Imagein: Life kicks you, a project gets delayed so you don;t have much testing to do, you stagnate. Then life clears up, you start working again, but you’re finding it hard to get back up to speed. Maybe you’re feeling rusty, maybe you’re still recovering, maybe soemthing else.
How do you get back into your groove? Get back into your role as an A+ tester, full of ideas and enthusiasm?
I’d been stuck between projects for a while, and life did give me a kicking this summer. I’m getting there, looking at Artillery/Gatling/Postman and growing into my senior tester role. I faked it til I made it, essentially, but maybe this will be useful for others who are in a funk.
I had moments where I thought I’d never get back into it, that I’d lost my testing enthusiasm, but I think I’m back now 
If you haven’t already watch it I hugely recommend Amy Cuddy’s Ted talk. A great take away… Don’t ‘fake it til you make it’, ‘fake it until you become it’.
We all doubt our abilities from time to time, it’s normal. Another suggestion is to try and find a concrete example of a time in the last two weeks where you felt lost at work, didn’t fully understand what was being discussed or had problems with a technology/tool.
Set aside an hour to research, practice or speak to someone about the problems you faced and try and improve your understandings of it. Even a small take away will improve your knowledge for next time and add to your experience.
I know exactly how you feel Gem as I’ve been feeling the same lately.
What has helped kick start my passion is finding new people to share my knowledge with, see the passion and curiosity in their eyes, and remind me what I was like. Show them all the things I had to discover the hard way, so they can learn better and faster than I did.
I’ve also started dusting off my keyboard to write some blog posts. One was quite ranty (apparently), and the other I tried to be more informative. But it has got me into the motions of writing, getting me to think about things again.
I’ve also been asked to help run my local Meetup, so I tried to interact more in the last session, speaking with the different attendees, encouraging them to present in future sessions, keep coming back, etc. It’s also made me think what I can do to make the Meetup better, expanding into other events, different venues, better advertising, recording the sessions. So whilst not all about testing and improve my skills directly, it’s keeping me thinking about testing, and helping us all improve, which is something I enjoy as a tester.
For me it works when I take it one step at the time. With this piece by piece I am able to get things done and in the end I am able to get my enthusiasm back.
I seen a video about an author that wanted to get out of authors block. He challenged himself to write at least 10 sentences per day and when he started he usually wrote more cause he got into it.
Aaaand the last thing that works for me if there is nothing else and I feel stuck I emerge myself into an area that is completely new for me or travel where I have never been just to get away from everything that bothers me. When I come back or when I fed my curiosity I feel energized to get back into the grind.
This happened to me around a year ago. I put it down to mild burnout though. I had so much enthusiasm for what I was doing - talks, blog posts, Twitter, reading about testing and taking on extra work and then all of a sudden I couldn’t be bothered to do anything to do with testing.
I slowly re-introduced myself back into testing (I was still doing my day job - but not with any enthusiasm) by reading a couple of articles a week, going on Twitter a couple of times a week etc. I now have my enthusiasm back fully.
What I’ve done now is be aware of how much I’m doing. Be aware of what events I have coming up. Not taking on extra work. If I can’t be bothered writing a planned blog post, then I just won’t do it that day. Hopefully by limiting what I’m doing (even though I’ll sometimes have the urge to do more) and looking after my workload then I’ll keep up this level of enthusiasm!