  Perhaps we can also get more professional satisfaction from networking and taking these kinds of opportunities.

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