From terror to confidence - aka 'feel the fear and do it anyway'

It's weird how our brains work isn't it?

Just a week ago I was sitting in a state of panic (to the point of tearing up) at the thought of the impending parental leave of my senior developer (which will leave me in sole charge of development work on our team for 4 months).

As a Bank Holiday week, I've had only 2 days in the office, but for the first time in a long time, we sat down with the system in front of us and worked on some simple changes TOGETHER.  I'll come back more to that capitalisation in a later post, but I think that exercise, and addressing some of the main kinds of change that I would be expected to deal with in the next few months, made a massive difference in the confidence I have that I won't simply drown the second the senior goes on leave.  I have another 3 days left with him this week, so I am hoping for more of the same.

I also think that doing a mental 'brain dump' here on the blog is kind of cathartic, if it's out here on screen then it's not whirling in my brain so much.

So strangely, in the course of a week, I've managed to go from 'argh!' to 'bring it on!' - yeah I am still scared, it's a big unknown, but the actual worry is above my pay grade... more on that one soon too.