This is a story about  personal leadership from events that took place on June 7th.

I’ve almost got a new web site “marketable.”  I start thinking about the supporting Facebook and Google Plus page I have to build.  I have to write a blog entry.  Wait, I’m doing it right now! I have to get all my profiles saying the same thing or at least similar things. I have a new affiliate to market for on the topic of leadership.  I do one day of marketing and then, “wham!” I work two 10-12 hour days in the restaurant I work in at night. I get an email from Twitter about a bunch of other people who want to talk about “leadership” and many of them I follow and admire.  Between the exhaustion of working a job working for someone else to a surprise email from Twitter with a bunch of other people who are leadership gurus of one sort or another.  Then it happens.  My day off arrives.  I have some time off and time that I can use to get to work on what I’m working on.

This is my “comfort zone.”  The A/C is out in my apartment and will be out for an unknown period of time.  I live in Atlanta and it’s June with a high in the mid 80’s.  Thank goodness it isn’t 95 degrees outside, but it’s in the 90’s in my little apartment.   A friend of mine says I need a new restaurant job and gets me an interview.  I spend the first day laying in bed and getting nothing done.  I’m too tired to read books or even concentrate.  Part of me thinks that my inability to focus might be from fatigue.

I try to figure out just why I want to go to the interview.  I would be essentially trading one restaurant/hotel job for a restaurant job…not what the glamorous people would refer to as “glamorous.”  It’s summer and the business conventions I rely on are dwindling for the summer.  I won’t be able to increase my income to the levels I need in order to meet some of my most daunting personal goals.  It’s my fifth summer in the same apartment and the fifth summer I complain about the heat in the summer.  A new apartment will require a 40% increase in income, which my first “boss” deems impossible.  The second job seems imperative.

In the meantime, I must get that last page of the web site finished.  I think about the two blogs that I have started, and the other 5 domains I have purchased that I haven’t had a chance to get started building the web sites for…or have I been ignoring the chance to get started.  Then, I think about my appetite dropping off.  I’m normally starving by now, but all I can do is think about what I must work on next…the long list of things I must work on next.  Thinking, but not doing.  I wonder why my appetite would drop out like that.  I think of the possible unknown reasons based on survival instincts.  I realize what the problem is. It’s not that I’m overwhelmed.  It’s that I’m scared to death.  My fight or flight mechanism is trying to kick in and I am stuck in the middle like a deer in the headlights.

I wonder about the deer in the headlights.  Why does it just stay there?  Here comes impending death and doom and all it does it just stand there.  Is it that it’s trying to see what is coming at it?  Is it terror?  Then I think about my “comfort zone” and why I’m in it.  It isn’t comfortable.  It’s hot and has a very uncertain future.  It looks like I’ll be working harder for someone else than for myself…but then again this is how I fund these projects working for myself.

What did I learn from this day?  My “comfort zone” isn’t comfortable.  When in doubt of what to do next, do something…DO ANYTHING!  The first step has led to the next step and that builds into a plan.  Just don’t stay staring into the headlights of potential disaster.