Learning something new can be exciting — it can also be intimidating. A story I am about to share with you today captures both of these realities.

Several of my blog posts have talked about taking risks — about taking that chance at a new idea or new way of doing something to be better.

It can be uncomfortable. Sometimes, it can be downright frightening.

I’ll start with an example of a fairly low-risk professional learning journey I took last year. I wanted to learn more about racism — what it looks like and how it weaves its way into our language, decisions and actions. I immersed myself in the topic, wrote a few blog entries about it and even shared my learning journey with my Board of Education and others in the school district.

I learned a lot, but I felt pretty safe while doing it. Admitting that I don’t know everything about a topic is usually easy for me, so learning more about racism, while important, wasn’t super risky.

But, there WAS something I worked on last year that was intimidating — something that actually had me doubting myself along my learning journey.

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