Last week, I was sitting in an office. A team meeting was scheduled. This is nothing new for me but everyday.For many years, however, I have been sitting in the middle of my colleagues for the first time , listening to the news our head told us. She did this well - in detail, but still concentrating on the essentials.
Subsequently, she collected the feedback of each individual. She also asked me if I felt picked up and well-informed. No one had asked me for a long time. And honestly, I have not missed it in this form either.
I was surprised that this really everyday situation still occupied me for quite some time. Yes, I had to nibble. Nice colleagues, interesting tasks, a boss who gave feedback and asked for feedback. So what was really my problem?
Now I was again part of a team, after many years of running teams, leading executives and management.
I have been an interim manager, consultant and business coach for six years, focusing on customer service and team development. At the beginning of my career, my professional contacts with a group have made sure that I could quickly get involved in international large-scale projects. However , it became increasingly frustrating for me to be a small cogwheel in a huge gearbox - without real responsibility, without really making decisions. I filled Excel tables, sat in meetings and had deadlines for power point presentations. Clearly, the company benefited from my expertise in the field of customer service, but creatively or innovatively I did not have to be.
When this order expired, I concentrated on medium-sized companies and found my place there. There was also a lot of pressure here to reach the targets for which you were hired, with achievable results. Yet this way of working was quite different. I became acquainted with a wide range of industries, took responsibility for acute problems, and temporarily led customer service teams until they had restructured and found a permanent management.
I was booked as a business coach due to my professional expertise in customer service and my additional qualification. My experience and my opinion were in demand and demanded. So I wanted to work: phase full of stress, but free in my time division. I was able to go to sports, attend network lunch meetings, and had my weekend trips to the most stressful travel times on Friday and Sunday evening. At the beginning of each year, I planned my further education, which was aimed at my interests.
In the last three-year period, however, this professional idyll got some serious cracks. It became clear to me that my personal development was also limited in this way of working, if I were to repeatedly optimize a customer service in a medium-sized company. That my social life was more and more reduced to the weekend and I lived the week out of the suitcase in a strange city (if I was lucky), because that with the three-day week was not realizable, though It was discussed in advance.
I became more and more aware that this " time against money " situation stressed me (old-age provision, build up reserves, increase sales!) And an increase in my merit in this way would be difficult or not at all realizable.
I had to find a new career path for me.
For a few months, the idea for a whole new business model, based on my professional experiences, which I have made in small and medium-sized enterprises, has been forming within me.
For years the dream of becoming a businesswoman has grown in me. I want to design myself. My own ideas fill with life and grow and thrive .
I would like to implement all the experiences I have gained, just as I think it is right. And now I have the right idea and thanks to already many conversations with potential wish customers also the confirmation that my idea will find their market and their customers.
From a small thought has become a big business model and I am looking for partners and a financing.
And now I was faced with the question of how to deal with all these personal changes, how to develop and drive my idea, and still earn my livelihood.
Since the company, which has always charged me over the last years, always stressed that they wanted to cooperate with me in the long term, the question of a temporary employment was quickly expressed. And a treaty lay before me on the table. I was able to set the basic conditions myself: limited to one year, partial home office (the company is located in another city), completely free time division, written commitment that I could continue to work freelance as a freelancer. Only the salary was unfortunately not negotiable.
With my signature, I had business cards and a fixed place in the organization chart, job title: project manager.
It does not change much for me, I thought. But something changed. Now I am involved in a hierarchy and have to adhere to rules that were not previously for me. I represent a company. And I have a supervisor, who in turn is under the management. There are instructions I need to keep.
Privately, I have a much smaller financial leeway, with which I have to come to terms every month and which limits my habitual lifestyle. In return, it is a relief not to have to pay the maximum amount (voluntarily) monthly to the statutory health insurance fund and my pension account is also after a lot of years again aufgestockt (juhu).
Part-time and Homeoffice are a challenge that I am still struggling with. I am focused on demanding projects by my employer, while it is itching in my fingers to drive my own company.
Perhaps I have just needed this situation to realize once again that this is not my professional future.
Despite many creative freedoms in my job, in spite of extremely nice colleagues and much contentedness, I become increasingly clear that I want to use my energy and my knowledge for my own topics. I want to create something of my own . Leave my personal traces on my and our street.
Perhaps it is actually pure "ego", which drives me.
Well, it is just the will to self-determination and self-realization. Is this something bad? Why am I just getting upset to want to set up my own project next to my very demanding part-time job? What drives me?
After a working week in my hired job I am just tired and exhausted. I give a lot and I have to actively try to fill these empty energy storage again. If I work on my own projects, it is so satisfying every time that I start the weekend with an incredibly fulfilled exhaustion. The euphoria and joy of every success, however small, gives me new strength.
Missions are hurting and depressing, but they only pull me down briefly - very quickly form a "now more", which makes me get up again and make further progress.
There is no Plan B.
If this still brief intermezzo as (re) employee something has already made quite clear to me, then that I can not imagine sitting the next 20 to 25 years in team meetings and let me tell of my opposite, where The company, for which I give my best every day. It is precisely this status that I want to design myself and proclaim myself . I want to be responsible for inspiring my own team and pushing our ideas into the world.
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