Hi, I'm Annemarie. Again.

If you've been around here for a while, you probably know me as the crayons and coding girl. If you're new, welcome. Pull up a chair. I'm going to reintroduce myself because honestly, I'm not the same person I was when I started this blog, and I think that's worth saying out loud.

People ask me all the time how I got here. "Here" being a Senior Solution Engineer at Microsoft, a Microsoft Certified Trainer, working in Azure, married to another Microsoft Azure person, raising two toddlers, somehow still finding time to study for certs, and weirdly, actually liking my life. The short answer is a lot of pivots, a lot of therapy, and a podcast that rewired my brain. The long answer is this blog post.

The weird career path

I started in sales. Then I went to marketing. Then back to sales. Then to consulting and delivery. Then to presales. And somewhere in that mess, I went from being "a salesperson" to being "a technical person," which is a sentence I never would have believed about myself ten years ago.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about non-linear careers. Every single one of those jobs taught me something I use every single day. Sales taught me how to actually listen to what people need, not just what they say. Marketing taught me how to tell a story that makes someone care. Consulting taught me how to walk into a room knowing nothing and walk out with a plan. Delivery taught me that the demo is the easy part, the implementation is where the trust is built or broken. And presales? Presales is the weird, beautiful job where all of that finally clicks together.

I didn't plan any of it. I just kept saying yes to the next thing that scared me a little bit, and no to the things that made my gut hurt. Turns out that's a strategy.

The introvert extrovert thing

I am also a Microsoft Technical Trainer, which means I regularly stand in front of rooms full of people and teach them things. Which is hilarious if you know me, because I am genuinely somewhere right in the middle of introvert and extrovert and I freak out before every single training I give and every single demo I show.

Every one. Not "the big ones." Every single one.

My heart pounds. My hands get a little shaky. I run through every possible thing that could go wrong. I am convinced, for about fifteen minutes beforehand, that this is the one where I forget how Azure works. And then I start, and within about ninety seconds I am completely fine and actually having fun.

I used to think the nerves meant I wasn't cut out for it. Now I think the nerves mean I still care. Big difference. If you're someone who also freaks out before the thing and then does the thing anyway, congratulations. That's not a flaw. That's the deal. The freakout is the toll you pay for doing work that matters to you.

The middle of introvert and extrovert part is real too. I can hold a room of fifty people for a full day workshop and feel energized. I can also need three hours of complete silence afterward to recover. Both are true. I am not "an extrovert who needs alone time," I am not "an introvert who fakes it well." I am just a person who has two modes and needs both.

The school thing

I worked full time through two bachelors and a masters. I don't say that to brag. I say it because if you're sitting there right now reading this and thinking you can't do the thing because you also have to pay rent or feed people or hold down a job, you can. It's not fun. It's not balanced. There were semesters I cried in the parking lot before class because I was that tired. But you can.

The certs thing is similar. People ask how I find the time. I don't find it. I make it. Forty-five minutes in the morning before the kids wake up. Lunch breaks. The thirty minutes after bedtime before I lose all higher brain function. It adds up. And if it doesn't add up this week, it adds up next week. I stopped beating myself up for not studying every day. Consistency over intensity, always.

Two toddlers and an Azure husband

My husband works at Microsoft too. We both work in Azure, but in really different ways, and it's the running joke in our house that we speak the same language but completely different dialects. It's actually amazing. He can vent about a customer situation and I get it immediately. I can vent about an architecture decision and he gets it immediately. We don't have to translate.

The toddlers are a whole other thing. Two of them. Both under five. If you have toddlers you already know. If you don't, just know that the floor is always sticky and you will be touched a thousand times before 9am. I love them. I am also tired. Both things are true.

The way we make it work isn't magic. It's calendars. It's communication. It's accepting that the house is not going to look like a magazine and that's fine. It's also knowing that my career is mine and his career is his and we trade off who gets the hard week. Some weeks I'm in customer mode and he's solo parenting at bedtime. Some weeks it flips. We keep score in fairness, not in tasks.

Therapy. The actual game changer.

