Good Life Project - How to Do What You Love When You Can’t Just Walk Away

Episode Date: April 6, 2017

How do you continue to grow, to honor the call of your "true self," when you're far enough into life that you've got responsibilities and people looking to you for some semblance of stability? When you don't want to rock that boat?Put another way...How do you do what you love when you don't want to blow up your life?This was the question asked by one of our listening community, a married parent in his thirties who wants to align his career with his ability to evolve and do work that aligns with his true self, but not at the expense of mass disruption to his family.In today's Good Life Project, we look at a few strategies that just might help you find work lights you up through a process of self-awareness and "conflict resolution." +++THIS WEEK’S PODCAST IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY+++Camp GLP: Summer Camp for Creative Souls, Entrepreneurs & Change-Makers! Join us for 3 ½ mind-bending days that will change everything. The ultimate blend of deep-learning, epic stories, friends-for-life, juicy adventures and ideas, strategies and tools for accelerated personal and business growth! Camp GLP is, more than anything else, about finding your people. Letting your guard down and, maybe for the first time in years (maybe ever), just being you. And knowing that’s enough. Learn more now! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by Camp GLP. It's an amazing opportunity to come hang out with me, with our awesome Good Life Project team, a lineup of inspiring teachers from art to life to work, and a community of almost impossibly friendly grown-up campers from literally all over the world as we take over a beautiful summer camp for three and a half days of workshops and activities that fill your noggin with ideas and strategies for life and create the type of friendships and stories

you thought you'd pretty much left behind decades ago. It's all happening at the end of August, just about 90 minutes from New York City, and more than half the spots are already gone. So be sure to grab your spot quickly. You can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp, or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes. On to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan with today's Good Life Project riff. I'm fresh back from a bit of time out in the mountains in Western Canada. So back settling into New York, and I thought it might be fun to

kind of go through and share a question from a listener and share my thoughts on that today. So this question came in, and I'm going to kind of paraphrase it a bit, but it came from a listener who is married in the middle years of his life and wants to have what he calls a fairly sustainable path for growth. And let me read sort of from this section on. He says, I have a fairly sustainable path for growth, the intersection and stepping into my continually changing better self being more aligned with my true self. I would say this rocky road in quotes, started as soon as I graduated from college and stepped into the

quote real world. This might be more important for people in a different spot. But how do people do this without making big waves? Maybe there's a better path. And truth be told, I would like to make my future waves as gentle as possible. I think my family and peers deserve that. Would love your thoughts. This is such a common question. This is such a common thing that we kind of noodle on very often. You know, when you start to get into the middle season of your life, and you are in a long term relationship, you have more responsibilities, you may have kids or other dependents or just other people who are depending on you, and looking to you to provide some semblance of stability and security. And you want to be able to provide that for them. Yet at the same time, you want to continue to grow and to evolve and

you have this deep yearning to be fulfilled. You know, sort of the popular, popular self-help wisdom kind of says, you know, you've got to be true to yourself, you've got to be authentic, anybody who is not on board with that of you standing fully in who you are and blowing up anything that stops you from doing it, then you need to walk away from those relationships too. I've always found that that's just massively unrealistic for the vast majority of people. We don't want to endure the level of disruption in our own lives. And we don't want to cause the level of pain and disruption in the lives of those who look to us for things to be, quote, okay, in the name of standing in being fully aligned with our, quote, true selves, the way that this listener shared it. So most of us just choose not to rock the boat. And we choose to kind of, you know,

work and stand and contribute for the rest of our lives in silence in a way that we know deep down is massively misaligned with the essence of who we are. And, and it's, it's a bit of a tragedy, because we assume that that's the way it has to be. So a couple of thoughts here. One, the option that leads to mass disruption, to me, very often people look at as, you know, like, that's what I have to do. In my mind, when you reach a certain point in your life, that is actually something that may have to be done, but is often best considered as the last possible option after you've already explored other options that are far less disruptive on a lot of levels. So what are those less disruptive things? Well, it starts by actually zooming the lens out a bit and really doing a bit of self-inquiry. So our listener used the phrase true self, being more aligned with the true self. Well, who is that person? What does that person look like?

What is that person's strengths and values and skills and gifts and beliefs? What are the things that spark you? Those are a lot of the things that go into really trying to figure out who is this true self, which is deep inside. And there is not a whole lot of academic process that's been offered. When we go to school for undergrad, for post-grad stuff, for primary school, for high school, generally that's not a part of the curriculum. Self-discovery, character exploration is not a part of what we learn. And there's no conceivable way we can actually align the way that we live in the world and continue to grow and evolve if we don't actually know what we're aligning our actions to. part of my last book, How to Live a Good Life, under the section on the contribution bucket, the entire first half, all of the chapters are devoted to self-inquiry into different exercises

and different ideas that really invite you to take a look at yourself and to get a better sense of who you are, what you care about, what matters, what lights you up, what the primary elements of your character are. Because once you start to know that, then the world of how you continue to evolve, how you contribute to the world, build your living, your career in a way that is aligned with that true self, the massively disruptive option becomes not the only possible option. You start to see all sorts of other ways to do it. So the first way that I would say to take a look at is to look at the work that you're doing in the world right now and look for points of conflict with the sort of elements that you

