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