Fly alone to another country

Last week I volunteered to be game day photographer for my local American Football team, what the hell was I thinking! First game tomorrow afternoon.

Posting poetry on my facebook. Sparking up conversations with people. Idk, I lack confidence in general but slowly improving at it

3-minute thesis competition; I made it to finals. Other people in my dept had been trying for years and only made it to finals after years of practice. That was my first rodeo. Of course I lost to a cancer researcher

Walk in on a meeting with own and foreign staff and your scientific opponent is there staring at you and you take the opportunity to directly address him before you sat down and make it clear who is the boss. He loved me for that. Some people are conditioned to only respect "male" alpha-gorilla habits.

Doing job interviews. For a normal person that's no big deal, for me, I had to be out of my friggin mind. I passed a couple of them.

I've given talks for over a 100 people, that's about it - for me though, it wasn't really about confidence so much as making my subject matter interesting and keeping an audience that was forced to be there engaged - THAT is the hard part

Oh and I guess talking to like models and shit, but again for me that isn't really about confidence so much as me just not caring much - maybe that comes across as confidence, good for me I guess

Went into teaching? Got married? Had children? All of that shit scared me..Terribly. Honestly, how have I gotten this far? 🙀

The national high school exam - which is used for uni admission here - back in 2021.

It didn't require confidence, per se, but I can say from experience that it's much more important than just having the knowledge if you want to endure 6 hours of taxing mindwork for a sufficiently high score.