When I hit 40, I was perplexed by how I was feeling. I had a great job, worked with amazing people, my marriage was good, kids were thriving but I didn’t feel great physically and emotionally. I carried a lot of stress with work and felt unfulfilled career-wise. In fact, there was probably a ten year stretch with work, even though I was advancing my skills and income, where I had a general feeling of being unfulfilled. I looked at my career decisions and wondered if I had made the wrong decision leaving the walls of IBM after ten years or if I had picked the wrong career path. I wondered if I should step out of management or ask for more leadership duties. I even wondered if I had simply set my sights too low or too high. Despite all the contradictory questions, the one thought that kept running through my mind at a low hum was “it just shouldn’t be like this”.
But what is “this”? We have these glamorous pictures of leadership in our mind – finally being in control of the decision making, having people listen to and respect our voice, surrounding ourselves with people who want the same thing as we do. Then, we get to our first leadership role and all the glamor is gone. We spend our days in meetings, arguing about how to proceed on important topics with a broad impact, getting judged not just on our technical and functional knowledge but how we “show up”, facing the difficulty of needing people to do their work but not knowing how to control them, then comes the job of having to spin the bad news as if it’s a blessing and we start telling ourselves that something is wrong. This picture does not at all fit the vision we had created in our mind about what life should look like.
The lack of fulfillment starts to creep into all of it. We start finding all the reasons we don’t enjoy our job and we complain to coworkers just to find out they feel the same way, but we don’t look at what’s going on in our brain or the things we enjoy about our job, we lose sight about what we truly want and start looking for things that will make us feel better right now. In the end, we start looking for a new job because we believe it’s the job causing the problem.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t fix the real problem which is the underlying belief that it should be different and feel better than this. So we go to a new job, convinced that we’ve solved the problem and then once the honeymoon period has passed, we find ourselves right back to where we started, facing similar problems in different styles and the same feeling of discontent.
What would it be like if we could feel content right where we are? What would we have to believe to make that happen? For starters, it takes acknowledging that our emotions are not created by the external world. They are in fact, a result of our own thoughts.
For me, the willingness to believe that I can create my own reality changed everything. I started putting boundaries around my work, implementing self care routines like a sleep schedule and daily exercise, I allowed myself to fully disconnect after hours, started enjoying my coworkers more, celebrating my wins and stopped taking other people’s behavior personally. My ability to decide what I wanted and didn’t want out of life suddenly became very clear.
The source of our problems is rarely in our external environment and until we change what’s going on in our minds, it will continue to follow us from decision to decision. Instead, we can allow ourselves the freedom to see that anything is possible when we put ourselves in the driver’s seat.
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