Taking the Leap of Faith
Everything I’ve set out to do has led up to this point. All of my effort, dreams, goals, aspirations, whatever you want to call them, have led me to the decision I just made. I put in my notice with my job as a flight attendant. I’ve talked about this decision for a long time but never knew when I’d actually follow through with it. Obviously, it was a very hard thing to do, but the fact that I feel no regret tells me all that I need to know.
I know a lot of people who wish they could work for themselves, myself included. It’s a nice thought, but I don’t think a lot of people realize just how hard that is to do. It took me years to get to this point where I’m confident enough to make that choice and take the leap of faith, but that doesn’t mean I’m not scared or a little anxious about it. It’s a huge adjustment for someone like me who likes stability and knowing how much money I’ll be making every month. When you decide to go your own route and be your own employer, you can’t always guarantee how much you’ll make every month, and I hate that I’m talking this much about money, but in the world right now, everything is expensive and not getting any cheaper, which makes finances among the first things in your mind when it comes to your job. At the end of the day, I realized that I was getting more and more depressed going to work. I enjoyed my job in the beginning, but that faded quite quickly. Being a flight attendant has its perks, but it also has its disadvantages, which for me started to outweigh the perks.
When you have big goals like me that include publishing books, creating merchandise lines, getting on tv shows, and more, you will reach a point to where none of that is possible if you aren’t giving your business ventures and endeavors 100% of your time. I tried to make 2 jobs work as long as I could. I tried to fly as little as possible and pour the rest of my time into my business and content so I could keep growing, but I have to say that it didn’t work well. It allowed me to get a little more off the ground, but if I am to be successful and grow online, it takes all of my time and energy. Adding merchandise and dessert orders to that only requires more time and effort, because for now, that’s how I’ll make the most money. I’ll have to do more. I can’t do more if I have another job taking my time away, especially when that job requires me to go somewhere else for however long.
A lot of this is a big mental game as well. When we want something, we focus on it. When we go somewhere that hinders our ability to focus on what we want, it affects the process. Even though I flew a lot less this year in order to have time for my own work, it made the process less effective, because I got comfortable saying that if something fell short or I needed more money that month, I could just work a couple flights to make up for it. That is not the mindset to have if you’re trying to grow a business. If you’re short and need money, find a way to sell more, do more, make that extra money. It creates a very specific mindset and thought process that becomes more and more helpful over time, because you become completely business oriented and learn firsthand what works for you. This is no hobby of mine; this is my career. Having published one cookbook and appeared on one TV show and a news segment already, I’d be insulted at this point if someone called this a hobby.
In the end, I’m still confident in my choice. It’s scary, but it’s the right thing to do. This will allow my mind to focus solely on my goals and figure out exactly what’s necessary to reach them. I am determined to make this work. Life is too short to not at least give it a shot. There’s no looking back, because that will only make me second guess myself, and I didn’t work this hard for that.
