Katie was late.
We were sitting in HeartSpace, our retreat centre in Park City, ready to start a coaching session with her. We had hot coffee, open space and calm music—everything we needed to begin.
Except for Katie.
This wasn’t like her. We’d known Katie for a long time. An accomplished professional with a private practice, she was superb at balancing the many demands on her time—patients, team members, family, friends, volunteer commitments. From an outsider’s perspective, she seemed to be at the top of her game.
So, when she’d reached out a couple of months earlier about engaging in coaching with us, we were a bit surprised. Katie represented the kind of conscious leader we love to work with, but we couldn’t see any of the signs of stress, dissatisfaction or yearning we commonly find in leaders looking to grow. We said, “Of course—what would you like to work on?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever set out to, but…” She trailed off for a second. “I don’t know. Something’s missing.”
Over the previous few months, we’d really enjoyed getting to know Katie and had come to appreciate her thoughtfulness and depth. But after several coaching sessions, we still couldn’t quite pinpoint why she’d asked us to work with her. Now, sitting on the cozy couches of HeartSpace, we wondered as we waited about what might be holding her up—literally and figuratively.
A few minutes later, she arrived. Before we saw her face, we could sense the rush of someone flustered. The front door opened quickly and shut with a slam. She walked into our main room with her coat still on, complete with a thin scarf to provide some warmth in the Park City spring. She absently dropped her scarf onto the floor and collapsed into the sofa. Katie looked tired. Frazzled. She seemed almost dim, in some way, like someone had turned down her brightness a few notches.
Jennifer asked, “Do you need a few moments to slow down and get here?”
Katie gave a nervous laugh. “Jeez, what a morning. Holy smokes. You know, when you’re raising your kids, you tell yourself that things will get easier—and less expensive—when they grow up. Ha! I can’t seem to catch up.”
She paused. We could see tears welling up in her eyes.
“I mean, with the business, the kids, my marriage … it’s so much. Everything is moving at warp speed. I feel like I’m running to stand still.”
The world is speeding up
We hear comments like Katie’s all the time. Do you feel it? Does it seem like the world is speeding up?
Maybe you notice the pace in the news cycle, which seems to bring us a new world-shaking event every few weeks. “Once-in-a-lifetime” environmental incidents occur almost every month now. Domestic and global political tensions dominate the headlines. The financial and economic foundations of our world can seem to be on shakier ground every day.
Or do you notice the speed in your ever-present mobile device, constantly pushing notifications at you, telling you to be more, share more, do more, buy more?
Do you see it in your calendar, packed with things to do from sun-up to sun-down each and every day?
Do you see it in your bank account? A feeling like you’re running to stand still, that no matter how much you learn and earn, your expenses always seem to just outpace your savings?
Or do you notice the pace in the conversations you have with your friends and family? Does it seem like despite the fact that we have more ways to connect with one another than ever before, our feelings of loneliness, isolation and depression are at record highs?
For many, the pace of life is speeding up. And with that speed may come a sense of unease. It feels like the technological progress that has created so much prosperity is also personally running us into the ground.
There’s something more
And yet, doesn’t it sometimes seem like there’s more possibility than ever before, too? Perhaps hidden just beneath the surface, like a springtime tulip trying to push its way out of the frost on the ground?
Can you hear the whispers of a better world calling?
It could be in the growing proportion of electric vehicles you see in your neighbourhood, or in the growing number of articles you read about the low-cost renewable energies now available. Maybe it’s in conversations with your kids, as you realize they have a much broader sense of tolerance and acceptance than you did when you were young.
Maybe it comes when you notice the growing number of mainstream podcasts that you listen to that mention the power of mindfulness, whole-body well-being, and mental health.
Maybe it’s in catching a news story from the corner of your eye about the progress towards landing a human crew on Mars in our lifetime.
A new paradigm is emerging. Everywhere around us, the old systems of our world—many based on efficiency and hierarchy—are gasping for breath. That can feel disruptive and painful. But new systems are taking their place—systems based on cooperation, respect, constructive creativity and well-being. These systems are going to help us create a different kind of world, a world where the best aspects of technology integrate with the power of the natural world to uplift us all.
That feels like possibility.
People are realizing, “There’s more out there.” And you’re one of those people, aren’t you?
Our new paradigm is personal and global
This paradigm shift is personal, too. Many of us, like Katie, climbed a ladder. The shared experience of the global pandemic accelerated a quiet trend we’ve noticed for years: more and more people are taking stock of their work and their lives. And more and more people are deciding something is missing.
In our work with executives and leadership teams, we hear this story repeated frequently. We climb the ladder to success, and many of us—partly thanks to hard work, partly thanks to privilege and partly thanks to good luck—are pleasantly surprised to realize we’ve ended up towards the top.
Most of the people we work with are tremendously accomplished. They’re proud of their work. But once they get where they thought they wanted to go, they have a feeling that there’s still something more waiting. We hear leaders say, “I think life has more to offer me.”
And of course, the corollary to that belief is “I think I have more to offer life.”
When success isn’t enough
Can you remember the last time you felt really, truly fulfilled?
Close your eyes and imagine it. Perhaps you finished a massive product launch with a team you’d handpicked. Or finally broke 90 after trying to learn to play golf all summer. Maybe it was watching your child graduate from high school, seeing them grow into a real human and knowing you played a part in that. Maybe it was finally earning your high school diploma after years of thinking you’d never go back to school. Maybe it was being on vacation, unplugged from your daily routine and feeling the freedom of limitless choice. Or perhaps it was looking at your life partner and realizing you found someone who you can be yourself around.
Whatever it was, can you recall the feeling?
