I Was Late for a Job I Don’t Have Anymore

Growth doesn’t always feel like growth. Sometimes it feels like guilt.

What happened

Monday morning. Seven AM. I am awake before my alarm, which almost never happens, and instead of going back to sleep I start working. I record videos for social media. I research content ideas. I take two calls on Zoom, makeup done, shirt on, maybe still in the wrong pants because nobody can see that part anyway. No coffee, because I don’t drink coffee, that’s another way I’m a fraud. No breakfast either, because when I’m in that flow state I forget my body needs anything at all.

By ten thirty I have already worked three and a half hours.

And there is a word in my head, just one word, and it is loud. Late.

As if I am standing outside a building I have not walked into yet, as if the real version of my job has not started because my body has not shown up somewhere with a door and a desk and other people watching me sit down.

I start spiraling. My employees are in the office. Everybody starts at ten. Nobody saw me arrive at ten because I never arrived at all. What are they thinking? That I am not working? That I am not a good leader? That I do not work as hard as I used to?

All these voices, and none of them are true, and all of them are loud.

And then I stop. Out loud, alone in my kitchen, I say it to myself. Cristina. Stop. You have been working since seven. It is ten thirty. That is three and a half hours, and you are calling yourself lazy.

You built a company with more than thirty employees. There is a structure. There is a team. There is a way of doing things that does not require you standing in that building every single day.

So why can’t I take the win.

What I thought it meant

I thought it meant I was slipping. That the woman who used to be first in and last out was somehow becoming someone smaller, someone who works from home and calls it a day.

Because here is the thing nobody tells you about growing a business. You spend years becoming the person who has to be everywhere, who has to be seen doing, who earns the right to call herself a hard worker by how long she stays and how tired she looks at the end of it. And then, if you actually do it right, if you actually build the thing you said you wanted to build, that version of you becomes unnecessary.

And I built her. I built the version of me who had to be present in the business every day. And now that I have outgrown her, I am the first person who refuses to let her go.

I was judging the woman I am today by the job description of the woman I used to be. And that woman does not exist anymore. I fired her without telling myself.

What I think now

My job today is not to be in the room. My job today is to think. To plan. To build marketing strategy, sales strategy, hiring strategy. To find the right people, onboard them, teach them the way we do things here, and manage them, and think five steps ahead so that when everyone else walks into work at ten, there is already a plan waiting for them because I built it while they were asleep.

And I want to be clear, I do not believe any task in my company is small. I tell the girl who washes the dishes that her job is one of the most important in the building, because a guest can have the most unforgettable class of their life, and still all they remember is the dirty plate. So this is not about ranking work. This is about recognizing that thinking is work too, even when it looks like nothing from the outside.

But that is not how I was raised to measure it.

This is how my father measures effort. Not by what you produce. By how long you are visibly producing it. How many hours in the office. How many hours in the study room. If you are not actively doing something with your hands, you are not really working, and the thinking, the planning, the resting that lets the thinking happen, none of that counts. None of that gets praised.

And I am not blaming him for this. I am naming it, because I am still grading myself with his rubric even though I am not living his life anymore. I built a new identity. I did the work to get here. And there is a part of me that is still stuck evaluating the new me with the old measuring stick, and of course she never passes. She was never supposed to be measured that way in the first place.

What I’m practicing

I am practicing catching the word the second it shows up. The second I hear late, I am practicing asking, late by whose clock. My dad’s, from thirty years ago, in a completely different country, running a completely different kind of business? Or mine, today, the one I actually built?

I am practicing letting hidden work count. Thinking counts. Planning counts. A walk where I figure out next year’s strategy counts, even if it looks like I am just walking.

And I am practicing something harder, which is believing that the fact I am not needed in the room every day is not proof that I failed. It is proof that I finally built something that works without me standing guard over it. That was the entire goal. I just never trained myself to feel proud of it when it actually happened.

Question for you

Who are you today. And is she being judged by someone who has not met her yet, some older version of you still running the scoreboard.

Because I think most of us are not being judged as harshly by the people around us as we think. We are being judged, brutally, by ourselves, using a rulebook we outgrew years ago and never threw away.

So tell me. What version of yourself are you still grading yourself against. And is she even the one doing the job anymore.

Every week I write one honest thing about building a business, becoming the woman my future keeps asking me to be, and unlearning the ways I was taught to measure myself. Subscribe if you want to keep following along.