This morning I am feeling a lot of mixed emotions and I am having racing thoughts. I am trying to calm them down so I put my headphones on and I am going to listen to some new age music written by Kitaro, a Japanese musician. I found listening to Kitaro after work helped me to calm down significantly. I feel excitement, fear, and maybe a little anger all at once. I am naturally excited to meet my mentor to help get a small business started. I thought I was feeling optimism but I think I am just more excited about trying something new.

At the same time that I feel excited, I also feel fear because of uncertainty and fear of failure. I still have failure in mind as a negative. In the context of business, failure is not negative but a learning experience. All entrepreneurs meet with some failure and success is never a linear progression; always ups, downs, and setbacks. I think the first step is to come up with some sort of business plan and get the ideas swirling in my head onto paper. I’d like to convert these ideas to opportunities.

I also feel a lot of anger and it is quite possibly self-directed. I am angry at myself for being so intractable when I tried to start businesses before in the past. I always just tried to do something in IT but it was a folly. The managed service provider space is really crowded. It’s a shame that it took a mental health inpatient experience to have an epiphany about what it really is that I want to do: teach and mold the next generation of IT pros.

While I was inpatient, the idea came to me in a flash and it seemed exciting but I was dominated by fear of getting started. I was afraid of failing yet again. Now here we are 8 months later and I am taking an actionable first step. I have to create a to-do list. I think if I did this, it might stop some of the swirling thoughts.