Good Life Project - The First Step to a More Meaningful Career

Episode Date: March 11, 2016

This week's Good Life Project Riff is a reply to a question from one of our wonderful listeners.You've spent your whole life working at something that pays the bills, something that gives you time to be with family. Life, on the whole, is pretty good. But the thing you're doing to put food on the table and a roof over your head is emptying you out.You'd love to wake up feeling like the way you contribute to the world lights you up. But you have no idea where to start. And, you're not excited about the prospect of disrupting the rest of your life to make it happen.So, what do you do? What's your first step?I've written recently about first working to make things as good as you can get them, before blowing anything up. Whether you decide to eventually leave or even launch something on your own, the starting point is deepening your self-knowledge. Discovering who you really are and what matters. That's what this week's short and sweet Good Life Project Riff is all about. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what happens when you hit sort of the middle years of your life and you realize, you know what, this isn't going the way that I hoped it would go? That's what today's Good Life Project riff is all about. It actually comes from a question that was sent to me, and I'm going to share that question with the person who sent its permission. The reason I wanted to speak about this a little bit is because I get this question in so many variations so often that I just thought it made sense to speak to it. So here we go. The email I received says, Hi, Jonathan. In your most recent podcast with John Acuff, he mentions that to live a good life is to be who he honestly is and for that to be enough. This makes a lot of sense to me, but I find myself struggling to figure out who I am.

During the past 24 years of my life, I spent the first six getting an education, which put me fairly deeply in debt. I then dedicated the next several years to working to pay off the debt. And during the last 18 years, all I've been doing is working my tail off for someone else. What a waste of my time. If I was to break my life into an average 24 hours a day, I spend about seven sleeping. There's nothing I can do about that except have a comfortable bed. So far, so good there. Spend about five hours a day with my family. Personally, my family life is something I'm very proud of.

It's an absolute joy to be at home and with them. Fact is, though, it doesn't pay the bills. I've got to figure out what I'm going to do with the other half of my day that benefits me, not somebody else's bottom line. And so the journey begins. And there's a bit more in here, but I think we can kind of all get the gist here. Really, the question is, I'm ready for a new adventure. What is it exactly? And he wants a change. And the question is really, I want my life to be sort of more in my control and more meaningful so that those working hours during the day actually matter, or I feel like they matter beyond a paycheck. And this is a question and a conversation I have on a pretty regular basis. I'm 50. I turned 50 at the end of last year.

I've started thinking about this a lot. And it turns out a lot of the people, the folks in our community are sort of 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. It's funny, actually, at Camp GLP, the age range last year, I think was 17 to, I think, 71, or actually, it might have been 76. So we tend to have a listenership in a community that's kind of lived enough of life to have experienced some major highs, also some major challenges and getting to a point where you're asking the big questions. And I'm constantly asking these big questions and I'm incredibly blessed and thankful for the opportunity to also spend a lot of my time professionally sitting down with people who more or less spend their lives thinking about and living these questions as well. One of the things

that I've realized along the way, I actually wanted to address something before I just share a thought or two on this. And that was, there was a line in this email where he was saying, I've been working my tail off for someone else. What a waste of my time. My is capitalized. And I want to stop there for a moment because a lot of us look at the decisions that we made. And we think, okay, you know, I've done this. I've spent so many years doing this. And it was to build somebody else's happiness, somebody else's life, somebody else's power, prestige, business, whatever it may be. And we look at that and we consider it complete waste. And I would love to invite a reframe of

that because part of what's going on here is that there's a lot of good happening in your life at the same time. And part of that good also is an outcome of the fact that you've had the same job and that you have devoted all of these years to, yes, on the one hand, helping somebody else build what's meaningful to them. But on the same token, there is probably a lot to be grateful for about what you have because it's also allowed you in some way, shape or form and granted with a lot of your own intention and deliberation and action, to craft a lot of really good things in your life. So first, invite a reframe. Instead of saying, what a waste of my time, you know, what a waste of 18 years, say, you know what, it was 18 years that didn't have me focusing on doing something that matters deeply to me for my contribution to the world, you know, but it allowed me to develop a whole lot of meaning and connection in my personal life and in my family life. And there's a blessing in that. So honor that and find a space for gratitude for that. And then instead of lamenting it,

just say, okay, you know what? I've lived a chunk of life, but I'm 45. So I've still got a pretty major chunk of life ahead of me. So how am I going to redirect my energies there? And the first step for me, it's more difficult when you get past the first step, because we need to run a series of experiments to really figure out what sparks us, what lights us up. But there is a first step, you know, and that's part of that first step. And the step is really kind of doing a lot of self-discovery. So most of us move out of school with a fair amount of debt. So we feel that we actually have to commit to some sort of financial path, some sort of living, not necessarily because it's the thing that we really want to do or that we feel called to do or it's the thing that is going to provide us

a lot of meaning and joy and connection, but because it's the thing that is going to provide us a lot of meaning and joy and connection. But because it's the thing that's going to actually let us pay rent and pay our school debt. And sadly, these days, the amount of school debt that a lot of people have has piled up to an extraordinary level where to service that debt, we actually need to commit to a job and often a profession at a much faster rate than we have the ability to run experiments to see whether that same job or profession is actually something that we care about doing.

