Meet 
If you’re like me, you have a rough vision of yourself in the future. Not necessarily what job you will hold, but a sort of essence of the kind of employee, perhaps manager, and overall person that you’d like to be. While it’s always good to have a vision like this to aspire to, it can also be incredibly frustrating when we don’t measure up right this minute. I see “Me of the Future” (MotF) as someone with a lot of answers, experience, and knowledge; someone who is approachable yet firm, experienced without being inflexible, and who speaks up with confidence. I wouldn’t say this is a representation of who I am today, and I tend to look back at my days and weeks disappointed, feeling I’ve missed the mark.
But what I always have to remind myself is that MotF is in the future. No one expects an engineer with just over a year’s experience to have more answers than questions, so why do I? At least weekly, I have to do some sort of reality check with myself that all of the people that I aspire to emulate started from this same place of inexperience. We have to let ourselves off the hook for not being able to act like we have 15-20 years of experience when we’ve got less than five!
The key, I’ve found, to manifesting MotF and someday making that vision a reality is to allow yourself to be where you are and set small, reasonable goals. For instance, one of my small goals is to learn everything I can about air systems at compressor stations. I want to be the one-stop knowledge base for all things air. I’ve given myself about six months to accomplish this, and have set out milestones for each month that will help me get there. I also try to do one thing a week that scares me. It could be speaking up in a meeting, or submitting work that I fear might not be perfect. I’m embracing my place of inexperience and seeing it as an opportunity to shape the future in any way that I want.
All of these very manageable steps are laying the groundwork for me to look back and wonder why I was ever worried in the first place.