This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Wayne Sheffield (blog) - Brick Wall. He wants you to share about a time when you ran up against your own brick wall, and how you worked it out or dealt with it.
I find that, for me, most of the technical reasons for hitting a wall in a project have been solved by asking others for help or researching on my own. I havent come across a wall that I havent been able to climb or go around - so far (I am knocking on wood as we speak).
My professional and personal goals, however, are a different story. At the start of this year, Doug Purnell (blog) and I became accountability partners. I wrote a blog post about it, which you can read here. It was actually due to the Dec 2017 #tsql2sday blog chain! :)
Things were going well for me, I landed a new job which got me out of a bad environment, and was settling in ok. Unfortunately, in early June I felt like I hit a wall. I missed one of our bi-weekly meetings due to an unexpected family thing and to me it felt like a big thing. In that call, we had scheduled time with Grant Fritchey to answer some questions and pick his brain. I have started an email to Grant to apologize for missing that meeting and ask to reschedule, but I havnet sent it yet. I feel bad about missing, and this is where the wall comes in: I am beating my head against it waiting to bust through before I send it, which is silly because I know it doesnt work that way.
If it weren't for Doug and our continued meetings and communications, I dont know if I would be on track right now. If I am just setting goals and noone else knows about them, its easy to slide for a month with no momentum. But, since I have someone else to keep me going, it makes it harder to not move at all. Doug recently told me he was re-evaluating the list of goals that we originally set for ourselves at the beginning of the year, and that made me feel like I had permission to do the same. Its silly, but that really helped and made me feel relieved - it helped release a lot of the pressure I was putting on myself.
In summary, I think I am still at the wall today, but am on the track to finding my way around it, thanks to the help of Doug. I think we set ourselves up for success by finding each other when things were going well, so that we have a system in place for when things got messier.
I am very grateful for this topic this month... it really made me stop and think. I am going to send the email to Grant today so that I can stop beating myself up for not doing it yet.