Running to Stand Still

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

• You feel “behind” since people around you advanced more quickly or achieved more than you

• You see your colleagues as competitors for a limited number of advancement opportunities

• You feel like you have to be really careful and strategic about the career choices you make because otherwise you won’t get ahead

• You don’t want to take too many risks because they may backfire

• Your team is not moving at the rate it should and that stresses you out, but you can’t get these people to move faster

• You think you need to have better relationships with executives / industry luminaries / investors / fill-in-the-blank to get ahead but you don’t have a strategy to develop them

• You’re afraid to ask questions or bring up ideas so people don’t think you’re incompetent

When you sit by the computer to work each morning, which feeling is most common? Get into your body - how does it feel in your heart, in your gut? Really feel into it for a second. 

Do you feel expansion or contraction?

Hope or fear? 

Excitement or dread? 

Ease or stress?

If you’re like me and most professionals I know, you’re much more likely to feel worry, stress, contraction and fear than excitement, ease and expansion. Think about an athlete training and competing in that state of mind: How successful will they be? It makes it infinitely harder for us to achieve everything we want in our career. It also creates a less-than-ideal day-to-day that shows no signs of changing - unless we do.

It certainly doesn’t allow us to stop and consider if the life we live is even the life we want. I don’t mean what our conditioned self wants - the one looking for the validation of success and money, but rather what the being we are at our core wants.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t want success or money (I do!) - just that we should ask: Success at what, and money for what? Take my friends, fresh from a life-changing IPO, who discovered that maybe they don’t want a house so massive they need baby monitors everywhere to keep track of their toddlers - right after they bought the house. Or my friends who are senior executives at large companies but hate dealing with people problems - which is all you do when you manage a large organization.

Too often it’s success at what society deems acceptable (e.g. climbing the ladder at a “brand name” company), and money to acquire something that we’re supposed to value - but do we? 

Do you want to continue to live the life other people tell you you should want?

If your answer is no, there are some ways that helped me start to figure out what I do - not what I should - want, which I’ll share next.

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