CHANGE PLEASE

I’m in a coffee shop somewhere in London. It’s called Change Please, which feels a bit like an instruction on how to buy coffee, but is also one of my most frequent prayers, so I went with it.

I’m not a fan of London. It’s loud and confusing, and there’s traffic everywhere. Red buses, black taxis, and all manner of shiny cyclists come at you from all directions. There are beeps and boops and honks and engines, all set to a background of everybody trying to get everywhere all at once, all the time. I need a slightly calmer life.

I’m here for a meeting that hasn’t started yet. I’m early, so I’ve taken advantage of the few minutes I have, to get my head together and cool down. I need a lot of confidence today - I’m meeting my colleagues for the first time, and I’m suffering from a fresh wave of imposter syndrome - they are all so competent, so experienced, so diligent!

Somehow I have to believe that the only thing that separates me from them is time, and not the fact that I’m about as technical as a hairbrush. Well, that’s not true - I am technical, it’s just that my techniques, my experience, my knowledge exists in a world that they either don’t know, or don’t think they need. That’s the bridge I have to cross - and it’ll be a lot harder to blag my way across it in the next three hours of ‘Documentation Strategy’ live and in the room.

Change Please, eh. I wonder if it’s prophetic. Not that I want to duck out of this job and go back to the shallows. It’s more that internal change I need - the change that helps me be a better technical author, a growing engineer (if that’s what I am) and a more rounded colleague. I have to do that, and I think I have to at least show that I can do that today.

Plus, I think I have to change the perception as well, so that somehow my jigsaw piece looks like it fits the gap left by their puzzle - even if it doesn’t.

So, tea drunk. I’m going in. The thing about asking for change is that it finds you anyway; the only thing I can do is be adaptable to it, and then thankful for every opportunity it brings. I just hope I don’t get embarrassed or humiliated in the process.

Oh well. Here’s to a little confidence.