A few years ago, I accepted a job as a director of strategy at a small agency. One of the perks of this job was that I would deal with clients less, because this company had client managers to do that, and wouldn’t have to do things like public speaking. To be clear: This wasn’t a promise, just the way the job was laid out, and I liked it as I have never been a big fan of formal corporate work. But now that is changing.
For a while, I was able to minimize my direct client relations work and time spent leading meetings, which was great. Unfortunately, in 2023 we had to downsize. Many of the roles that were buffers between me and clients have been lost. Now I am leading a ton of client calls, which I begrudgingly tolerate.
In addition, though, my company has started pushing me to give huge strategy presentations, appear on panels, lead trainings, present at conferences, etc. I do not want this! I do not want to get better at public speaking, or learn how to teach more effectively — I just do not want this, full stop.
Whenever I talk about how stressed I get when I have to speak, they tell me, “We could never tell! You did such a good job!” and say I am good at it. Which, great! I do not care! All I want is to work quietly. I get that I can’t always avoid client meetings, and I have no problem with presenting internally. I’m not trying to never speak in public, but this has branched way out of my comfort zone.
Besides this, my company is wonderful, and I’ve worked at enough places to know that I have it good. I don’t want to work full-time anywhere else. Ideally, I would move back to freelancing, which I used to do, but the market is imploding and I have a baby and toddler in daycare. I am very familiar with the types of full-time jobs that are available in my area, and they are not a good fit.
Ideally, I would tell my company that I want to walk back on all this public speaking — but their growth strategy includes the person in my position doing this, so if I were to say “no thank you,” I would very much risk losing my job. It’s a small company, so there’s no one else on my team I can punt to.
I feel like there’s no solution between “leave my otherwise good job and try to cobble together some kind of freelance career again” (which, *gestures wildly at our capitalist hellscape*) or “spend the rest of my career doing something I really don’t want to do.” Is there?