I read a post today from someone I follow on social media. She is a successful presence in her field and she seems to be everywhere right now: she recently published a book, she has a series of popular webinars, she has clients for her personal business, and more. She appears tireless.
But in her post she talks about how she is struggling with it all. She admits that what she has is what she has worked for, what she has wanted. But she is overwhelmed. She feels bad about complaining, but she isn’t feeling good about her personal and professional lives.
“I’m late on work (guilt), missing time with my husband (loneliness), and really late on work (panic),” she writes. “I’m picking what to do next based on what has the biggest penalty if I don’t get it done. I am—barely—getting it done, maybe 80% done on time. But there’s no room to plan for the future. I’m so busy reacting I’m not acting.”
Then she writes something that really sent up a red flag for me. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s working—but I want it to feel better. I want it to BE better.”
A couple of decades ago I was in her position. I simultaneously had a leadership role at a Big Four firm, was developing an indie film production company, sat on two non-profit boards, was an associate editor of a journal, was teaching grad-level university courses both in-person and virtual, was publishing non-fiction articles, was presenting at conferences, and was coaching my young son’s sports teams.
I thought the same as she did, that “it’s working—but I want it to feel better.”
I came to realize it was that very mindset that led to the Vortex of Doom; if it feels that bad, then it most certainly is NOT “working.” This thinking assumes the problem is with us, that we can’t handle all these “good things.”
But that is just blaming ourselves in a damaging way. If they are doing harm, whether just impacting the quality and timeliness of our production or actually causing us health-threatening stress, then we need to stop thinking of them as “good things” and be more ruthless in prioritizing the relevant and important things in our life.
That prioritization will be different for everyone, of course. But choices need to be made; not all options are always possible, which is a reality it took me a long time to acknowledge.
In my case I let go of the university teaching (a time suck) and the media production company (a mental energy suck). I turned the ideas and insights underlying the production company into an article, which was published in the journal where I was an editor, and for a while it was the journal’s most-downloaded reprint. The teaching became subsumed into the same process as my conference presentations, so that I occasionally appeared as a speaker at academic events, offering the same value without the ongoing time commitment.
I miss the engagement of teaching, and I’ll never know for sure if the production company would have been successful.
But I was able to focus on a solid second-act career in global marketing communications with two of the biggest business services firms in the world. And I was able to spend time with my family and to travel to sports events up and down the East Coast with my son, who turned out to be an exceptional athlete. I chose which things were the truly “good things” in my life, and prioritized accordingly. And I have no regrets.