Having a Fear

Hi All!

It has been a long time since I posted but I have been facing a tremendous problem.

I have been working on a set of games since April and for the life of me, I couldn't finish.

I put working on the lists on my to do lists over and over again. I set deadline after deadline. I felt the guilt time after time as I continued to not finish, procrastinate, and not finish the games. When I would work, I would work on it piece by piece and spend too much time formatting or adding detail.

I could argue that I was pregnant and working all the way up to my due date (I could have waited for the two extra weeks it took her to come) and that was the reason.

I could have argued that I had a job, then a newborn, then family, and finally trainings for work, which distracted me from my task and occupied my time.

In truth, it was fear. It was fear about the quality of my products. Fear about the content. Fear about the reception. Fear about the criticism. Fear of failure.

This week, I decided to conquer that fear. Instead of clocking in and working from home (while on maternity leave -sigh-), I decided to take this week to complete this task and free myself from this burden and this guilt. Slowly, I completed the different levels of the games, compressed the folders, learned how to turn a pdf to a jpg, and saved all the files to their respective folders.

And then the moment came. It was time to upload the materials. I'll admit that I did spend another 3 hours this morning updated my teacher store and making new banners for my site. (Side note --> go to  Teacher Blogging Basics for tips and tricks. Her site is amazing!) While these things are helpful and necessary, I know them for what they are, another distraction tactic.

After it is all said and done, I took a deep breath and began to upload my work.

And it was...easy. It was effortless. It literally took me 10 minutes to upload all of the information. I felt so free. And so silly. All of the worry and anxiety over posting these materials seemed like such a waste of my time and of my life. With each subsequent material, I felt freer and it became so much faster the more levels I uploaded. All told, I completed over 1200 pages of work and material in about 15 hours of work. I literally spent over a hundred hours during this time worrying, thinking, tweaking, and living in guilt over these resources. That is way too much of my time spent living in fear and not living with joy.

The simple moral of the story is that I can't let fear and procrastination stop me from sharing my resources and sharing my gifts with the world. I have to push through these challenges and continue to do what I do best. I hope all of these efforts will be helpful to you and your students :)

Have you ever struggled with fear surrounding your materials? Please share how you dealt with it and any tips you have :)