Once bitten….

Or as the case may be for me this week - once burnt, twice shy!  Ever since I burnt my arm with boiling water this week during the art of tea making (well actually my husband burnt my arm with slapdash tea stirring, I know! Outrage!) I have been nervous of making cups of tea. For a tea addict this is a serious, life hindering issue. I may have to go under urgent and prolonging psychotherapy to resolve this or there is a very real danger that life may no longer be worth living.

But what this has made me realise (very handily, for blog writing purposes) is how easy it is to carry this fearful attitude in other areas of life. I like to think I’m pretty brave, not in a lion taming, sky diving way (I’m not mental, you know) but in that I go for opportunities as I see them, I don’t hold back on what life has to offer (unless it’s lion taming or sky diving). But now that I have some really exciting opportunities ahead of me I’m realizing that where I’ve gotten a bit burnt this year I really am feeling a bit shy.

So I’ve been mulling over ways to rectify this. Confidence is so important when taking on new challenges, particularly creative ones where you have to put your ideas out there and not crumple into a ball of human goo when people don’t like it (a challenge, I can tell you). For a brief moment I considered becoming one of those people who yells affirmations at themselves in the mirror.

N -  Go for it, Nicola! You’re a winner! You’re book is awesome, it rocked my world!

I don’t know why I have to be an American cheerleader on E numbers to do this, but there we are. The mind wants what it wants. Ultimately I realised that I couldn’t maintain my respect for myself if I became one of those people, so I mentally meandered over to plan two – some sort of holiday. The danger here is that with time to think I may sink deeper into my fear pit and end up wading into the murky waters of reminiscing so I would need some kind of preppy, motivational element to the holiday to be certain that this would be successful. Luckily before signing up to a cheerleading, lion taming holiday a friend of mine assured me that the strengths that I have are still there even if I’ve been bashed around a bit workwise in the last year and I think that’s true.  So I have decided to go easy on myself and trust that my positive, creative, bouncy self is just waiting for an outlet and I’ll be back on full form before you know it. So to celebrate my new found confidence in confidence I am drinking a cup of tea made confidently. There! Have it world!