Years of wanting exactly this title. Hours of genuine, specific terror about the parts of the job nobody properly prepared me for.
Got promoted to co-executive producer today, a genuinely significant title I have been working toward for close to a decade now across several different shows and writers rooms, real, hard-won professional validation that I spent this morning celebrating properly with my whole team, and spent this evening, once the champagne and the congratulatory messages properly settled, genuinely panicking about whether I actually know how to do half of what this specific new role now requires of me.
The writing itself, the actual craft that got me this promotion in the first place, I feel genuinely confident about, close to a decade of accumulated skill I trust completely regardless of whatever new title now sits attached to my name. What I do not feel remotely as confident about is the considerably larger, less familiar administrative and budgetary responsibility this new role actually carries, managing a writers room’s budget directly rather than simply contributing craft within budgetary constraints someone else manages, real personnel decisions about hiring and staffing an entire room rather than simply being one voice within a room someone else assembled, a whole category of genuinely unfamiliar responsibility that this evening’s panic keeps circling back to.
I called a friend who made this exact same transition, from staff writer up through co-executive producer, on a different show a couple of years back, specifically to ask honestly how she actually learned the considerably less glamorous, more administrative parts of the job that no writing career up to that point had actually prepared her for. She laughed, genuinely warmly, admitting she had experienced almost exactly this same panic on the exact same evening she received her own equivalent promotion, and that the honest answer, in her own considerable experience since, is that nobody actually arrives fully prepared for this specific transition, that the administrative and budgetary skills genuinely do get learned on the job, gradually, through actual practice and, inevitably, some genuine early mistakes along the way.
That reassurance helped considerably, though I will admit it did not fully dissolve tonight’s specific anxiety, a real, particular fear of making an early, visible administrative mistake in this new role that could genuinely damage both the show’s actual production and my own still-forming credibility in this considerably more senior position, stakes that feel meaningfully higher than the more purely creative risks I have grown genuinely comfortable navigating across a decade of staff writing.
I think part of tonight’s panic reflects a specific, familiar pattern I have noticed in myself before at other career transitions, a tendency to focus disproportionately on the unfamiliar, genuinely difficult parts of a new role while discounting the very real, hard-won skills and judgment that actually earned me this promotion in the first place. I did not get promoted purely on the strength of my writing craft alone, however much tonight’s anxiety keeps framing the promotion that way. My show runner specifically cited my growing ability to actually manage and mentor other writers within our current room, a genuinely relevant, transferable skill for exactly the kind of broader room management this new title now formally requires of me.
I am going to spend some real time this week, once tonight’s initial panic properly settles, actually reaching out to a couple of other co-executive producers I trust, beyond just tonight’s one call, specifically to build a somewhat clearer, more concrete picture of what the administrative and budgetary parts of this role genuinely require day to day, rather than simply sitting alone with my own anxious, unstructured worry the way tonight’s panic has mostly unfolded so far.
For tonight, though, I am going to try actually letting myself sit with the genuine accomplishment this promotion represents, a decade of real, sustained work finally recognized with exactly the title I have been working toward, before tomorrow’s more practical work of actually learning this new role’s unfamiliar responsibilities properly begins. Both things are true simultaneously, genuine pride and genuine anxiety, and I think tonight I am allowed to hold both without needing to fully resolve either one before I go to sleep.
My mother called earlier tonight, once word had properly gotten around to family, and her genuine, uncomplicated pride, entirely untroubled by any of the specific administrative anxieties currently occupying my own evening, was exactly the perspective I think I needed to hear before finally settling in to actually write this entry. She reminded me, in her own way, that a decade of anyone doubting whether they had actually earned a promotion this significant would probably not have made it this far to begin with, a reassurance that landed with more genuine weight coming from her than it might have from anyone closer to the actual industry itself.
I am going to bed now, genuinely proud, genuinely a little terrified, and genuinely looking forward, once tonight’s specific mixture of feelings properly settles, to actually beginning the work of growing into this new title the same patient way I grew into every previous stage of this career, one genuine mistake and one hard-won lesson at a time.
More from this author at Aisha Muharrar, prat.uk.