The first cat­a­lyst involved in my “trans­for­ma­tion” was my job. It could be said that the only rea­son this job was so sig­nif­i­cant is because I had never had such a job before. Perhaps things would be dif­fer­ent if I started my cur­rent career at a dif­fer­ent time, although the same could be said about the other two factors.

I was hired to work closely with one of two own­ers, a man with the drive, mind, wit, and per­son­al­ity to run one of the top com­pa­nies in the indus­try. I see myself as a tool, an exten­sion of his per­son, respon­si­ble for things that he doesn’t have time to do. By free­ing his time, the com­pany is able to grow faster, because his resources can then be put to bet­ter use.

My role is as a sort of sub­mis­sive. This works out well, because in (most of) the rest of my life I’m dom­i­nant. Like me, many sub­mis­sives at work are also dom­i­nants at home, and vice-versa. People want change from the every­day life of their career, and in fact, my sub­mis­sion in this role is what makes me a bet­ter dom­i­nant in oth­ers (more on this extremely sig­nif­i­cant point in the forth­com­ing part of this series).

I don’t have the per­son­al­ity to run a busi­ness, the way my boss doesn’t have the per­son­al­ity to work for some­one else. Our roles are clearly defined, and I’m much more pro­duc­tive as a sub­mis­sive in this sit­u­a­tion. It’s this pro­duc­tive­ness that has given me so much con­fi­dence. I know how good a worker I am, how inte­gral my role is in the com­pany, and how dif­fi­cult I would be to replace.

Relational roles aside, how­ever, there are sev­eral other fac­tors of my job that con­tributed to what I con­sider explo­sive growth. The respon­si­bil­ity I have was a big thing. As the only IT per­son there, I have to make sure that all our hard­ware and soft­ware is suf­fi­cient for what we’re doing. When the nature of the busi­ness changes, the upper ech­e­lon comes to me for a solu­tion, whether it’s upcom­ing VOIP imple­men­ta­tion to save on long dis­tance, wire­less track­ing of our pick-ups and deliv­er­ies, or some­thing as sim­ple as a server upgrade to han­dle the mar­ket growth.

Even things like mak­ing phone calls have changed me. I was never com­fort­able on the phone. Only a year ago, order­ing pizza was a dif­fi­cult thing to do, and Trolley can attest to this after get­ting him to call for me sev­eral times. The only expla­na­tion I could come up with for this behav­iour is that there are peo­ple on the other end, but I still can’t really make sense of this aside from poor self-confidence. All I knew was that my tele­phone shy­ness was a prob­lem. I got over it by forc­ing myself to make phone calls at work. After all, one does not stop a project at a tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion when one’s boss wants some­thing done. I still have my off-days, of course, when I avoid mak­ing calls alto­gether, but those are few and far between.

Not only has my job sparked a change in me, it’s paved a way for other growth as well. Even finan­cially speak­ing, I now have the free­dom to pur­sue my other goals and hobbies.

Every day I work, I’m thankful.

The Trinary Maturity Series

1. Introduction
2. The Job
3. The Girlfriend
4. The House
5. (In)Conclusion