I’m going back to my roots. Literally.
I’ve been highlighting my hair for longer than I’ve had a driver’s license. And this week, without much thought or realization of the significance, I asked my stylist to match the top half of my hair to the bottom half. Under all that blonde, I’m apparently a natural brunette.
Under all that stuff, there is something for you to discover too. This week I’ve met at least half a dozen clients who needed to look below the layers they had accumulated in order to find some sense of direction, of solution, of respite…a reminder that they have the talent and instinct within them to succeed and thrive, but somewhere along the way, they lost touch with it.
One such client had so many layers of emergency response piling on top of herself, that she had lost sense of what her ideal timeline for delivering service could be. At her organization, she had jumped into the all-hands-on-deck mode early in the pandemic, and years later had settled into the expectation she built of responding to email within 30 minutes, no matter what.
Another leader found himself feeling out of touch with what used to inspire him, restless in his role, guilty for wondering what might be next when – on paper – he had accomplished everything a successful executive in his industry would hope for. He was buried in layers of external expectations.
Just this morning I coached a new leader who had been promoted up the ranks of her large corporation faster than anyone before her. The go-to person for getting stuff done, she was a reliable executor who had become known for her ability to take on and finish anything. But now that she was leading people, she felt completely out of her element.
There are many common themes. It’s normal to feel lost. Hey, at least that means you’re awake to what’s going on. It’s normal to feel tricked by our own habits, outshined by our own stories and lies, married forever to the exact things that worked for us years ago. But there’s more to this life than that. If you’re hearing the whisper that there may be a better way to live this crazy adventure, you’ve already done more work than you know. So where do you take that gut feeling? What do you do?
Here’s a framework I casually finding myself gravitating toward more than once this week. I call it the Favorite Future Self exercise, and it sounds insightful while being quite practical.
Your favorite future self is GROUNDED. This is the mental equivalent of turning down the radio so you can pay attention to the street signs. Build awareness of what is working for you through gratitude and recognition.
Ask: Which of your strengths are you proud of and grateful for? What got you to where you are today?
Ask: If you were to restart tomorrow (a new job, the total inability to continue on your current path, a forced shift to a different country), what about your experience today would you want to keep?
Your favorite future self is FREE. Release what is no longer serving you.
Ask: What should you let go of?
Ask: What does not fuel your strengths that you could delegate, automate, or eliminate?
Your favorite future self is FOCUSED. Prioritize areas that deserve your full attention and emotion.
Ask: How will your days be different when you are doing more of what you do best?
Ask: What is the most important thing to focus on?
You can do this on your own through meditation. You can ask a friend to listen. You can write it in a journal…or in the sand. It can change! Give yourself the power you already have. Step into the grounded, focused freedom you deserve. It’s completely okay to take a baby step. What’s important is that you step.
And maybe you’ll find yourself back to where you started, or perhaps back to the beauty of yourself beneath all the layers of experience you’ve collected. You needed those to get here. And you might get to leave them behind to dance forward.
