Celebrating Career Moments: A Promotion to a New Chapter

Life offline is what I tried to live a lot of this summer and early fall. I like being able to hold moments all to myself until I’m ready to share with the world. It’s always been my MO and I find comfort in it. The more I have larger milestones that I want to soak in and be present for.

One of those big moments happened recently.

It feels ironic that sometimes in order to have big thing happen you become so busy you can’t share the initial excitement of them and by the time you come back to tell people, you’re months into it. It’s a good problem to have!

I’m now a Sr. Manager of digital brand. Not only do I get to say Sr., that title means a lot to me, but I get to be a Sr. Manager under the person who hired me. Many people asked if I was worried about being with someone who saw me when I was 25, new to the world and was there when I was at my most junior. I wasn’t. It felt like a coming home but a home that knows you have grown and its grown and come into its own.

Did I anticipate staying five years at my organization? No, but I also didn’t expect to have such a diverse array of opportunity here. While my focus has always been marketing, the journey has taken on many forms. Those people along the way are still part of my story today and have shaped a path for me to develop into my own.

For the first time in my career I didn’t walk into a new title and find imposter syndrome waiting for me across the desk. It felt right and I didn’t give it a chance to not. Honestly what I do is nothing I’ve done before but it also very much is always there for me. It’s something I think about innately and trust that the answers and inspiration will come.

Lessons I’ve Learned During this Career Moment

• Good things take time. They really do. And that time will make you appreciate them more.
  
• Only you know your signs of burnout and disengagement. Do a check-in with yourself regularly about how you really feel.
  
• Career growth isn’t just on you, it’s a network of people who advocate for and with you. Sometimes in order to ask for what you’re worth it’s going to be trusting those that they will help you get across the line. Make sure you’re surrounding yourself with the right people.
  
• Those mentors you love and adore? They are also growing.
  
• Blogging has long been part of my work journey. It’s why I often take a backseat here so I can excel at my corporate role, but it’s never left. In fact, it’s how I got here. There’s a lot to be said for letting yourself just enjoy something and see where it takes you.
  
• Growing your team and people management is hard , don’t take your 1:1s with leadership for granted and realize they aren’t just report-outs, but chances for you to ask how to grow and lean into where your role can be highly effective.

I asked for a significant raise with this promotion. Emboldened by the incredible Tori of HerFirst100K and many other financial feminists I follow, I asked for what I’m worth and bring to the table. And that’s where you have to trust someone else in getting it over the finish line what you started. I trusted my boss before, but in that moment she came back to me and told me I had it, I realized what had happened. The growth, the work, the all of it, went into that moment and she took it across the finish line.

As I talked about here, I like work. I really do. However, I am much more balanced and have stronger boundaries than I did when writing that post. The photos in this post are from one of the first in recent time I was truly out of office (OOO) to celebrate a friend’s fall wedding in Napa. I took off three days in a row. That was a huge step for me. Three days where I communicated I am not available.

I left behind the “you are irreplaceable” (which was never true). As well as, “you have to be available because someone else would be and can take your job.”

My mindset is simply this when it comes to taking off time,

“I am enough and I know I have set up my team with the right expectations from myself for what is supposed to happen.”

There’s a Quiet Ease Marking this New Chapter

I work harder than I have before, but with an ease that I didn’t have before. Maybe that’s part of the beauty of entering a new decade. The work I’m doing now is the strategy-setting thought development I wasn’t ready for before, but so desperately wanted to be. But I wouldn’t have known what to do with it had I been given this before. There’s something about 30 that has shifted. For the most part, it’s been a shift into being who I am to the fullest and what I’m now ready for.

It’s October 2021 and I’m already looking forward to planning my first ever spring vacation in 2022. I had a scarcity mindset that if I took vacation in the first half of the year something bad would happen and I wouldn’t have vacation days. So I starved myself mentally for an invisible prize I gave myself for burnout and being stressed about fighting for end of year time off with everyone else.

Working for someone who saw you at the beginning gives you a chance to see and measure the changes within and externally. There’s so much for me to improve on, but in this moment, I’m okay. I’ll get there. I don’t need to frantically search for it, because good things take time.

I don’t find it a coincidence the amount of work I had to do to get here. Not just career-wise but personally as well. I bring myself to work and don’t separate the two. Growing into the person I needed to be an life has aligned itself along with it. I can see the small and large steps to get here. Don’t count out those small choices to invest in yourself or ask life for what you want out of it.

You are your greatest investment. Treat yourself that way in your career, relationships, everything because I’ve learned it really does come full-circle.