Something to chew on if you have the nagging feeling you’re not reaching your potential:

As part of my prep for my recent interview with newsletter subscriber Khe Hy, I checked out a podcast featuring a thoughtful back & forth between Khe and author, neuroscientist & entrepreneur Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

During the podcast, Anne-Laure mused about three cognitive scripts that can sneak into people’s lives.

One of these is the so-called SQL Script.

In Anne-Laure’s words:

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That’s the script that says that whatever decision you make today, whatever career choice you’re making, it needs to make sense based on what you were doing before. And so, for example, that’s why some people might only consider jobs that make sense based on what they studied at university.

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The ultimate effect of the SQL Script?

According to Anne-Laure, it nudges us towards safe choices rather than satisfying ones.

I quite agree. 

That's not to say that everyone is following this script all the time, in every aspect of life. But I do think the more we feel we're drifting, the more likely the script is running the show.

Work is a good example. Even when I had the soul-stirring idea to take some time away from my career to travel, read and dive into my chess, poker, magic & bridge, I buried that idea. And when it popped back up, I buried it again. 

Then I doubled down on my career and snagged a promotion. 

The end result was a working life that felt narrower, more constrained and much less fun.

So what can be done about this?

Well, if you want to debug your SQL Script, there’s two ways to go about it.

The first?

Burn yourself out.

That’s the method I used without even realising.

And while I wouldn’t recommend the crankiness, brain fog, cynicism, exhaustion, loss of motivation and self-neglect which comes with burn-out (have I sold it to you yet?), there’s no doubt that burning out forced me to re-evaluate a lot of my choices and acted as one almighty CTRL+ALT+DEL on my career and my life more generally.

When I burnt out, I was working as a securitisation banker.

3 years later, I’m back in the holy world of banking while I juggle the 9 to 5 with my writing, my coaching and running Mindset & Clarity workshops for my colleagues.

i.e. what I call “work” has certainly gone off script.

Anyway, if you have no desire to burn yourself out, there’s always debugging option 2.

That option?

Subtract the SQL Script from your mental software instead.

To do this, you first need to be aware of the script.

Once you are, you’ll start to glimpse where your life choices are being copy-and-pasted rather than freely chosen.

Then you can take a step back with your newly armed perspective and ask yourself the question “what do I really want?”.

As it happens, my Subtraction Method is made for this kind of debugging.

The Subtraction Method has zip all to do with giving you more stuff to practice, learn, achieve and worry about. Instead, it has everything to do with subtracting, unlearning and removing all the shoulds, stories and scripts which block your intuition, box in your creativity and mute your goals & dreams.

When you’re ready for a mental reboot, you can power up over here:     

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com