Last year, I wrote a few blogs on all sorts of preparation and strategising for getting what you want. Millenial Musings, Getting Out of a Rut and Waiting Well in particular come to mind. These are parts of my approach to having a healthy and productive way of engaging with performance culture. Assuming you’ve managed to convert your plans into reality, what happens next? What if you’re struggling to cope with all the things you’ve added to your life and instead of them making you happy, you’re jaded and overwhelmed instead? I’ll say this again:

What’s going on?

There is a version of you that knows how to be successful in achieving your priorities but soon, that version needs a (steep) upgrade to embody the traits required to perform in the new operating environment you’ve created. What does that transition look like for you and are you making it quickly enough? Are you willing to fundamentally change where necessary? Who do you need to be in this new reality? What is the interplay between dialling up strategic input and downplaying sweat equity to be more effective during the concise hours you put into your work? You can’t live in the past and the present at the same time.

How is over-commitment to goal-setting tripping you up? (Finally) Reaping the rewards of the paths we began pursuing in our 20s makes it hard to ignore the sunk costs. Performance culture being what it is, we put our heads down and ground down all challenges until we achieved - in some cases with insufficient regard with whether we were achieving the right things. Have you been blinkered eyes-forward to your goals for so long that you’ve lost the agility to pivot? Do you trust yourself enough to believe that when you pivot, it’s not a distraction or a form of avoidance, but rather a course correction to ensure you want what you get? 

Could it be that you’ve actually been unhappy for longer than you’ve realised because of those unfulfilling goals but prior to this pandemic, you didn’t pause long enough to assess what you want? Crowded offices, back-to-back meetings and jam-packed social calendars are convenient places to tuck away inconvenient feelings. The quieter lives we are leading now give room for suppressed emotions to surface. The busier our lives are, the more anxious we get that we don’t have time for these emotions to boil up and over into all that we’ve worked hard for.

Now that all these things are in your life (some of which have a no-return policy like kids), I’d challenge you to flip your perspective around. Delete what you thought your life would be like and how you expected to feel about it. What will it take to be excited about your life going forward? You might have gotten here by a weird process of elimination: you knew what you didn’t want but weren’t sure what you truly want so rather than stay still, you moved towards “something”.  There is beauty and transferability in your “something” that you can re-mould into your right thing. What kind of coaching or mentorship do you need to re-position all these elements with the necessary objectivity you might not be able to give yourself?  

Are you giving too much power to your career as the underpin of your identity, purpose and source of affirmation? Is there misalignment between how you use your talents and where you would like to find fulfilment? Or could it be that your job and workplace are great but you need to evolve the ways you relate and add value (eg. strategising versus sweat equity as per earlier point)? Burnout as you try to extract more meaning out of your career is sometimes the unfortunate way we discover that we are looking for purpose / validation in the wrong place. My approach to this, as I’ve written before, is premised on developing a portfolio career as a corporate professional, philanthropist and investor. Across these three domains, I find myself maximising my gifts and satisfying my curiosities. What new environment do you need to move to, or create for yourself based on who you are today? What adventure do you want to undertake with your life and career? Rather than over-complicating how difficult it would be to change, consider how much more dissatisfying it would be to stay the same. Keep it simple as you re-shuffle the narrative.   

My impressions from a life shared with my 30-something comrades is we need to get to the bottom of how to be happily successful. We have mastered “what to be successful at” and this next phase adds colour between the lines. Let’s deepen our conversations to understand the “how”: what are the systems, choices, resources, investments, connections, relationships that enrich the success we are emulating. Why figure it out alone? In our professional lives, we know that building success through strategic partnership is smart business - how is that ethic crossing over to your personal life to quell the overwhelm that comes with high achievement? 

What’s in your tool-kit as you replace “survive” with “thrive”, “struggle” with “flow”? Remote work is an immense opportunity to re-organise your life for optimal resource allocation en route to happy success. I’m intentionally not saying “balance” because that conjures up images of a neat pie chart with equal time to all that matters. That might work for some, and I don’t disparage it, but it’s not how I personally operate.   

This time around I have no conclusions to make, only questions to ask in the hope that they dislodge beliefs that no longer serve the beholder. Let’s continue the conversation in the real world and not just in our heads until we get to a more positive space. If anything I’ve said hit a nerve, that’s a good thing. You care enough to feel, and that means you care enough to fix. Now to do the work!