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New Job

So I have a new job--Marketing and Coaching Coordinator at an Independent Financial Firm, starting at end of June. It's a very good salary. It's got the potential to be anything I can make it (there is NO marketing department now--I'm creating as I go). It has the potential to be a train wreck. It's funny, because it's the kind of job that I sort of expected an Amherst degree to provide me when I graduated. Not that I expected this salary straight out of college, but I expected to be considered for this kind of renaissance position, a little writing, a little design, a little management, a little planning and coordination--liberal arts, in other words, and of course, there really were no positions like that going or company's willing to take chances on untried talent--at any salary. Or none that I was able to find. Of course, I'm over 10 years out of school and I've done lots of things that give me added value, but I'm actually not that "tried" in this thing I'm being hired in--ostensibly marketing. I did get this job in the way that they describe when you go and talk to the career counselors. I got it through my network. It wasn't a posted position. It's sort of being made up by me and the boss as we go. Weird.
I'm really pretty scared. There's parts I'm looking forward to and think I'll be fine at. There's parts that I've always thought I could/should do and have never really been given a chance. There's parts I have no clue and it could all be different when I get there. That is, I think I should create the brand and I may get there and discover that they're planning to outsource that to a design team and I'll just be coordinating and liaising. There is a part of my brain that worries that I won't actually be able to do it now that I have the chance (write, for instance) or will be only mediocre at it--I think I'll be functional. What's funny is that I attended the last day of their conference on Friday (since I do know I'll be largely responsible for organizing the next one in the fall) and they had a speaker who is a licensed psychotherapy hypnotist, and he talked at length about believing in a better vision of yourself. Do you say it with your conscious brain but undermine it in your subconscious? The example he gave was Oprah Winfrey gaining and losing the same 40 pounds because she secretly believes herself to be a fat woman. I believe I can do it, and yet somewhere deep in side I really doubt that people should listen to me at all.
What's equally interesting about this is that I had already considered going to a licensed psychotherapy hypnotist, a friend of a friend, to stop talking myself out of things.

I am terribly afraid of letting people down and of being let down. What I hated most in high school was team projects because I feared a) I'd be responsible to all those people and b) I'd end up doing most of the work. And then I chose theater where one is always in a team, always having everyone counting on your work and being reflected by your work (as opposed to being only responsible to yourself--if you fail only you are standing there humiliated) and depending on everyone else to be really good as well (which doesn't always happen esp. in my level of theater or, as far as I can see in any.) I find I turn things down that I probably could do, or bizarrely assure people that I can do things that turn out to be beyond my level. Case in point--those two damned costumes. Worked on them all day yesterday--probably about 9 or 10 hours. Wasn't happy with them and the client wasn't happy either. I only charged him for 7 and apologized like a loon. Now here's the really stupid piece. I don't know that anyone could have done what he wanted in the time allowed without more meetings and discussions--and certainly not at the rate I was charging. I did tell him that, but I don't think he was convinced and I'm pretty sure will not be calling me for any more work--and I feel terrible about that, at the same time that I really don't want to do that kind of work. Gah!!!

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