As open as I am, I am equally cautious to exposing too much too soon.  This blog is my muse.  A place for me to express my inner most thoughts and to get somethings on paper that I have been holding in.  I come here to educate and to memorialize my feelings at particular moments.  I go back and read some of my own passages as if I wasn’t the person who wrote those words.  Once I release something onto paper, I usually forget about it and move on.  I have 14 drafts of posts that I have not completed or have chosen not to share.  I am telling my story, the best way I know how, but I know that the world will never know my full story because I am only comfortable with sharing certain pieces of it.

A friend posted a question about successful people on Facebook.  He asked if successful people were honest and transparent or calculating and cloaked.  I responded by saying that successful people are calculated and cloaked because being honest and transparent can leave you vulnerable for an attack.  This is something that I have learned in life and I did not understand as a young professional. I started my first real job out of college prior to graduation.  I was young, optimistic, and extremely outspoken.  I hid very little and commented on way too much.  I  build relationships easily through conversation, but towards the end of my 3rd year, those relationships started to bite me in the behind.

People judged me off of the relationships I had with many of the people on my unit.  The doctors felt comfortable enough to talk to me in a way that extended beyond professional etiquette.  My plans to progress were stunted because they didn’t want my voice in a place of influential power.  I reminded them of so many people who had come before me and they openly told me so. I could not understand why people would not want me to progress.  I came to work everyday, I stayed over, I worked anyones off-shift, I picked up extra hours often and actively loved what I did.  I realized many years later that I shared too many pieces of me and for that, I was punished.

I want to come onto my blog and share so much, because I know that it will help someone who is where I am or is where I was.  But I desire to be successful, so I have to always be truthful and extremely real but in my sharing, I must be calculated and cloaked on my content.  I have received some backlash for a post that I wrote, but I knew that post would elicit such a reaction and I did not care.  My strategy is not one of dishonesty but of planned progress.  This blog will go as far as I allow it to go, but I will not let anything that is shared here be the tool used for my demise.

Be two steps ahead and know your opponents well.  Be you.  Do you.  Tell your own story.  On your own terms.