The Choice You Don’t Have to Make.

Astrid is a woman with an incredible memory, and she loves puzzles.

Who is she? And what does she have to do with leadership and decision-making? I’ll get to that in a moment, I promise, but first, I want to talk to you about my entrepreneurship journey.

Lately, I have been focused on establishing clarity about my clients. Specifically, who my services are for and why it matters to them. This is a bit of an oversimplification of the steps needed to find your clients. It sounds easy, but it’s rather challenging.

But then, it’s always challenging to get to the bottom, the essence, of things, isn’t it?

Over the past few months, as I seek to refine and articulate how I can best support people, I have been thinking about my ideal client a lot. I have been mining my work with clients, existing and past, to gain clarity about who I serve best. While I made some progress, I had been stuck for a while, because I had identified two different categories of coaching focus.

Many of my engagements relate to the client’s career—be it choice, progression, or challenges. However, others seek greater alignment and fulfillment on a personal level.

And I noticed that regardless of the entry point of our work together, we seem to navigate both aspects of my client’s life (professional and personal). And while that makes sense to me, I couldn’t let go of a feeling that there was a commonality to be found here, but the missing link continued to elude me.

This brings us back to Astrid (thank you Jackie for suggesting I watch this show!) Astrid Nielsen works in the library of the judicial police in Paris. She has Asperger's syndrome. Her incredible memory makes her a genius at analyzing files and solving investigations. I find her character delightful and endearing. As I mentioned before, she loves puzzles, and she uses and talks about them a lot. She advocates for people to switch their outlook when working on solving them.

Astrid’s astuteness led me to flipping my approach around when seeking to leverage my clients’ wisdom—instead of looking for common traits, I started to look for common challenges.

And I finally got somewhere!

This shift in perspective enabled me to express a nugget I have known for a while but had struggled to put into simple terms.

You see, the commonality amongst my clients is that they operate from the belief that we must choose between having a successful career and having a fulfilling personal life. This self-limiting belief often results in frustrations and feelings that something is missing: if I have a career that other people deem successful, why do I experience this sense of emptiness? What is missing?

By the time my clients reach out, they are struggling with aspects of their lives. They are seeking help to determine what they should prioritize. The focus of our coaching work typically evolves away from determining prioritization and towards finding integration of all parts of their lives.

Because,

when it comes to your professional and personal life, you don’t have to choose one over the other.

Full stop.

And that’s a golden nugget I wish I would have clearly articulated earlier in life.

Perhaps blending both will create a slightly different trajectory than planning each aspect separately, but ultimately it results in satisfaction with both and overall fulfillment versus a sense that to succeed with one aspect of your life, you must sacrifice the other.

My hope is that you will grab a hold of this gem and not wait to experience roadblocks before you give yourself permission to create a life that is all encompassing and on your own terms.

You can do that by dedicating your energy to creating the blend that works well for you rather than aiming to meet other people’s expectations.

It’s possible the balance that you strike might evolve over time as you navigate the various stages of your life. Think of it as fine-tuning the recipe as your tastes evolve.

I don’t pretend to be a sociologist, but my speculation is that the beliefs we carry around of having to choose between success at work and personal fulfilment is a heritage from the modus operandi of previous generations. What I can say with certainty is that these beliefs are being challenged every day by the young talent entering the workplace. Our young people are not lazy or impatient; they are wise to seek a better balance.

Perhaps you are skeptical, and you think, “No one can have it all.” I speak from a place of personal experience as well as firsthand witness when I say this: I promise you that once you upend your belief system, as Joseph Campbell’s puts it, “the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

What do these doors look like? One of my clients went from feeling pressured to say yes to opportunities extended to him by his employer to politely declining a few offers and eventually saying yes to the perfect role for him. Another client decided to “quit corporate” and is now a thriving entrepreneur. A third client established better work boundaries as she supports a child with learning challenges; this has given her a renewed sense of empowerment, and she is enjoying her role again after a lengthy stretch of feeling disenchanted.

So, what can you do to think like Astrid, switch your outlook, and give yourself permission to build a life that nurtures both your professional and personal aspirations? 

Let’s connect if you would like to discuss what support on your journey might look like.

Kindly,