be more professional

I’m living in a house with three other adults and three children. I always heard you learn responsibility from your elders, so far I learned I’m the youngest of four adults and I feel like the only one showing any responsibility.

Weird how that happened.

I love my job for a lot of reasons. (that is so great to say) but one reason is because I’m required to dress professionally. I gotta say, I like dressing that way. It makes me really good about myself. :D

I’m slowly learning to be more professional. I hope working for this company will help me with this goal.

I’m 20 years old now and as my grandmother would say I need to “straighten up and fly right.” Well I can’t “straighten up” too much me being a lesbian and all but I can make an effort to be more professional and show that not everyone in my generation is all tattoos, piercings, weed and being lazy. Though I am a sucker for tattoos and piercings.

But that’s beside the point. I’m not about to be pushed into the group of lazy drugged out losers in my generation, I’m going to kick ass and take names. First step is to be more professional.

I am trying to be more professional, but I usually end up feeling awkward and inexperienced.

My current boss seems to be an expert at this. Often, in the military, when someone says, “be more professional”, we mean “don’t fly off the handle so much” or “be more ernest about things” and sometimes even, “just be serious for a moment”. When teaching cadets, the trick is to not fly off the handle at them, make sure they’re moving in the right direction and otherwise just stay calm, cool and collected. After all, ROTC is a process, not an end in and of itself. They MUST make mistakes in order to learn. The tough part, then, is allowing them to do so. My boss seems to have this preternatural ability to watch and not panic and not show frustration or anger. For that, I’m grateful. I tend to be more than willing to show emotion – anger especially. And, more often than not, whatever I grow angry over wasn’t worth being angry about.

I take some aspect from everyone I meet or work with. From this commander, I’m emulating his “watching, waiting, balancing.”

Learned last week that it is often better to withhold action until all sides of an issue are well known. In retrospect, I would not have changed much about what I did, although I would had a better concept of where I was going, goal-wise.