I’m Fighting my Introversion by Teaching English Online.

I swapped the kitchen for an online desk job.

A desk job is something that I have always said that I wouldn’t be able to do. Working in those little cubicles and enduring meaningless small-talk at the fucking water cooler with someone like Brad from accounts. Urgh. No thanks. That kind of life would suck the soul out of me.

Even if I had the professional skills needed in one of those sterile environments, I certainly wouldn’t have the personal skills. After 20 years working in kitchens — sometimes with the dregs of society — I’m not prepared for the beige, corporate world.

Around this time last year, when I had some time off, I completed an online TEFL course. I planned to use the certificate and what I learned to teach English to the kids in my Indonesian village voluntarily. I never intended to use it for work, only to do something nice and help the underprivileged around me.

I finished the course, got my certificate and promptly did nothing with it. I returned to work in Australia and got stuck there for six months. Meanwhile, life’s hectic pace pushed my plan onto the back burner.

When I arrived back in the UK with my family just before Christmas, I knew I would have to work. I didn’t have enough savings to survive for the length of our stay without working. I suspected that there would be work available in kitchens. There always is. It’s a perpetually understaffed industry.

The thing is, in this country, wages for a chef have barely risen in the 20 years that I’ve been away. Why would I want to spend 12 hours a day working in a job where I’m dead inside when I know that I’m going back to Indonesia in June?

So what am I going to do? I thought to myself. Find something else. A cooking job was now out of the question, at least unless absolutely nothing else came up. I thought about perhaps a delivery driver job — no stress, reasonably easy work, average money. I could do that. So I applied. When I found out what the hours would be, I baulked. Early mornings, late nights, weekends? That sounds like a cooking job. No thanks. So what then?

I searched for work from home jobs from a random thought, doubting that whatever was advertised would be within my scope of education. I’ve been fascinated and probably a little jealous of people who can work from home or any online location throughout the world. I met many digital nomads when I was travelling in 2017 and always thought that work/lifestyle was out of my reach. I mean, I’m a chef. How am I going to be able to work remotely? It’s impossible.

I found a job came up that sparked an interest. An online English tutor. Hmmm. I clicked through and read the details. The requirements were a minimum of a degree. Fuck, that’s me out then, I thought.

I scrolled through more jobs and found another job with a similar title — TEFL Teacher. Giddy up!

I remembered that I had done the course. The certificate was lying somewhere in a dark corner of my laptop. I dug it out, dusted it off and sent in my application. This was something I could do, wasn’t it? Moreover, it was something I could do from anywhere globally, meaning I could potentially be working from home when we return to Indonesia. Perfect.

The recruitment process was super quick. The company fast-tracked my application because there was a push to hire native English speakers, and within a week, I received my onboarding instructions. I was pretty nervous. This would be a massive change from anything I’d done before.

I don’t even really like talking to people all that much. What was I doing?

Maybe I should back out, and get myself a job in a kitchen somewhere — something safe, where I know what I’m doing. The scenery and people are familiar. Nice and easy. I tend to convince myself that whatever I’m doing isn’t perhaps the right thing. Growth? Leave my comfort zone? Why would I want to do that?

The default setting in my brain is to take the path of least resistance. It’s sometimes a struggle to persuade myself. I’ve found that I’m better off not starting any internal dialogue in situations like this. Just keep quiet, ignore the moron talking inside my brain and do the thing, regardless. This gets me to where I need to be without much of a battle.

I’ve done 238 lessons in a couple of months of my new teaching career now, and I love it. I’m mainly teaching Japanese people from all walks of life. They are incredibly polite and gentle people, principles that fit very well with me. I’m finding it much easier to talk frequently with strangers who are similarly shy and reserved as myself.

I still have trouble with “free conversation” lessons. Students can choose this option where there is no textbook. Sometimes the student is prepared with topics they would like to discuss. Sometimes not. In this case, I struggle to keep the conversation moving and flowing unless the topic is something I am familiar with. But I’m learning and slowly improving and increasing my repertoire of general questions I can ask.

As an introvert, I never imagined that I would do something like this. It goes against everything that I thought I was capable of. Growth is a good thing, especially when it’s scary. That’s when you know changes are happening.

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