Photo by William Iven on Unsplash
Do you feel you've reached success by other people's standards? Have you ever woken up and wondered, "How did I get here?" You're not exactly motivated to go to work. You feel you have no right to complain. After all, you have everything you need. Certainly, everything people expect you to have in your position. Yet you know you're not where you want to be and there's something more. You just don't know what it is nor how to get there. Perhaps you started on your career path early, and it simply doesn't fit who you are anymore, or you've hit a level in your current position and you don't know what's next or how to get there. You are in transition from a social mindset into an author mindset.
No matter what the reason is, it's time to explore what you truly want. What is your more? For some of my clients, they don't want to live by other people's rules anymore. So they start their own ventures. I also have clients that actually love what they do, just not where they're doing it. Or they've reached that plateau and don't know how to get off of it. No matter what the reason, we all want to be happy. Being happy, is having a purposeful career. Do you wish to author your career?
How do you find out what is your more? I have three practices that you can try, and I suggest that you try at least one of them.
The first requires you to reflect on what would the ideal life for you look like. Okay, you have a general idea in mind. Pick up a pencil and paper and start writing a day in that ideal life. Start from the moment you wake up. What are you doing? Who are you with? Where are you? How do you feel? Step through the day, every aspect of the day. What do you do? How long do you do it for? What are the results of that? What happens at the end of the day? All the way to the point where you're about to go to sleep. That's when you stop writing. Now, you should put down your pencil. Look at it. What is in your ideal life exists already today? How can you bring more of that into your life? What can you bring to your life that doesn't exist? What's available to you? What's possible for you? That's practice one.
Practice two is a little bit more difficult to explain, so I'll use an example, me. It's about considering what we're telling yourself. What are we telling ourselves about our limits? I thought I spent 15 years in a very specific field. I had a lot of experience and my only possibility was for me to switch companies and do that very same career. Yet, here I am doing something totally different and using those very same skills. I've transferred them. I've used them in new ways, ways I never thought were possible. I was telling myself that I couldn't do something. What are you telling yourself? What limits are you putting on? Can you look at them? Can you question them? Can you try something new to see if you can change your self-talk about what you can and cannot do? Try it. It's challenging. Give it a try.
The third practice is to list out everything you could change if everything was possible; everything. Don't limit yourself. Remember the second practice. We have a tendency to say we can't do things. If you list out everything that's possible, and at the end of that brain dump, go back over that list and find one thing, just one thing and change it. What happens? What shifts for you? What becomes possible next? If it works, what is something else on that list you can change? You'd likely be surprised. It's not that difficult.
Why do these things work? Well, they're actually been proven out by science. How we perceive our situations is up to us. If you choose the right lens, you can be limitless in your potential.