have identified as the core parts of yourself. And what we very often find is that that work is not completely misaligned. It's very often aligned in a lot of levels in a lot of ways. But very often, there's one particular metric that we're looking at. Maybe it's values, maybe it's strengths, maybe it's skills, maybe it's the sparks. And we realize that there's actually a lot of stuff, which is really aligned. But there's one area where we're feeling a conflict. And then rather than saying, oh, I need to blow this up or I need to walk away from it, I need to create bigger waves

and a lot of disruption and pain, it gives us the ability to say, huh, is there something that I can do that would be a lot less disruptive? Is there a shift that I can make that would resolve these conflicts and allow me to maybe change a bit what I'm doing, but stay where I am and avoid the sort of big, massive, painful shifts and keep my family okay and keep my peers okay and keep those who don't want to move through

this mass disruption with me, allow them to have some sense of stability in their lives too. Very often what you find is there is a way to do that. There's an interesting story that actually it was an interview that I did when I was researching my first book. And I was talking to somebody who's very high up in an ad agency. And she realized that her one of her primary strengths was a love of learning. She the thing that lit her up was she loved learning, she loved growth. And she realized that she had reached a point in her agency where she was very

high up, there's only one person above her in her division. And that person was not moving and was not leaving for a really long time. So she figured, you know, the only way to solve this problem was that she had stopped growing. She had stopped learning in this one agency. She was going to have to actually sort of blow up her career and completely leave the agency and find other work, potentially even leave the state where she was working. And rather than doing that, she kind of zoomed the lens out and said, huh, you know, if I actually think about this, I love the agency. I love the people. I love the work. I love our clients. I love geographically where I am and the life that I've built around this. And I'm even good with my salary. You know, the one thing, the one conflict here is that learning and growth are

massively important to my ability to be satisfied with what I'm doing. And the role that I'm playing in this company is no longer allowing me to get that. So what she did was she went to the executive committee and she proposed to them. She said, look, all these things, I love this, this, this, this, and this, but there's this conflict and I don't want to have to leave. But if I can't resolve this within the company, then I see no other way. So what I would propose instead is I would like to move into this other completely different division of the company.

And it's something I haven't had a lot of experience at, but you know me, you know my ability to learn massively quickly to manage, to lead, to grow and to be able to operate at a really high level. And I will take on the burden of getting up to speed, lightning fast. If you'll let me essentially carve out this new position in a different place, that will allow me so much more learning and growth. She had no idea. She was prepared for them to say, sorry, we can't do that. She left.

And literally in a matter of minutes, they got back to say, sorry, we can't do that. She left and literally in a matter of minutes, they got back to her and said, of course, we would love that. We don't want to lose you. And that allowed her instead of saying, okay, I have to completely disrupt everything I'm doing. It allowed her to make this really different, much subtler move that opened up a world of growth potential for her and resolved that one area of conflict without a whole lot of angst and a lot of disruption. Zooming the lens out from that, there's an approach to creating your job called job crafting, which is gaining in conversation these days, which talks about when you're unsatisfied

with what you're doing before just completely blowing everything up and taking the massively disruptive option. Take a look at what you're doing and ask, is there some way I can do this job differently? Can I make small changes? Can I go beyond what is in the job description to make this a much happier place for me to be and at the same time contribute in a

different way. What they found was that very often you can do that. You can go outside of the confines of the job description, especially when you're giving and doing more. And even though it's not something you may be immediately compensated for, you tend to experience your job, the way you contribute to the world in a far more meaningful and purposeful way. And that also tends to have the ripple effect of getting you recognized within an organization because you are lit up and you're exceeding expectations and you tend to move up through an organization much more rapidly as well. So a lot of times you can really, you can take a look at where you are and say, well, what if I stayed? What if I, you know, what's actually right here? What is well aligned? And where are the areas of conflict? And can I do something? Or how can I resolve these areas of conflict with minimum disruption? Now, sometimes you can do that. Very often you can, if you take that approach. Other times you can't. Other times you do everything that you can do that. Very often you can if you take that approach.

Other times you can't. Other times you do everything that you can and you realize there is still such a high level of conflict that I can't resolve this. And it will require a bigger, longer-term process of conversation, both with you, of exploration, and a conversation with those who are looking to you, and who lean on you, and who rely on you, and are building a life with you, to have those conversations and make the decisions jointly, because it doesn't just affect you. So one last thing that I want to make really clear here, which is that if you are in a situation where the nature of the culture or the work or the job or the social dynamic or the relationships is actually not just a nagging or unsatisfying or misaligned, but actually rises to the level of being physically or emotionally, psychologically harmful to you, then these rules change.

You know, it's important to understand that there may be situations in life and in work where to completely remove yourself from that situation will cause a substantial amount of disruption. And at the same time, the level of genuine pain or threat of pain or threat of danger requires that you actually make that move. So be intentional about that.

You know, you need to sort of zoom the lens out and discern. And if that is in fact the case, the rules change and your job becomes to remove yourself from that scenario. So I hope that's helpful for those of you who are sort of looking. And one final thought here is that to me, you know, there's this interesting blended path for a lot of people that so many discount where you can actually keep a full-time gig and do so much of the growth work and the expression in your five to nine and on the weekends. And what I'm finding increasingly in conversations with people, especially when you're sort of in the middle season of life,

is that that blended path can be an immensely satisfying approach to contributing to the world. So explore these things. A bunch of these ideas are in that last book, How to Live a Good Life, and see how they land with you. As always, if these ideas resonate, go beyond just thinking about them and turn this into a conversation, because that's where real change takes root. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.