confidence

I was recently meeting with my mentor and he opened our time together by saying "How are you doing? You seem well, you've seemed confident lately."

(If you're wondering, there's no better way to make someone feel confident then telling them they already appear confident!)

But it's true. There's a tiny part of me that wants to think "I must be missing something, then." But I can't make that stick. No, I'm not being arrogant.

There's a number of things I'm pretty pleased with lately as we enter the Christmas season.

I'm getting out of work earlier, closer to 5. Early on, I would go walking after work. It was exercise and decompression between home and work. And then when the weather turned, I'd do email and Google Reader. And it got where I was arriving home at 6 pm every day (work ends at 5). Which meant an hour with the children before they went to bed. Getting home earlier means more time to hang out with the children, especially Ben before dinner. This isn't always the case, but it's becoming more the case.


Our group is making great strides in its collaboration with another a couple of other groups.  I'm pleased with this because we're all better when we work together for common goals.

My own team is doing well. I'm missing one of my guys because he's been out on FMLA with his family welcoming the new baby, but he'll be back soon. My other guy's starting to see results on some of the initiatives he's held in his mind for a long time. It's cool to go back and see emails from 2-3 months ago where he outlined his vision and to see that actually coming into being now is cool. And I've got an offer out to a guy to fill one of my two open headcounts - that's cool.

My diet is coming along. I'm really close. It's tough this time of year, but thanks to Lori's help, I'm staying on track most days. Accountability is key - I'm emailing her my stats each day.  And my cheekbones are starting to show. That's cool.

We just built a 12-month budget. We've tracked our spending and income month-to-month before, but this is the first time we've forecast an entire year, month-by-month and quarter-by-quarter. I think it will be really good for us and I'm extremely encouraged.

My family is doing well. We're going to finally get Ben in to see a neurobehavioralist and Rachel's been doing well even without one of the medications she's been on for awhile. I still need to work at some of the stuff I wrote about last January, but just the fact that I now have this knowledge is excellent.

And I think I have Christmas shopping done. I need to lay it all out and wrap and see if anything's missing, but it feels good.

So I feel confident, I feel good. And then someone observes that I seem confident and it only serves to feed that. I don't mean to be cocky or arrogant, just feeling good, feeling right, feeling positive. It's a good feeling.

Must find opportunities to pay this forward.