I’ll be honest. I get bored in a job, and that is a killer for me. As soon as I get bored, I start giving less to a job, and start looking for another.

Yes, it is important that I like the people I work with. But for me, there is one thing that a job must have to keep me on my toes. I call it my moment of panic. Now for someone who struggles with anxiety, panic is normally something I like to avoid. But in this case, it is an indication that my job is not boring, and is actually challenging me.

My moment of panic is usually “Shit, I have no idea what I just did/what to do/what the hell is going on.” This moment of panic makes me question if I am good enough for the position I am in. Usually this is followed by furious googling, and trying to look like I know what I’m doing so others don’t realize I just broke something.

This used to scare me, I used to be afraid that these moments of panic meant I wasn’t good enough for my job, and if anyone found out I would be fired. Then the more I thought about it, these were my challenges, the times I got to learn something new, or prove to myself that I was capable of handling things on my own.

At the time that I learned this, I worked as an IT Supervisor at a large theme park. The job title was a little misleading, as I barely had any type of training or experience, and little to no power to do things. We had corporate offices that held the power, and were our first line of defense, should there be something we didn’t know. When I first started, I would immediately call them if I didn’t have the answer to a question, or something went down. After awhile, I realized that the answers they were giving me, I could probably have come up with or searched out on my own (thanks google!). So I took to the large whiteboard in my office and wrote in big letters on the top…

DO NOT PANIC! IF YOU FEEL THE URGE TO CALL CORPORATE, TAKE A BREATH AND WAIT 10 MINUTES

I figured that, barring an entire park network outage, 10 minutes was an acceptable amount of time to give myself on an issue before crying out for help. It turned out that taking a breath and giving myself a chance to figure it out myself not only challenged me, but gave me this awesome sense of accomplishment for figuring it out. I also got recognized by our corporate offices for my growing abilites.

I wanted to write this post as an intro to a new series I want to start that I will be tagging “My mMoments of Panic”. I believe this will be useful for me to feel good about what I learned, share new things I’ve learned, and remind myself of how far I have come.

Stay Tuned…First Moment of Panic coming to a blog near you soon!