The more I research PR and communications, the more excited I get about doing PR as a career. I kind of feel silly for it because part of me thinks if I was really meant to work in PR, I would know it already… but then I think: how could I have possibly known I was meant to work in PR?
In a couple hours I’m going to Scarborough for a photo shoot and interview for an article I’m writing on Jenny and Diane Paty, sisters who are also band leaders at Caribana (carnival in Toronto). But right now I’m finding myself reading as much about what PR is as possible. Luckily, so much information is available on the internet. Nearly all my questions about the program I’ve applied to (find out in a week!) and working in PR have been answered by more visits to Centennial’s blogs. On the program blog, there are articles just on what the grads are doing–all of it is very exciting and makes me giddy about the opportunities and possibilities.
But I can’t ignore this anxious, excited feeling I have writing the Caribana story for Sway magazine. I feel scared because I worry about the whole thing falling apart (I’m writing two stories) and then I would have let a lot of people down. I also worry about damaging whatever little reputation I have. From what I’ve read about public relations and communications, the whole job is about ‘being responsible’; writing press releases, organizing events, creating communications plans (don’t really know what that means), all of it amounts to huge responsibility, and, I worry, huge chances for failure. It’s the total opposite of an environment like a call centre where a team of people are responsible for reaching certain goals.
So it’s all scary. And I’m tempted to just run away–leave everything behind and go hide in a call centre where if I make a mistake, the ‘team’ can cover it up. But I will not. I’m working on changing my mind in to going towards what scares me rather than running away from it. If you hide from what scares you, you’ll always be running scared. On the other hand if you go for what scares you, you grow as a person. I’d rather run on a treadmill then run away from what I really want because I’m scared… So for me it’s all about very deep breaths and going for what keeps me up at night.
Maybe cutting back on the caffeine would help?
