Show of hands: How many of us know what “the life you deeply desire to live” looks like?
For so many, I think it’s not the “living” that’s hardest. It’s the knowing or deciding THE KIND OF LIFE that we most want.
Ten years ago, I thought I had mine all figured out: rising star at a big firm, completely career focused, happily married and convinced I didn’t want to have children. Between the BMW and island vacations and fancy bottles of Cabernet, my lifestyle was more than a little hedonistic. The narrative of days could be summed up by “work hard + play hard,” a pattern I assumed would repeat until we achieved the nirvana of early retirement and permanent beach relocation.
But like all things, my perspective evolved. I EVOLVED. I found a life-changing yoga practice. My father became terminally ill and died. My husband and I decided we wanted to have a baby, and then another. As priorities shifted, I realized I was no longer happy living the life I’d created. In fact, with each passing year, I became more and more miserable.
I knew I longed for something different but didn’t yet know what that was. I felt trapped and stuck but had no idea how to get out.
Have you ever felt that way? Boxed in without the tools or the strength or strategy to get out? One day, on a flight to California and tens of thousands of feet in the air, I decided to pass the time by reading something given to me by a trusted colleague who knew I’d been struggling, a piece in the Harvard Business Review called “How Will You Measure Your Life?” by Professor Clayton M. Christensen. With sections titled “Create a Strategy for Your Life,” “Allocate Your Resources” and “Choose the Right Yardstick,” I felt like the good professor had written a love letter just for me, in the language of business, which I could easily understand. (The 2010 article was the precursor to Christensen’s book by the same name, published in 2012.)
You should have seen how marked up that six-page article was by the time I got through with it; red-ink asterisks and underlines and exclamation points practically covered the pages and notes crowded the margins. I got out my yellow legal pad and started jotting down, in no particular order, the questions that flooded my brain. I share them in case they spark something for you…
- What is the purpose of my life?
- What is the metric by which I’ll measure success?
- What do I want the “culture” of my life to be?
- What qualities do I admire in others and want to instill in myself?
- What do I want out of my relationships – friends and lovers?
- What do I want out of my career? • How do I prioritize my stakeholders?
- What can the people in my life reasonably expect from me? What do I “owe” them?
- What can I contribute? To my friends & family? To society? To my job?
- What do I stand for?
- What do I want my legacy to be? How do I want to be known/remembered?
- What am I afraid of?
- If money were no object, what would my profession be?
- What is my greatest treasure?
I chewed on those questions for months, and as I reflected, the answers came into view slowly — some more slowly than others, for sure. But they all reinforced what I already knew: big changes were in order if I was going to live a life aligned with my new priorities.
It would be another year before I finally screwed up the courage to make the big leap I needed and leave that job (a story for another day), but this moment was absolutely pivotal. It solidified my journey on the road to big life change, prompting serious reflection to understand just what I wanted life to look like, followed by the hard work of mapping out a plan to get ever closer to it. And here I am now, teaching and writing and just plain living – making my choices, using my voice.
To all those struggling to visualize your future – one that feels natural and empowered and, well, happy – I encourage you to take the time to dig deep into life’s big questions. Consider things like resources and strategies, yardsticks and culture. Think like the CEO of Your Life, Inc., and build something you’ll be damn proud of.
Here’s what I know about change: It’s sticky. It takes time. Some days, it might feel impossible and you might just want to fling yourself down on your belly and beat your fists into the ground and give up. But as the old saying goes, “I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it.”
Stay with it, friends.
