Your Manager is Not a Fairy Godmother

The breaking point.

​I told my boss I wanted to go to grad school. It would add so much value to my work! She didn’t agree. There was work to be done right now — that had nothing to do with me going back to school. Well, crap. That was the moment I knew I needed to be my own fairy godmother.

Becoming my own fairy godmother meant knowing what my deepest dreams were and then making them come true. It meant giving myself the freedom to switch paths so that I could follow my heart and not be so focused on keeping everyone else happy.

​I knew what I wanted. And now I could either be miserable and blame her for not giving it to me, or I could just go get it myself. I didn’t need wands or pixie dust or the perfect wish...

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I just needed to be bold enough to create what I wanted most. For the record, a wand would have been a lot easier, BUT, part of success is the strength it takes to build what you want and not have it handed to you.

Even if you’ve got the best boss in the world, they can’t fully understand who you are and what you want. And if they just handed it all to you, you would miss the chance to grow strong and figure out life on your own terms. Trust me, you really don’t want a fairy godmother outside of yourself.

You can do this. You are more powerful than you give yourself credit for.

​So let’s try this today: what are three things that you really want out of your career? Write them down. Pick the one that feels the most exciting and see how you can take a baby step towards it (outside of your normal work life). Maybe you want to be a public speaker but you’re afraid of being in front of others. Your boss probably won’t ask you to speak on behalf of the company out of the blue, then, right? So what can you do? Go to toastmasters, take an acting class, take an improv class. Any of these will help you develop the skills you need to be comfortable in front of others. It starts small. If you begin this work today, you’ll show the world that you don’t need no freaking fairy godmother. You’ve got YOU and that’s enough.