This week I threw myself out of my comfort zone.
I’m not a stranger to this place, in fact I actually quite enjoy being there.
I enjoy the pressure, the challenge and that overwhelming sense of achievement and pride if it goes well, or even the lessons you learn from failure.
Opportunities do not come every day, so when they are presented you should take them.
So, with that in mind, when a last-minute opportunity arose to host and present the Landscape Institute Awards, I thought “wow, ok this is a fairly big deal”.
This was a whole new challenge for me. I was responsible for setting the right atmosphere for the event and making sure the Landscape Institute’s vision came to life the way they had hoped.
I can deal with that kind of pressure though. I’m confident enough in myself that I can engage with an audience.
However, as I flicked through the brief I read “you will be reading from a cue screen” and immediately a cloud of anxiety engulfed me.
You might be shocked to know that reading out loud is not my forte.
Give me my own words and I am fine, give me an outline and let me wing it, I’m even better, but give me a script the night before that’s not written in my style and I PANIC.
I had never done anything remotely similar to this. I’d never had words moving as I read and, just to set the anxiety level higher, on a quick glance at the 23-page script there were a lot of foreign words and names I didn’t even know how to pronounce.
We all have a weakness or insecurity and I felt like mine was about to be torn right open.
When you’re presented with something like this it can go one of two ways and that is down to you as a person.
You either retreat and crawl back to the safety of what you know and pass up the opportunity, or you put your brave pants on, summon up some self belief (even if you have to fake it) and, most importantly, you don’t let the fear of unknown inhibit your potential.
In true Hannah style, I went with the latter option. I was unbelievably nervous, I but you have a choice as to how those nerves affect you — they either consume and overwhelm you, or they make you fight and work a little harder.
This week I learned a new skill, one that scared the hell out of me, but I tried it, it went amazingly well and the sense of achievement outweighs the nerves tenfold. So this is a reminder — if there’s an opportunity there, take it, because nothing grows in the comfort zone.