So we do it because we have to keep a roof over our head and food on the table and the bill payers off our back. And you do what you have to do when you're moving out into the world. The challenge becomes that very quickly that becomes routine, and that becomes habit, and we start to build a life and a lifestyle around that. And pretty quickly, it's the classic, what people would call golden handcuffs. It's we've built this lifestyle from the outside looking in. Everything looks great, but from the inside looking out. The way that we're contributing to the world from our quote work becomes more and more

empty. So it really doesn't matter how much we're generating cash wise. So the starting point is the point where I think a lot of people would actually be really well served getting out of high school or college, which is to do a really deep dive into who you are and what matters to you. You know, start to ask the big question. Some of the things that I really look at, and we do a lot of this work with some of the programs that we've run over the years, is one is your values and what I call, you know, sacred beliefs and values. And that's really, what do you hold dear? What's important to you? And what's important to you on a level of granularity that makes it actionable? So add a verb to that. So instead of family,

if you're saying family is important to me, well, that's great. But what does it actually mean? How do you wake up every day and actually honor that value of family? Well, what if you drilled down and said to provide to my family? So now we've got a verb there, and that's awesome. Except that really still doesn't give us direction for our actions either, because the verb is still pretty vague. So one person's provide for would mean making sure that you have enough money in the bank to pay for your kid's college. Another person's provide for would mean being physically and emotionally present as much as humanly possible. So get even more granular than that. Keep drilling down three, four or five layers until you have an action that's attached to that value that actually becomes masterfully actionable, where you wake up in the morning, and you know exactly what you need to do that that that statement guides your behavior. That's the level we're looking for. So see if you can actually spend some time thinking about this. What are the three, four, five things, values, actionable values that matter most to you? These will become

one of the guiding forces in every decision that you make, every yes and every no that you make moving forward. It'll help you understand what to invest your energy in and what to step away from, even if it looks like it's an interesting opportunity. So that's one thing that I think is really important to do in this self-discovery. Another thing is to explore your strengths. Strengths operate really in two different levels. There's a lot of research around strengths and kind of two different schools of strengths also, which makes it even more confusing. There's the more the class of positive psychology school, which came out of the work of Chris Peterson and Seligman in sort of the early days of positive psych. And it came out of the,

what they called signature strengths. And it was really about virtues, sort of like the key virtues that drive you, where when you're operating from a place where you're using and standing and acting upon those virtues on a regular basis, you come alive and you feel most of service, and there's a bigger sense of meaning when you're doing that. So you can actually, if you Google VIA strengths inventory, you can find that and actually take a quick and free online assessment to figure that out. The other thing that a lot of people talk about when they talk about strengths is what Mark

Spuckingham and some of the folks at Gallup created their own strengths inventory. And their lens on that is closer to your talents. And again, they have assessment tools that can be really helpful. So I found that taking both of those can actually be really helpful in guiding your behavior to really figure out the next path. And then really asking yourself what lights me up. So these are things that are really, really important as precursors to figuring out, you know, how you want to spend the rest of your life from a professional standpoint. Then step two, so that's kind of like, those are just a handful of deep discovery things. And we could talk about each one of them in a lot more detail. But I just wanted

to touch on some of the metrics that I tend to look at and that we've used working with people. Then moving forward, the question really becomes, how can I run a series of experiments to try different things on the side that I think might allow me to really leverage these essential parts of myself to light me up more than anything else? And think of yourself as just trying a whole bunch of different things. And then the question becomes, you know, you're not actually looking to succeed in any one of them. You're simply gathering data, you're running decision to build something on the side yourself or to find a career path or a company that allows you to really invest yourself in that way and derive a lot more meaning and joy and connection from what you're doing. So I hope you found this helpful. I know this is a regular experiment that I run in my own life. I'm constantly looking back

at the things that matter most to me and how I'm spending my energy and running experiments to see, can I dial this in better? So that's my invitation for you this week. I hope you found it useful. As always, fun hanging out with you guys. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you found something valuable, entertaining, engaging, or just plain fun, I'd be so appreciative if you take a couple extra seconds and share it. Maybe you want to email it to a friend. Maybe you want to share it around social media. Or even be awesome if you'd head over to iTunes and just give us a rating. Every little bit helps get the word out, and it helps more people get in touch with the message. I'm Jonathan Fields signing off for Good Life Project.