The idea behind this vlog is to share my journey as I move from where I am in my career now towards something that brings me as much joy as this blog does.

This first vlog is already 2 weeks old, I had some trouble with finding editing software I could intuitively understand. Excuse the watermark! I will redo this video without it if people are interested in me doing more. It requires an investment of several hundred dollars, or to keep hunting for free software I understand!

I would love feedback on it (I was told not to look straight at the camera but it looks wrong to me for example!) and an indication of interest in more like this!

Please see below for an audio transcript:

Hi, my name is Fiona and I am the creator and author of the blog stepping out of your comfort zone where I interview people and share my own stories about stepping out of your comfort zone. Today what I wanted to talk to you about is why I created the blog, where I am in my career path at the moment and where I’d like to be. And the idea is that this vlog will be an ongoing story of how I move closer to where I’d actually like to be in my career. So I started the blog a in January this year, so about five months ago, as a result of reading some books by Dorie Clark. I recommend them if you haven’t read them. And also talking to a couple of people, my friend Mark Baker, and some people at work. What I was passionate about was sharing stories about stepping out of the comfort zone to encourage other people to do the same. I personally have found that when I step out of my comfort zone, that is when awesome things happen. And I hear lots of people nervous about doing that, they’re scared of failing. They don’t take risks. Lots of people do, don’t get me wrong, but there are people who don’t. And I feel like they’re missing out. So the idea of the blog was to say, Hey, good things happen out of the comfort zone. Why don’t you give it a try? Do something small, you know, walk a different way home, whatever it is, that step out of the comfort zone, and just see what happens. I wanted to originally do public speaking, but I’m a long way for being prepared to do that. So a blog was a logical place to start and then I worried I wouldn’t have enough stories. So the idea came up of interviewing other people.

I really love that idea but wasn’t sure other people would. Turns out when I asked lots of people were happy to share their stories and to my honour people actually thanked me in some cases for giving them a platform for sharing their stories. So it’s been really fantastic. When I was asked at a summit a couple of weeks ago, what I was passionate about, it wasn’t my day job. I love my day job, don’t get me wrong, but what I’m really passionate about is stepping out of my comfort zone and encouraging other people to do the same. So I talked to people about my blog, and then I talk to people about the fact that my blog was here, and my career was here. And I got some tips about how to bring those two closer together.

I don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. But my goal is definitely to bring the two of them closer together. And one thing that has happened to do that is, I have as of Monday, four days ago, started as a ways of working coach at Telstra, where work where I’ll be learning about coaching, facilitating training, also about agile, lean, DevOps and human centred design. Now, I think that’s an excellent first step towards my ultimate goal, which I’m not sure that’s what that looks like yet. But plan is I’ve next 12 months to learn all I can about all of those seven topics, particularly coaching, facilitating and training, and then also use that time to explore what I’d like to do next. What next step brings me closer to the passion that I find doing this blog. And what I plan to do is share that journey through this video log. So I hope that you enjoy it. I hope that over time I get closer to working out what next looks like.

Some of the suggestions have been a book, including some of the stories, which could lead potentially to speaking. That’s a very ambitious target for me right now. The other option is becoming a coach to encourage people to step out of their comfort zone. And that’s something that also has some real appeal. Whether enough people are interested in that just to make it a career, again, I don’t know. But the first step is to learn about coaching, facilitating and training and discovering if I do love them as much I think I’m going to, and working out what next and in the meantime, hopefully, building up some more readership on my blog, and maybe getting some new watchers/listeners via my video blog. Thank you very much for listening, and I will talk again next week. Thank you.