Mon. 7/6/2009 (4:23 PM MST)
I woke up with a splitting head ache (probably from a late night last night) and worked from home from my Ancestry.com web developer job – I am thankful they allow me doing this periodically. For those of you who are wondering, I work at Ancestry.com on the search UI. That’s UI as in user interface, as in the stuff you see while you are using the website, such as the search pages where you can type in first and last name and more, search results page, and the image viewer page, just to name a few. I am blessed to have such a terrific form of employment and wonderful group of people to work with.
I am an optimistic person. I believe in myself. However, today was one of the few days where I had to fight the age old battle against discouragement and depression. It happens to the best of us. I am not immune to it. Let me share with you why I was discouraged.
I am trying to find success in a field that I’ve only recently begun studying (as in just over a year now). I am 31 years of age as of this blog post, and so I am somewhat of a late bloomer. I look at the success of Anthony Robbins and Wayne Dyer as the benchmark to measure myself against. This is a huge benchmark, and of course where I am now, it is nowhere near what they have achieved.
As I brainstormed my first service, I thought of personal appointments to individual homes. I thought of offering personal training, nutritional guidance, pep talks, access to my website, a pamphlet of useful information, weekly emails, and more. I thought about doing this as a $75.00 package, and for each individual visit after that, for just personal training and general guidance and advice for $50.00 an hour. The discouraged part of me said, “Nobody is going to pay you – you have no experience, just forget it.” As I began to dwell on the negative I really had to slap myself in the face hard.
This is how spiraling depression happens. It’s something that runs in my family. We get depressed for a while, then flickers of excitement and then back into depression. Thankfully I’ve been able to reverse this to where I only have rare days where depression hits – and I can recognize it as in today. What did I do? I took action. I went to work and stopped dwelling on what might go wrong or might not work. I started focusing on how talented I am, and how there are so many people in the world who need my services and if I can just reach them, they will be benefited greatly. That’s the key everyone. Fight depression with action and enthusiasm. Do it. Do not spend another second in self pity. Action and service trump depression.
And so it is, I continue to move forward with determination and faith. I am excited for the opportunity and challenge that lay ahead!