True fulfillment comes from inside of you. Fulfillment comes from doing something you chose to do.
Chances are that your feeling of fulfillment didn’t come from doing something someone else told you to do—AKA recognition. Now, don’t get us wrong—giving and receiving praise is incredibly important, particularly for leaders. But true fulfillment comes from inside of you. Fulfillment comes from doing something you chose to do. And often, fulfillment comes from the process as much as the product.
When we reflect on the moments when we’ve really felt fulfilled, we recall our entire journey. Finding that life partner also means struggling with people who don’t understand you. Raising a healthy adult means putting up with some unbearable teenage moments. Shooting 90 means playing some truly uninspired rounds of golf! Earning your high school diploma as an adult means overcoming challenges of workload, time management and sometimes self-doubt.
Fulfillment comes from following what you love, through thick and thin, and learning something about yourself in the process.
Most of us didn’t get to pick our grade school or the subjects we studied. Most of us didn’t really pick whether we wanted to work—we knew that we had to put food on the table. And so, we did our best with what we had to do, which is very, very different from doing our best at what we love to do.
That paradigm shifts immediately when you realize “I could choose.”
More and more people are waking up to the choices they have in their own lives. You don’t simply have to take that next promotion. You don’t have to stay at your current company at all, do you? Or even stay in your current field, right? You don’t have to settle for your current relationship. Or choose to be overtired. Or under-fulfilled.
The belief that you have a choice is a powerful thing. Our experience working with leaders has taught us that this idea of choice is as daunting as it is liberating. It’s often harder to slow down when you reach a fork in the road than it is to keep grinding down your path when you don’t have a choice.
But as scary as it might be, when you start to hear a voice inside your heart asking, “Is there more for me to become?” it’s time to slow down and listen. Because the thing is, the question wouldn’t even occur to you if there wasn’t.
We live one life
There’s a phrase we use every day at Plenty Consulting: We live one life. It’s probably always been true, but in our ever-faster, ever-connected world, we don’t have a “personal life” and a “professional life.” Those are artificial constructs that were used to get us to think differently during the work week so we’d be more productive when on the job: Set your emotions aside until Friday night. Put off your passions until the weekend.
But these two lives aren’t separate. You live one life.
If you’ve ever thought about an argument with your spouse while at work, or dragged a bad work conversation home with you and unwittingly taken it out on your kids, you’ve experienced the full-heart, full-self humanity we’re talking about. You live one life. The more you try to segment it, divide it and parcel it out, the more you end up feeling unfulfilled, disconnected and lost.
You don’t live a personal or professional life—you live one life. That’s why, no matter how good you are at climbing the ladder, if it isn’t a ladder you genuinely want to climb, you won’t feel fulfilled when you get to the top.
And you’ll be exhausted if you try. The more you try to keep your lives separate—showing up one way personally and a different way professionally—the more you’ll be sucked dry of your vital energy.
If you’re the common denominator in both your personal life and professional lives, why not be your whole, authentic self in both places? And if you can’t, for any reason, isn’t that a cue to find the place where you can?
For each of us, the question isn’t “How do I get to the top?” The question is “What do I love enough to keep me fulfilled in the climbing, no matter where I end up?”
And ironically, the wonderful truth is the more we focus on what we love, instead of what we’ll get, the more we will create abundance that we can experience along the way. The climb can become the top, each and every day.
Not convinced? You don’t have to be. But the fact that you’ve read this far shows us you have a sense that there’s more for you to become.
The invitation to wake up
Many stories of personal growth and transformation, ours included, start with what we call “The Mack Truck Moment”— something that comes from out of the blue and smacks you down so hard that you have no choice but to pay attention.
Maybe you’ve already had such a moment: a cancer diagnosis, an injury that forced you to rest, a difficult divorce or getting fired from a job that you later realized you never really liked. Experiences like these are catalysts for self-awareness. They are crucibles that can help us realize, “Maybe I want to live my life with more intention.”
But we believe you don’t need to wait for the harsh alarm. Life is inviting you, every moment, to wake up.
Practice Points
Getting started
Threaded between chapters, we offer practices designed to deepen your engagement with the ideas in the text. We invite you to try them out as you encounter them after each chapter. It’s our hope that these questions and exercises give you the opportunity to feel increasingly in touch with your light as a leader. You may wish to have a notebook and pen around for some of these activities.
Here’s one to start.
The roles you play
Take a moment to reflect on the many roles you currently play in work and life. We don’t mean the titles you hold—we mean the roles within those titles.
For example, you may hold the title of “vice president of marketing.” That title may come with many roles: visionary, inspirer, manager, PowerPoint maker, protector, convincer and advocate.
As another example, you may hold the title of “mother,” which also brings with it many roles: caregiver, picker-upper, coach, co-ordinator, planner, yes-or-no-er and approver.
As a way to examine the one life you get to live, write down all the roles you can think of that you’ve taken on in recent years.
- What roles do you see?
- How many roles are you playing?
- Are your work roles different from your personal roles? How?
- What roles feel fulfilling to you?
Bringing your own awareness to the many hats you wear in life is the first step towards aligning around what is really working for you—a process we’ll consider in future chapters.
Jennifer Mulholland is an author, strategist, alchemist and executive coach. Jeff Shuck is an accomplished entrepreneur with lifelong experience in leadership development, organizational growth strategy and social impact. Mulholland and Shuck are co-owners of Plenty Consulting as well as co-authors of the new book, Leading with Light.
Excerpted from the book, Leading with Light: Choosing Conscious Leadership When You’re Ready for More, copyright © 2024 Plenty Consulting, Inc. Reprinted with permission from Modern Wisdom Press—www.modernwisdompress.com.
images: Depositphotos
