Did you ever get what you wanted, only to realize it wasn’t what you wanted? Do you ever feel unfulfilled as outward career success builds and find yourself missing earlier, simpler times? If so, relax, you’re human and this is a universal experience, but one that is generally not openly discussed. The good news is that this experience doesn’t necessarily point to imminent failure (in fact, it often means the opposite…), but it does merit our attention to figure out what’s behind it and how we can use it for growth. Here are some common drivers of disillusionment with career success, and 5 approaches to turning this around.
High functioning individuals, from stressed executives to creative visionaries, like most adults, experience depression, anxiety, loneliness, and a sense of meaninglessness. The relentless demands of a successful career add logs to the fire. The common drivers of career disillusionment that emerge in therapy include:
· Impact on Relationships; as work demands rob us of the time and energy to relax with friends and family. On the home front, confusion and misunderstandings can emerge about how to relate to friends and family who have not experienced the same level of success. Even friendships at work can become frayed over time as the politics of navigating stakeholders can result in personal bonds becoming strained. This is a catch-22 situation since strong interpersonal relationships are effective in helping us cope with workplace stress.
· Loneliness; triggered both by the fact that the pool of people with whom we can be honest and vulnerable, diminishes with seniority, as does the number of peer mentors who understand what we are facing. Similarly, these roles often require us to hold complex information that cannot be shared.
· Work-Life Balance; a concept that is out of reach for many executives. Given tight deadlines and heavy responsibilities owed to highly demanding stakeholders, work comes first. Even if time is carved out for other-life activities, the energy available to invest in these activities is limited to what is left over from our energetic investment in our careers.
· Impact on Health; chronic work stress can create health issues, including blood pressure, weight, substance use issues, while at the same time robbing us of the time needed for self-care. Mental health is also impacted, through the emergence of symptoms like depression, anxiety, apathy, or panic attacks linked to chronic stress.
Once executives experience these symptoms, a secondary wave of emotions often follows, including fears about the ability to maintain high achievement, fear of failure, or imposter syndrome. It is no wonder that career anxiety creeps up over time.
Evidenced Based Approaches to Fuel Growth
One area we work on in therapy, and the main reason for authoring this article, is to normalize the experience of disillusionment with career success as something that simply points to our changing needs, motivators and perspectives that naturally occur as we grow in life. Look at it like an invitation to audit what is important to you now, how your concept of fulfilment has changed as you have grown in your career and matured in our life. Simple techniques that support this process include:
1: Distinguish what is Urgent from what is Important:
This technique is grounded on the principle that what is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent. When an executive is under relentless pressure to deliver on urgent work commitments, the ability to reflect on longer-term values, drivers, sources of joy and fulfillment falls off the radar. Think about what was most urgent on your list today, will it still be relevant in 12 months? Similarly, did you take the time today to push forward with something that was not urgent but might well give you fulfillment in 12 months? It takes a sustained effort to prioritize what is important and likely to generate a long-term return on investment.
2: Learn to Live with Conflicting Emotions:
Ambiguity and constant change are now universal norms in most professions. We can’t change that, but we can learn to see ambiguity as a driver of growth and exploration. Holding ambiguous or even conflicting feelings about something, known in therapy as a dialectic, is far more common than we often realize. In your own life, do you often experience both respect and resentment towards colleagues, siblings, and stakeholders? In terms of your own self-image, does your appreciation of your talents co-exist with people occasional feelings of being a fraud or imposter? This is perfectly normal, and it is more effective to acknowledge and make peace with these ambiguities than to fight them. Two ways of developing the skills around comfort with ambiguity include (a) consciously practicing releasing any expectations of a particular outcome, and (b) cultivate a mindset of curiosity in the face of adversity, and approach everything as a learning experience.
3. Foster Meaningful Connections:
In a culture where digital interactions often replace face-to-face communication, fostering meaningful human connections is highly predictive of maintaining energy levels. Whether it is through mentorship or informal check-ins over a coffee, cultivating authentic relationships can help executives experience a sense of belonging. Fostering connections can be as simple as saying hello, recognizing if a colleague is having a tough time and listening.
4. Embrace Authenticity in Leadership: Authenticity sometimes gets a bad name, but at its core it is about aligning your actions with your values and beliefs, even when faced with criticism. It is primarily a journey inward, figuring out what is important to you, and reflecting on how to translate that into your professional world. This work also involves acknowledging the choices we have in our professional lives, and becoming more conscious of the choices we make as a means of charting a course through chaos.
5. Talk it Out
Share what you are going through with a trusted friend, mentor, or a therapist. It is helpful to have someone support us figure out what drives us and what derails us, what attributes may have been helpful at one stage of the journey that no longer serve us well, and what is going to connect us towards a sense of lasting fulfilment. For the writers amongst us, journalling can also be effective in structuring thoughts.
The starting point to using the energy of disillusionment as fuel for growth, is to realize it is a normal experience, and one that signals a deeper need to evolve. If viewed as an invitation to audit the parts of our professional lives that serve us well, and adapt those that don’t, we can use this experience to transition to new levels of fulfilment and creativity.
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