Messy middle might be many things. You might have been recently laid off. You don’t love living your life while at your current job. You want to do something different with your life.
All of those situations might have a transformational power on your life.
Hear me out:
In employment and in life, you can hold one of two positions.
→ Proactive – choosing roles you enjoy and that serve you, leaving when it stops serving you.
→ Passive – staying because you’re scared you won’t find anything else. Or other reasons. But the bottom line is fear. You’re scared to change.
The second one is quite sad to me. I made that mistake myself – instead of leaving, I stayed another half a year, waiting for the layoff. Strategically and money-wise, it was the right call, and I’m glad I consistently did what was best for me and not for the company. But almost a year later? What a waste of time and mental space.
That’s the first thing I ask when employees reach out to me: what is this job for you? Is it worth keeping?
The moment I hear the word “scared” – scared to lose it, scared I won’t find something else – I know there’s much more going on than just the temporary challenge.
Because getting fear out of your decision-making will enrich your life in ways that were previously unthinkable.
We treat our jobs – and our lives – like a draft. Except this draft – this is it. There is no rewrite.
For me, not living my life as a draft would mean to always choose myself.
You’d think that getting laid off and doing my own thing would fix this. My own boss now – you’d think yay, the beautiful life aligned with my values will build itself and I will choose myself over everything else.
Wrong!
I have a whole system for not choosing myself, refined over time, very efficient.
It’s good for exposure, volunteering, networking – mostly leading to the need for external validation, unpaid labour, wasted time.
I am very good at treating distractions as if they were impactful work.
In my case, underneath all of it – because there is always something underneath – is fear of success.
Apparently this is common. So what’s underneath that fear of success?
→ Identity (I’m from a workers’ family) → Deservingness (programming that you don’t deserve it) → Some evolutionary powerful crap: fear of the unknown, where everything unknown can potentially be a threat (more money, more problems)
This is where more work and digging must be done to actually get yourself to do the really scary things that ultimately bring success.
And if you need help figuring out what those scary things are – to finally choose yourself over fear and unhelpful programming – reach out. That’s exactly what we work on together.