I dropped my kids off at school this morning, for their first day of seventh grade. It’s their second year of middle school and so much of the apprehension from last year around new buildings and new classrooms is gone. Instead, it has been replaced with a new chorus of “what-if’s” and unknowns that lead to early morning stomach aches and that slightly crazed, super excited, what’s going to happen today look in their eyes. Watching them walk into school this morning I realized something profound, at least to me.
We’re ALL still in seventh grade, even as adults. Check this out…
What if I can’t get my locker open? Walking up to your locker, every time for the first few weeks, it felt like all eyes were on you as you rolled the lock right and left to enter the numbers… 42, 39, 3… I think that’s… and everyone is looking at me… Sixty seconds later and after three or four or eight valiant tries, you were still locked out. Everyone was watching, the halls were full of people, and you were the kid who couldn’t open his friggin’ locker. Not only were you locked out, but your friends had left you to head for class, and now you were going to be the kid who walked in late, embarrassed and defeated by your Stanley combination lock. We’re adults now, but it still feels sometimes like everyone is watching us, and we’re still scared to death that we’re going to embarrass ourselves.
What if they don’t like my clothes? Am I wearing the right shirt? Are these shoes cool? Did I lace them the right way? Is this color even in style this year? I wish I had Jordans… There’s still pressure as a professional to fit in, sometimes clothes-related, sometimes not. We need to look the part and act the part in meetings and at our desks, maintain our image, and for some of us we’re still trying to figure out if we picked the rights shoes to be cool.
What if I can’t keep up? So much homework, all my activities, and then keeping up with those friends who may or may not like me… I can’t do it all! We’ve all felt like this in our careers. We have roles and responsibilities, to-do lists and tasks, email reminders and calendar notifications, all to keep us on track. Sometimes, in the midst of all the controlled chaos, we feel like our seventh-grade self who was frazzled trying to keep up with their vocab words, science fair projects, and cross-country practices. How are we going to get it all done?
What if they don’t like me? I mean, they were my friends last year, and I think they like me, but maybe they met someone more interesting over the summer… It’s the same feeling some of us get when we walk into a networking event and have to strike up conversations with complete strangers. What if they don’t like me? What if they see someone more interesting to talk to? What if I’m not good enough?
The voices in our heads bombard us with “what-if’s” all day long. They’re the same voices that we battled in seventh grade, but now they’re grown up like us. Here’s the thing that I wish I had known in seventh grade though… We’re ALL battling voices like these. Our “what’-if’s” may not be exactly the same as our coworkers, or clients, or the person we’re walking up to at a networking event, but we all have them. They’re unique to our own insecurities, and the only way to muster through them is to come up with our own comebacks. Not necessarily “I’m rubber, you’re glue…” but simple reminders to ourselves that we’re enough. “I CAN keep up.” “They WILL like me.” “I AM worth talking to.” “I CAN get my locker open!”
The Takeaway
We’re all still in seventh grade, at least a little bit, no matter how put together we act. So show a little grace to the new sixth graders in your office, pick up someone’s books when they drop them, and sit with a kid at lunch that’s all by themselves. Whether you’re twelve, twenty, or forty, you’re still a seventh grader.
