On the first Monday of each month, I share the included essay with all subscribers. To get access to everything, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Quick heads-up: I’ve got classes coming up that will be free or discounted for paid subscribers. I’ll be teaching a class in May on recognising who you are, including acknowledging your needs and wants so that you can choose the relationships, jobs and opportunities that best reflect and support who you are and want to be.
I’m also teaching a series of classes, Relationship Fundamentals, where paid subscribers get to choose two. An email will go out later this week with all the info and the schedule.
Hard Pass to overscheduling and overcommitting myself.
When I found myself doing mental gymnastics trying to fit in a last-minute invitation, I paused and checked in with myself. I really wanted to be available to do the thing and also my inner [recovering] people pleaser had definitely shown up. When I prioritised my needs and considered the impact of saying yes, it became obvious I needed to say no. I think when we overload ourselves, we often assume it’s with stuff we had no desire to do. Sure, sometimes it is. But we can also find it tricky to say no and then wind up overloading ourselves with stuff we’d love to do but don’t have the bandwidth or know going ahead will have a knock-on effect on our well-being. By saying no, I said yes to enjoying my other commitments and being able to relax. There will be other yeses.
Happy Yes to sending this newsletter ‘late’.
We’ve had a fun Easter weekend catching up with various pals we haven’t seen for ages, chilling, and getting into a heated argument over whether one or two full houses constituted winning the game of Bingo. When I woke up yesterday, I remembered that it was a holiday and soon realised that I needed to have a breather and be immersed in the day with family instead of rushing myself to get everything sorted before we headed out. As soon as I made the decision, I turned over and slept until one o’clock, so, clearly, I needed the rest.
Thanks for all the money book recommendations. I suddenly had a surge of emails yesterday. Keep ‘em coming!
Is Anyone Else Exhausted from Chasing 'More'?
Am I on the right path?
Am I living up to my potential and purpose?
Could I do or be more?
Have I missed the boat (even though I’m not even sure of what “the boat” is or the destination)?
Do you sometimes have a nagging feeling, thought, that you could, should, be doing something more even though you’ve done plenty and will no doubt do other things? Maybe you don’t even feel like you’ve done a lot even though you have. Yeah, I feel you.
It’s as if you go from your teens and twenties where there’s, of course, a level of angst about work, relationships and figuring your life out while simultaneously knowing you’re not supposed to have it all figured out to being older and sometimes obsessing about whether you’re on the right path, doing the right thing or screwing up somewhere and ‘behind’. And this might all occur while having achieved some or a lot of the things you used to strive for and knowing there are other things that aren’t for you.
In my twenties, I didn’t spend a great deal of time pondering my path, purpose or potential as I have in recent years. It’s not as if, for instance, my career or romantic life were going swimmingly, but, to my mind, this was to be expected given my age. Also, thinking about my “path” or my “purpose” was not in my vocabulary at that time. Growing up in Ireland, they used to call pondering such things naval gazing. I figured everything in my life could be solved by finally being “good enough”. You know, do more people pleasing.
In the English/Irish/Jamaican/Chinese culture of my upbringing, you go to school, go to university, get a respectful job that your parents can ideally boast about to the neighbours, climb the career ladder, get the house, car, etc., or meet someone, get engaged, get married while doing these, have a kid or few, get more things, retire, die.
About a hot minute after starting the last job I had before becoming self-employed — working in media sales on client and agency side for the biggest IT publisher in the UK at the time — I knew I had no desire to keep climbing the ladder to the top. I didn’t want anyone’s job or to become like any of the bigwigs. The “having it all” that the nineties promised really wasn’t all that attractive; it was tiring.
Self-employed throughout my thirties, for a good stretch of it, I was in my own bubble doing my own thing. There was no “ladder” or “path” for what I was doing… until there was. Suddenly, I was aware of what others were doing and it felt like I could and should aspire for more. I veered between wondering if I was too ambitious or not ambitious enough. Am I hiding from my potential? I started to feel a bit lost, behind, not enough.
