For the past 4 weeks, I have been working through the Data Analyst Associate track on Data Camp. I grabbed a $1 trial and was stoked to find that it was all completed in-browser. This meant that I could work on the course during downtime at work, and wouldn’t you know, a month is exactly the amount of time I had left before my resignation date.

I’ve started and stopped so many courses and projects over my life time that it’s a miracle I ever finished a degree at all (Game Design) and I started to feel as though I just didn’t know what the hell I wanted to do with my life.

But what was really going on was this:

Any time I hit the difficult point in the course or project, I would jump to a shiny new one.

In the past, I told myself that it was my gut informing me that I wasn’t truly happy, and this other new thing would be more my style. How many times can you do that before you start to question whether your impulsivity is caused by gut feeling, or brain malfunction?

I began therapy early in the year for seemingly unrelated reasons. Several sessions deep with my therapist, I had to accept that I most likely have ADHD. I’m only informally diagnosed, as in my psychologist strongly suspects it, but even if it’s not the case, I have way too many traits of ADHD to ignore that my issue may be something bigger.

So, I am now newly self aware of my habits and tendencies, and I can’t just tell myself that my gut knows what’s best for me anymore. Maybe it does, but my brain is a manipulative jerk that just wants to be given new, exciting, easy things on the regular – and will do whatever it takes to get it. Whatever I’m being told by my gut is being jumbled and changed by my brain, it’s so frustrating!

This all means I now have the ability to recognise (usually) when I start to self sabotage under the guise of “this is what I want deep down”. I hit this point about half way through the Data Camp course. I caught myself looking at other data analytics certificates and boot camps… why! As if enrolling in another course at another institution would suddenly be better.

I wouldn’t be writing this post if I had switched courses, so I’m proud to say that I managed to force myself to continue the path I was already on. To do that, I had to finish a complicated SQL course. But not only that, I had to fight my self every step of the way. Every day I had thoughts of “maybe this is not for me” or “maybe it’s fine if I just don’t do it now, and finish it later” or “maybe I should sign up to Coursera and do the Google certification instead” or the worst one “maybe I’m not good enough to do this anyway”.

Most courses on Data Camp take ~4 hours to complete, but that one course took me two days. It was slow, it was hard, but it got done. The last course after that was a piece of cake compared to it, and now I’m sitting pretty with a whole track completed! All that’s left now is to complete the two exams and I’ll have an official certification. At this point I don’t even care if I do nothing with it, just having finished something on my own without giving up at the hard part is enough for me to be proud for now 🙂