Today, as I drove to the ski resort for my first official day as a ski instructor, butterflies in my stomach, I reflected on jobs like this one.  Jobs that the public views as someone who must be an expert, and really knows what they are doing, simply by representation of their title and their uniform.  Kind of like a firefighter or a policeman.  An authority figure in their field, that when you see them, you think “Ah, ha, here’s someone who knows….”

But the thing of it is, every person in that job has a first day on the job.  A day when they look the part, but deep inside they don’t feel that way, because yes, it is their first day.  That’s the feeling I had today.  I felt like the brand new kid at school, not really feeling especially confident.  And yes, any of us who have ever started a brand new job feel that way our first day on the job.  The thing that differs, is depending on what your job is, no one else besides you may have known or even cared.

I put on my special ski instructor uniform, the one with the unique color combination that only the ski instructors wear that displays our logo and Ski and Ride School lettering prominently.  I went to the meeting place where people come after they sign up for lessons.  All the while feeling nervous, anxious, and a little bit of a fraud – thinking about people who had paid good money, and I was going to be their instructor!  Of course, in the end, none of it mattered, as it turned out their were too many instructors, and I didn’t even end up teaching today.  So my first official day instructing just got deferred one week instead.  Still, as I made my way back to the locker room, I ran into a lady who was lost looking for the ski school desk to sign up for lessons.  She asked me if I could help her.  I took her to the info desk, and she said with a bit of reverence in her voice, “So do you teach the kids how to ski?”  When I replied yes, she seemed happy, even gleeful, to have met a real life instructor.

It’s not the first time I’ve had this experience.  I remember vividly my first day as an official Park Ranger of the National Park Service.  I had to borrow my “ranger” uniform, as my new ranger clothes I had ordered hadn’t even arrived.  I was working at Sequoia National Park, and my first ranger program was a guided walk of a sequoia grove that began at The General Sherman Tree, the largest sequoia tree in the world.

As the largest tree in the world, the Sherman Tree attracts hundreds of people per day.  I remember parking in the parking lot and walking over to the meeting place, wishing for all the world, that I could craw in a hole somewhere and hide.  Why did I think I could do this? — be a Park Ranger at a busy national park, and talk confidently about giant sequoia ecology?  A man shouted to his son, “Hey look, there’s the Park Ranger!”  Now I was done, they thought I knew something!  

When I think about that first program, I laugh.  I tried to be clever starting with a poem I had constructed, people looked at me like I was crazy.  Still, about 15 of them did come with me on the walk, and even more amazingly, stayed until the very end, 1  hour later.  I’m surprised they stayed at all, when I think of how nervous I was, stumbling over my words, speaking so fast, I thought I started to hyperventilate and couldn’t catch my breath.  My anxiety also got the better of me while walking, as I started racing along, only realizing moments later, that I had run away from my group, who was way behind me…

Now, 17 years later, and hundreds of programs later, it all seems like old hat.  I still get a little nervous, but I’m confident in my ability to develop and present a compelling and interesting program.  I’m hopeful that my ski instructor experience proves the same.  That one day I will look back on this first lesson, and chuckle, knowing how I got so much better, and that I truly am that knowledgeable person who can teach a person to ski; and it won’t seem like such an angst-ridden, gut-wrenching moment.

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