At the same time, I’d look at myself and my life and be like, Why am I feeling this way? Eventually, the anxiety, the niggling, the search for clues would stop until the next time the cycle began.
Between podcasts, books, social media and just general chatter in society and the media about success, manifestation, finding and living your purpose, realising your potential instead of, as some put it, self-sabotaging, it’s easy to second-guess yourself.
Next thing, you’re looking for signs. You might look to various people to tell you what your path is; to give you the blueprint for what to do next. It’s almost like, Please don’t let me have to figure this all out by myself. Can’t you just tell me what to do?
Throw in that if you’re in your late thirties and above, you likely internalised a lot of messages about “steady jobs”, “climbing the ladder”, and not being “lazy”. If you dutifully obeyed these, you’re highly likely to have questioned your life simply because you complied and now you’re maybe a bit more aware of your inner voice or the whisperings of new or forgotten interests and talents. Or you complied and ticked all the boxes and yet you still didn’t get what you expected and wanted.
When I retrace my steps to previous times of angst, they’re all precipitated by achieving something, loss or rejection, and lifestyle shifts.
Think setbacks at work, dad dying, turning forty, getting a book deal, being perimenopausal and tired, and sometimes paying too much attention to what others are doing or being in places and spaces that aren’t a fit and getting triggered into comparison. Displaced or buried feelings about something then became ‘What am I doing with my life?’ It’s so tiring!
There’s nothing wrong with questioning aspects of your life from time to time, particularly to check in on commitments made in different circumstances that you might need to fine-tune or rejig. You do need to acknowledge where you’re going against yourself, maybe playing it small, and people pleasing.
But notice where worrying about your path, purpose or potential becomes another way of saying, Maybe I’m not good enough yet.
I think we’re also so obsessed with productivity and squeezing every bit of juice out our lives for fear of squandering potential and opportunity that we exhaust and deflate ourselves. We don’t leave enough space and quietness.
Can’t we enjoy something just because?
What might we discover about ourselves if we’re not always chasing and busy?
Do we have to become the greatest something?
Does everything we show any aptitude for need to become something we can commercialise — a side hustle or our next big career move?
Look, I get it; sometimes we want more. And that’s fine and great when it works for us.
Sometimes, there’s a gap between where we are now with something and where we want or hope to be.
We know that, for instance, we can barely lift some of the lightest weights for any length of time, but with effort, dedication and experience over time, we’ll consistently lift these and heavier ones. There is potential. But the fact we’re not there right now doesn’t mean we’re not good enough. And if we don’t get there, we haven’t ‘failed’ in our potential as a person. It doesn’t mean we are unworthy.
There’s also something to be said for us and others seeing our potential, particularly when we learned to believe we wouldn’t amount to anything or we’ve lost confidence.
But this has to be done with boundaries where there’s respect and appreciation of who we’ve been and already are so that we don’t pursue things from a place of hunger and deficiency.
We need to see and accept ourselves (and have others treat us this way) so that we experience the confidence to expand. If we don’t, we will people-please. We’ll use people pleasing to realise potential others project onto us or to try to make people become who we need and want them to be, often with painful results.
We will also try to tick society’s boxes for success and happiness and ignore, dismiss and override ourselves. Sometimes we want more just because we’re in a cycle of wanting more, which means we don’t even register ‘more’ when we get it because we move on to the next thing. It’s exhausting!
There are things we’ve already been, done and had that barely register for us that our parents and caregivers didn’t, never mind generations further back. Listening to and knowing ourselves more isn’t so we can have everything figured out and neatly tied up in bow; it’s so that we can take better care of ourselves and be more attuned to what is and isn’t for us. Doing so offers us the potential to live infinitely better lives because they look and feel more like ours.
“Building a life that’s ours” This topic has been something i’ve been grappling with. Thank you for this insight. Often times when we share this with our peers or family it’s difficult to receive support that isn’t marred with their projections. This is more than a journey of just finding purpose or career path but learning to hear our own voices when no one else can do that for you.
I love this! “they’re all precipitated by achieving something, loss or rejection, and lifestyle shifts.” 👏🏻