…I’d been pacing up and down in my cubicle for the last 20 minutes. My hands were sweating and my mind was racing at a million miles a minute.
“This is never going to work!”
The words continued to resound in my head like a broken record.
“Shut up! It will work. It all makes sense on paper, stop being such a wuss!”
Some positive self talk to help calm myself and shut out the fears that had all decided to bombard my logical self all at once.
The mental load of the fears I thought I had answered before was overwhelming and I was sure that I wasn’t going to go through with it despite my logical mind telling me that I had done all the leg work and reduced any risks to myself and my job to near zero.
Just then in the midst of the chaos, I heard a question I had asked myself many times before.
“What is the worst that could happen?”
As if responding to this ethereal voice from nowhere, my lizard brain began yelling back with all the reasons I had heard so often before about why I would fail.
“YOU’LL GET FIRED! IT WON’T WORK! NO ONE HAS DONE IT BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE! YOU’LL EMBARESS YOURSELF! COME ON GET REAL AND GROW UP!”
Suddenly out of nowhere I feel something hit me. Stunned, I spin around half expecting to see my boss huffing and puffing while holding a bat and realized that I had slapped myself.
My subconscious self had had enough of my whining at decided to take action before I had a heart attack. Get a grip, it was telling me, and stop being such a whinny b***h.
Sitting back down in my chair, I take a deep breath and look at the paper I had been clutching in my hand the entire time. By now it was already soaked in sweat; however the words still read clearly and outlined all the reasons why I could and should telework.
I was dumbfounded as to why I was still fearful even though I answered every single fear that I could possibly think of regarding asking to telework.
Realizing that this fear would not go away and that I was as ready as I was ever going to be, I take a deep breath and head on over to my bosses office. Knocking on his door, I walk in and shut the door behind me.
“It’s all or nothing.” I tell myself quietly as I head over to his desk…
…20 minutes later I’m in my car on the way home. I reach a red light and stop. Staring at myself in the rear view mirror, my heart is still racing.
I can’t believe what has just happened.
The sound of impatient horns behind me stir me from my daze and I see the traffic light had turned green.
I drive off waving apologetically at the people behind me who felt it prudent to return the gesture by speeding past my car with engines reving and fingers waving.
I can’t help but smile.
Then again, I hadn’t been able to stop smiling for the last 30 minutes.
It’s true what they say about overcoming fears to do the impossible.
It feels marvelous.
If by now you still aren’t convinced that teleworking is possible, you need to take the time to understand your fear of teleworking. This for me, I feel is probably the most difficult step, not because it is HARD to do, but simply because most people naturally do not like focusing on things that make them uncomfortable.
Alright, so let’s get started on the exercise to help you overcome (or at least minimize) your fear of teleworking.
Right now, I want you to have a pen and paper in front of you (or if you’re fast with typing, your computer) and write at the top of the sheet in capital letters, “WHAT IS THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN IF I CHOSE TO TELEWORK”
I want you to read this statement aloud to yourself and then and fast as possible, write down every single answer you can think of whether it is logical or not. Here is an example of some of the things I had written:
- I will lose my job
- I won’t get promoted
- I won’t be as productive
- Everyone will hate me
- My parents would never approve
- I will ruin my relationships with my colleagues
- I’ll have more responsibilities
- It’ll be harder to manage my time
- I will feel more stressed
- I’ll will end up working more instead of less
This part was particularly hard for me because for a long time I was afraid to even start. I realized that the reasons themselves weren’t the problem, it was the fear of having to analyze those reasons and discover that there might not be any solutions that was really scaring me.
I realized however after writing them that I was able to come up with simple solutions for each of the reasons. For the illogical reasons, or the reasons that I knew shouldn’t be holding me back required me to reassess my reasons for wanting to telework in the first place.
Remember the sheet that you wrote at the start of the book covering all the reasons you want to telework. Go back to that, reaffirm to yourself why you want to telework so badly and also recall that it is ok if all of these reasons are for personal fulfillment.
At the end of the day, your goal is to become an effective and valuable employee as well so that the company loses nothing and gains a lot from giving you what you want.
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