I went to therapy for ADHD and postpartum depression. Both. At different times and also kind of at the same time. I am not going to dress this up. PPD is dark. ADHD as a grown adult woman who spent her whole life thinking she was just "bad at organizing" is a special kind of grief when you finally figure out your brain has been working twice as hard your entire life to do what other people do once.

Getting diagnosed and getting help didn't fix me. It just gave me the tools to stop fighting myself. There's a really big difference between those two things. I'm a better mom because I went. I'm a better partner because I went. I'm a better seller and a better engineer because I went. If you are sitting on the fence about it, this is your sign.

Michael Gervais broke my brain in the best way

I started listening to the Finding Mastery podcast and I genuinely have not seen the world the same since. Michael Gervais talks about mindset and high performance, but really, he talks about being a human being who is trying to live on purpose instead of by accident. That distinction has been everything for me.

A few things I think about constantly now.

You don't have to answer the door. Not literally, although also literally. You don't have to answer the call. You don't have to reply to the text right now. You don't have to engage with the email that made your chest tight. You get to choose what you let in. That sounds basic until you actually try it and realize how much of your day you've been spending reacting to other people's urgency.

When someone comes to you, ask what they need. Do you want a hug, do you want help, or do you want to be heard. Three different things we almost never ask and almost always assume. Most of the time when my kids melt down, when my friends call me crying, when a customer is frustrated, they don't want me to fix it. They want me to hear it. Asking the question changes the entire conversation.

Know the difference between a conversation and a lecture. This one I think about every day, especially in the world we're living in right now. Here's how I check. If I share how I feel or what I think, and the other person's response is not some version of "what I heard you say is this, did I get that right," but is instead them immediately telling me how they think and how they feel and getting louder until I agree with them, that is not a conversation. That is a lecture. And I am allowed to walk away from a lecture. So are you.

A real conversation has reflection in it. The other person tries to understand you before they try to be understood. If that's not happening, they're not actually talking with you. They're talking at you, and they want compliance, not connection. Walking away from that isn't rude. It's self-respect. It took me a long time to learn that and I'm still learning it.

Ready is a choice

This is the one I want tattooed somewhere. It's mine. It's the thing I've earned from every pivot, every late night, every therapy session, and every cert exam I scheduled before I felt remotely prepared.

Ready is not an appointment you can put on the calendar. Ready is not a feeling that eventually shows up if you wait long enough. Ready is not a checklist you complete. Ready is a choice. You decide you're ready, and then you do the thing.

I waited a long time in my twenties for "ready" to arrive. Ready to apply for the harder job. Ready to go back to school. Ready to have the conversation. Ready to switch careers. Ready to have kids. Ready to call the therapist. None of it ever arrived on its own. Not once. Every single one of those moments happened because at some point I just decided, today I'm ready. Even when my hands were shaking. Even when I didn't have all the answers. Especially then.

If you are waiting to feel ready before you start the thing, you are going to wait forever. The feeling comes after the choice, not before it. Choose first.

Why this matters, especially in tech sales

I am a technical seller. I sit in rooms with very smart people who sometimes disagree very strongly. The temptation in those rooms is to win. To be the loudest, the most certain, the most prepared. What I've learned, slowly and painfully, is that the people I trust most in this industry are the ones who pause. Who ask a question instead of firing off a counter. Who say, "tell me more about that" when their gut says, "you're wrong."

That's the same skill as the parenting skill. As the marriage skill. As the friendship skill. It's all one skill. Be curious before you're certain. Listen before you respond. And know when you're in a real exchange versus when someone is just trying to wear you down.

So that's me. Hi.

I'm Annemarie. I draw with my kids in the morning and write Azure architecture in the afternoon. I am a recovering perfectionist, an ongoing student, a tired but happy mom, and a person who is genuinely trying to do the next right thing. I write this blog because I figured out late that nobody actually knows what they're doing, we're all just figuring it out in public or in private, and the people who share their version of it make everyone else feel a little less alone.

If anything in here landed for you, I'd love to hear about it. If it didn't, that's fine too. You don't have to answer the door.

See you in the next one.

Annemarie