Your career is full of difficult decisions, difficult conversations, and moments that will be built with anxiety and stress that you'll never forget.
I'll never forget the first person I terminated. I'll never forget the first time I had to do layoffs. I'll never forget the first time I royally screwed something up with a client and had to fix it. I'll never forget the first time I really screwed up with my boss or my team and had to apologize.
My first budget cycle, my first crisis time in a company, my first failures, etc.
It happens; it's not fun to go through, but unfortunately it's all part of your career.
The thing I've learned through all of my years of experience dealing with difficult moments is that the sun still comes up the next day, people move on, and life still continues.
We can build these moments up as being so scary, so difficult, and it can create so much anxiety that we just about pass out from it all.
I'm here to tell you that the more you go through these moments on either side of the table, the stronger you become.
Eventually, you start to realize that the anticipation is often worse than the actual moment. You spend two days rehearsing the conversation in your head, imagining every possible reaction, convincing yourself that everything is about to blow up. Then the meeting happens. It sucks. You get through it. You walk out of the room, and somehow the world is still spinning.
That doesn’t mean you become numb to difficult things. I actually think the opposite happens. You understand the weight of them better. You know how much certain conversations can impact people. You know what it feels like to sit across from someone who is scared, angry, disappointed, or hurt. Experience doesn’t make those moments easy. It just makes you better equipped to handle them.
You also learn that avoiding the difficult thing almost always makes it worse. The conversation you keep putting off gets heavier. The mistake you hope nobody notices becomes harder to explain. The decision you refuse to make creates more problems around it. There is rarely some magical version where ignoring the uncomfortable thing causes it to disappear.
So you learn to walk toward it.
You make the call. You own the mistake. You apologize. You tell someone the truth. You make the decision you know needs to be made even when you know someone is going to be pissed off about it. Then you deal with whatever happens next.
I think this is one of the biggest differences between someone early in their career and someone who has been through some shit. Early on, every difficult moment feels like it could define you forever. Later, you realize most moments are exactly that. Moments. They matter, you learn from them, and then another Tuesday eventually shows up.
There will absolutely be times when you get it wrong. You’ll say something badly. You’ll make the wrong call. You’ll trust the wrong person. You’ll make a decision with the information you have and later realize you should have gone the other direction. That’s part of becoming experienced.
Experience is basically a giant collection of things you would do differently if you got another shot.
So when that next difficult conversation or decision shows up, and your stomach is in knots, remember that you’ve probably survived something like it before. If you haven’t, this might simply be the experience that makes the next one easier. The sun is still going to come up tomorrow. You’ll still have emails waiting for you. Life will keep moving. And eventually, so will you.
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