I’ve been a Registered Professional Reporter for 20 years, and I’ve been a Certified Realtime Reporter for 13 of those years.  For many, many years after I received my realtime certification, I rarely took realtime jobs.  Even though I had my certification, I was always nervous and afraid to take the actual realtime jobs.  I was worried my equipment would not work,  worried about how many untranslates I would have , worried what the attorneys would think of my writing.  Even though I was a certified realtime writer, I never really thought I was good enough to actually do a realtime job. 

With many things in life, we will never feel like we are ready for something, but we just have to push ourselves to take the next step and just do it, and I finally took that step last year, and it was a big step for me,  and I was put on a realtime case with multiple realtime hookups and multiple attorneys.

I knew the only way I would be able to stay on this case is if I pushed myself beyond my comfort zone.  I was hooked up to one attorney using LiveNote and two other attorneys doing CaseView Net.   It brought back the same nerves I had when I first started working as a reporter.   My writing was not perfect, but I survived.   No attorney yelled at me or criticized my writing and the world did not come to an end.  I actually did it!  I was so proud of myself, and I felt great that I finally did something I should have done years ago.

After a couple times of doing the realtime, it got less and less scary, and I felt more and more confident with myself.   Part of the confidence came from being prepared.  Before going into a realtime job, I would always test my equipment the night before and try to put any words I could in my dictionary, and I would bring a checklist to my job reminding me of everything I needed to do once I got there.

I think I will still be nervous any time I do a realtime job,  for me there’s really no way around those nerves, but the financial and mental reward from  pushing myself is well worth it!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 7:02 pm and is filed under All Posts, Court Reporting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.