Emotional Roller Coaster
by Robert
(Texas)
I was a minority shareholder and COO in a small private company. Our market had been very volitale over the past 4 years and we had accumulated a substantial amount of debt to keep the company solvent.
We recently sold to a small public company. However, after paying off the company debt, there was not much left over for the shareholders. It was a very anxious time leading up to the sale of the company trying to quickly determine what I was going to do with myself afterward.
I was very anxious about finances because I did have a substantial montly salary but knew it was going to be impossible at the age of 57 to find a position in the corporate world at my age at a fraction of what I had been making. And that has turned out to be very true.
I have applied for a number of positions in which I am sure my resume stood above all others but because of my age i did not even recieve a courtesy call. But this is what I had expected.
So in anticipation of this, I went to night school to study for a natioanl exam to become a certified Personal Trainer. I passed the exam and am currently employed at an exceptional club in my area as a Personal Trainer.
I have not worked so hard for so little money since I was a kid. And I have good and bad days emotionally. As with a lot of the folks that write their stories here, my greatest concern in financial.
Will I have enough funds to make it through my retirement years is a constant thought. And the strangest thing of all is the anxiety I feel sometimes at my new job.
In the recent past I have led the negotiation for our company to secure a $130,000,000.00 line of credit, while now as a Personal Trainer I feel very anxious when faced with developing a one hour training session for a new client because I feel inadequate.
Then I also think about the long hours I am putting in and the very little money that it pays and wonder if this is what I should be doing but am afraid to quit because I don't want to lose out on even the small amount of money I am making, plus all the effort I have put in to becoming a certified Personal Trainer.
My anxiety just seems irrational to me when comparing the challenges I faced before as COO and didn't blink an eye, when compared to the challenges as a Personal Trainer.
I have been working as a Personal Trainer for about 2 months now and it has gotten a little better but there are still days when I just dread going into work. It really befuddles me to experience these feelings of self-doubt, anxiety, and a general feeling of being lost.
My wife's income is sporadic, so I was the main income producer, but no longer, which contributes to my feeling of anxiety.
I know these feelings will pass eventually, as they always do, but I am ready to return to the state of my old self-confident persona. It is very unsettling at the moment.
