So, as I've often said in my day job I'm a developer. I've done different technologies over the years, and for several now I've worked with Java, and related languages.
A big part of that is working with servers to serve up Java web applications. Typically those servers are some form of UNIX box.
System administration and that sort of back-end command line stuff has previously been a tough go for me. I didn't have a lot of training in it, and at previous jobs I'd got some degree of grief for my lack of knowledge about it.
Really, when you look at the sorts of things you do in the back end, it's not rocket science. Mostly you copy files to the box, work with their permissions, bring up and down services, monitor log files, that sort of thing.
Fear made me look at a text command line like it looked like this
But as I said, I had got some grief from previous co-workers and superiors even over my unfamiliarity.
That grief had instilled in me some shame and fear. But I've been really focused on moving through and past it recently, and today I absolutely did.
I did about a dozen needed tasks on a test stack today, and some of them were things I had to teach myself on the spot, with help from some great websites.
I did it with gusto.
Something I've taught many of my coaching clients is that there's a really big difference between saying can't and don't .
When you say you can't do something you mean ever. In a word, bullshit. And it's toxic bullshit at that. How do you know you can never ever do something? People learn new things, get better at things, all the time.
On the other hand, when you say you don't do something, you mean you don't do it right now. But maybe you will do it. Maybe you did it before and may one day to come, do it again.
Who knows? "Don't" is the gateway to infinite possibilities.
Today I stopped even that. I switched from don't to do. I ssh'ed and scp'ed and chowned and chmodded like a champ. I wrote with .vi. I viewed my history. I took command of my command line.
It felt great.