Divided Company

A little while ago I signed myself up for LinkedIn. For those not aware of what the heck I’m talking about it’s a social media network, meant to keep you connected with your professional contacts. From all I can figure it’s like Facebook for business, but a tad more transparent as you can see who has been viewing (aka creeping) on your profile. So I proceeded to sign up my professional profile and started getting requests to link-in and that’s when my predicament started….

You see up until now- virtually no one in my professional life knew about my blog world and vice versus. To further explain this, I work in the oil patch an industry that is generally known as a male dominated, old-boys club. I’m not going to get up on a soap box and rant at all the injustices I’ve faced or the additional scrutiny felt through the years to climb up to my position because of my gender but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t exist at some level. Regardless of that though there are many wonderful and supportive  people in the industry and even though I know they understand hunting, fishing, horses and even shopping- fashion blogging seems to be a bit of a stretch to me.

So then requests were coming from both sides, blog world and the oil-patch, what should I do? It was like an awkward high school party where I didn’t know if the cliques would get along let alone talk to one another. Even worse, is the fact that people would eventually find out what I do and truth be known I was enjoying my anonymity. But then I remembered a post my friend Danielle from Bombshell by Day wrote about censorship. I have been censoring myself for a long time. I shouldn’t be afraid to be myself, which also means I shouldn’t be afraid to be a woman in an industry where it’s sometimes tough to crack the senior leadership ranks, or embarrassed to talk about my love of blogging over a lunch meeting.

A realization after all these years is it really just boils down to confidence in who you are and what you stand for that lends to your credibility and success in ANY arena of life you choose to step into, the rest is just noise. To be fair sometimes the noise is REALLY LOUD, but that’s what they make those awesome headsets for. Put a set on and dance to your own tune right?  Most days I rarely notice I’m the only female in the room at work, yet my blog caters to a predominant female base (ok thanks dad for following too), ironic no?  So why would I be scared for two important parts of my life to converge? I guess I’m picturing a scene from Meet the Fockers but I’m thinking the oil patch is ready for a little more Cashmere & Camo and vice versus.