This is it! Time to join the big boys and girls in the glamorous world of banking!
I got my first,
proper, full-time job 15 years ago.
I thought I'd hit the big time.
But I couldn’t have been more wrong.
A couple of weeks later and I was already wondering if I’d made a mistake.
Walking through the office to my desk was like plodding through the waiting room of a morgue.
But I had a plan. A way out.
And it was this:
Get a promotion.
I thought climbing the career ladder would makes things better. More interesting work, more prestige and more money.
It took two years for me to get my first promotion.
Here we go! This will make all the difference!
Guess what?
It didn’t.
Aha! I thought. But the next promotion will! Even more money! Even more prestige!
I don’t need to spell out how this ends.
It took me a couple more promotions to realise that promotions weren’t the answer.
Not only did they firm up my doubts about corporate life, but a load of new problems came along as well.
And they
weren’t problems my friends and colleagues were talking about.
No-one talked about them.
So it made me wonder if they were only problems for me.
I don’t mean problems like “how to lead a team” or “how to motivate other people”.
They were subtler than that.
I mean problems like:
1. I had more to lose. And the more I had to lose, the more I felt like I needed to cling on to what I had.
2.
Others expected more from me. And the more they expected of me, the more reluctant I became to ask them for help. I thought “I should know this by now”.
3. I looked at colleagues a couple of
steps ahead of me. For most, work was their life. I realised I was on the same path. Every promotion took me one step closer to being an apathetic workaholic.
4. I lived in the centre of London, ate in top restaurants and went
on amazing holidays – but something was still missing. The promotions didn’t make me happy. If anything, I was becoming more unhappy with every promotion
Maybe these feelings aren’t that
common.
But if you relate to any of these, you’re not the only one.
And for me it all comes down to this:
At work I focussed my time on doing. Emails, calls, presentations, spreadsheets and to-do lists.
And I didn’t focus any of my time on being. I didn’t ask myself who I wanted to be.
Simple question, but easily overlooked.
I see now that being needs to come before doing. It’s the being which steers the doing.
So if I could rewind the clock I’d ask myself this:
Who do I want to be at work? And who do I want to be in my
life?
Rather than asking “what do I need to do?”
If you’d like a
hand with this question, hit the link below.
That's all for today.
-
Tom
p.s. Whenever you're ready, here are the ways you can connect with me