I Applied for a Job

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I thought about how I would explain this decision if someone asked me directly, and I noticed how much energy I spent rehearsing a defense for something no one had actually challenged me on yet. That rehearsal told me something. I was not actually worried about what other people would think. I was worried about what applying meant about my own story, the one I had been telling myself about how this season was supposed to go.

I had built an identity, quietly, around being the woman who did not need a backup plan, whose faith was demonstrated by the absence of a safety net. I do not think I ever said that belief out loud. I simply lived inside it, and applying for that job meant admitting the belief had been more fragile, and less biblical, than I had let myself examine.

By the time I had put myself through what felt like mental calisthenics, I arrived at something simpler and truer than any of the individual questions. Admitting I needed help is hard, and it is also necessary. Whether I get the job or not is genuinely up to God. But the act itself, updating my resume, applying for something that actually matched my credentials and experience, did something for my self-confidence I had not expected.

My sense of self-worth soared, not from pride, but from simply knowing what was possible again.

I want to describe that shift more precisely, because it surprised me. It was not relief that I might get the job. I had not even submitted the application at that point. It was something quieter and more foundational, the simple experience of proving to myself that I could still take direct, practical action toward stability, that my capability had not somehow evaporated during the seasons where the business alone was not yet covering what I needed it to cover.

I think leaders, especially the ones who have built businesses or ministries from nothing, quietly absorb a belief that needing outside income, outside structure, or outside help is evidence the vision is failing. I do not think that anymore. I think it is often just evidence that the season requires more than one stream to hold it, and that multiple streams are not a demotion from faith. They are sometimes simply what faith looks like while a vision is still under construction.

Here is what I want to say to the leader who is sitting on an application, a request for help, or an admission she has been avoiding because of what it might mean about her. Taking the action is not a concession that you have failed. It is very often the fastest route back to remembering what you are actually capable of, independent of whether that specific door ever opens. The application itself was the win. Everything after that was simply what came next.

I think often about how much of that mental spiral was actually about an audience that did not exist in the way I imagined it. I had built an entire courtroom in my head, full of judges evaluating whether applying meant I had failed, and when I finally looked around at my actual life, no such courtroom was convened. A few people knew. None of them treated me differently. The verdict I had been so afraid of had been entirely self-authored, prosecuted and defended by the same anxious voice, with no outside jury ever actually present.

I do not know yet whether that particular job will come through. I have made a kind of peace with not knowing, which is its own small victory after a season of needing certainty before I could act on anything. What I know for certain is that the version of me who finally hit submit on that application is more resilient than the version who spent weeks circling it, regardless of what any hiring manager eventually decides.

I think about how often I have advised other leaders through some version of this exact spiral, watching them build the same imaginary courtroom I built for myself, prosecuting a version of themselves that only exists in their own head. I recognize it faster in them now than I did in myself, precisely because I have finally learned to name it in my own thinking. The spiral feels unique and private while you are inside it. From the outside, it is one of the most common patterns I have ever coached, almost universal among capable people facing an honest limitation for the first time in a while.

I have started asking a simpler question now, whenever I notice that particular spiral beginning in myself or in someone I am advising. Not what will people think, but what would I tell someone I loved if she were sitting across from me with this exact decision. I would never tell her that applying for honest work was evidence of failure. I am learning, slowly, to extend myself the same clarity I have always been able to extend everyone else.

I think about that gap often now, the distance between the rehearsed catastrophe and the mild, ordinary reality, whenever I feel the old resistance rising around a new, more visible step. It does not make the fear disappear in advance. It simply gives me a track record to set against it, proof gathered the hard way that the fear's predictions and reality's actual response rarely match as closely as the fear insists they will.

-- Dr. Rhonda

The Next Step: If you have been avoiding an application, a request for help, or an admission because of what it might mean about you, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to help you separate the action itself from what you are telling yourself about needing it.