I was reading through this Twitter thread a few days ago, and I’m still thinking about it.
To be honest, I feel like I’ve been going through the 5 stages of grief with this one. Like, for reals.
Shock & Denial
At first I was like NOOOOOOO people don’t do that! And I was kinda shocked and I kinda didn’t believe it. And I started thinking about all the like uber inspiring tweets in my feed all the time and how those totally inspire me to keep studying and learn and go to events and connect with people.
Pain & Guilt
And then as I thought more about it that night, I was like wait… do I do that? I post a lot of stuff about events and live streams and trailhead modules you should be doing. Even at work with my team, I have a whole slack channel devoted to learning and post in there every week with new modules and webinars and whatever I find. And by this point I’m starting to understand what Sara meant with her tweet.
Anger & Bargaining
And then I was like… but just because people post it (and just because I post it) it doesn’t mean you have to do it… like you do you, right?
Depression
And then I started thinking about how I have very little free time and I feel pressure to always be doing more trainings, write more blog posts, earn more certifications and go to more events because it seems like that’s what everyone else is doing. A lot of my peers have already surpassed me in terms of number of certifications and golden hoodies and mvp status. As it stands now, I do studying after I put the kids to bed, and usually in the middle of the night, when I should really just be relaxing and unwinding and binge watching HGTV or you know… sleeping. And I realized how I always want to go to Salesforce Saturdays but just can’t and I’ve always felt guilty about that.
Working Through It
I have big goals and I want to achieve them and this is how I make time for them… but would I do it differently without all the pressure from other people? I didn’t even think about how I even feel pressure from other people until I read this tweet. Do I need to complete every Trailhead module to meet my goals? Or do I need to go to every Salesforce Saturday and every Dreamin’ conference? Is there like one set path that we’re all supposed to be on to succeed in the ecosystem? And why do I do all this work stuff during my time off and not during working hours?
Acceptance
No. There’s not one path that anyone should follow to do anything. Something I was thinking about earlier when I was still working through this, was that I really need to remember that the majority of these events and modules and trails are asynchronous – they’re on-demand, and I can do them whenever I actually have time to do them. I don’t need to have FOMO about Salesforce Saturdays or attend every live Salesforce event so I can live tweet it and watch everyone else live tweet it. I need to have balance – something I’ve always always struggled with. I can draw inspiration from the people around me but their path doesn’t have to be my path. I need to remember that even though I love Salesforce… it’s actually still work, and who wants to work all the time?
And now that I’m thinking about this even more… this would be a wonderful topic for an upcoming user group meeting!
Force For Fun 
0 comments on “Setting Boundaries”