5 Proven Steps to Stay on the Path of Personal Development - Even at Quarter's End

As we hurtle headlong through these dwindling weeks of Q3 (or, if you're one of "those" companies, Q2 or whatever the heck), team leaders, execs, and individual contributors are chiefly and collectively concerned with one thing: not being thrown into the discard pile because the c-suite made some self-indulgent and predictably bad calls and since your name appears nowhere in the SEC filings or investor presentations, everyone knows that you are woefully, nay laughably expendable. KIDDING! I'm kidding. OF COURSE your job is safe, stop it, you're fine. Except for Carol. Carol is so f**ked, let's be honest.

No, what every employed person is facing here in September is, finish Q3 strong so we can finish Q4 even stronger. Right? Not, maintain the strategic course we all agreed upon earlier this year. Not, remain faithfully committed to your professional development plan. And most certainly not, focus on achievable, incremental organizational and systemic improvements so that we might reinforce a foundation for reliable growth even in the face of industry headwinds. F that noise, man: finish the quarter strong. Finish the year strong. That's it. Everything else was an HR exercise.

Interesting, isn't it, that in the global leadership events, employee development one-on-ones, and those ridiculous text books our worldly, newly-minted Chief Whatever Officers tell us to read, the dialogue is all about CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE. Very rarely are these thought exercises couched in discussions about short-term scrambles or, put another way, how to end every quarter strong. It's always about CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE. Which is appropriate. After all, it is leadership's job to understand where we need to be, what we need to do to get there, and how to secure adequate resources for the journey. So, naturally, it all begins with CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE.

But as quarter-ends rise upon the horizon, all that virtue-steeped CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE blahblahblah goes right out the window, along with -- if you're a public company with crap leaders -- people like Carol. (Poor Carol. I mean, she clearly sucks, but still. She has to go, right? Who's the one that always microwaves her leftover salmon in the kitchen, the one stinking up the place? Carol. Who's the one with all those excuses, Oh my mom is sick and forgets where she is, Oh my landlord evicted me, Oh I can't help move desks cuzza my bad plantar fasciitis. Carol. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even give her a severance, I heard they're doing that now. Stupid Carol.) The subtext in every end-of-quarter hype memo from the corporate office is this: To hell with the course we charted, get billings.

And, listen, as a shareholder myself, I can't blame the suits for this mentality. I want the companies that I've invested in to hit their numbers. So, I'm not saying it's dumb or unreasonable for an organization to re-calibrate its priorities as quarters expire. I'm just saying that you, if you are an individual contributor or a mid-level manager, would be totally justified in admitting that you feel a little duped every quarter. Because what the frick was all that CHARTING THE RIGHT COURSE nonsense at the beginning of Q1 if we're not going to maintain this course as the year progresses?

What the frick, indeed. If you are someone who believes in your potential, if you are someone who takes seriously her or his career and personal development, it pays handsomely to remain relentlessly committed to your own, personal right course -- whatever that course means to you. Because your company will hit its number or it won't. Your contribution will appreciably help or it won't. And then, when you flip the page on your Goats in Trees calendar and find it's the top of a fresh, new quarter, you'll realize, Frick, this quarterly scramble cycle doesn't end. And you'll know, perhaps not even on a conscious level, that abandoning your personal path did nothing to disrupt, prevent, or terminate the cycle. All it did was disrupt-prevent-terminate your own development. All it did, in other words, was divert you from your developmental path. And, by the way, isn't your development and growth something that your employer should be banking on?

So, if we know that committing to our personal development is important, and we know that our employer and its Board of Directors definitely prioritize our development somewhere between widening the parking spaces and gender-parity compensation, what can we do? One option, the one I tend to favor, is to stay fiercely committed to the path that serves you. Because if you won't commit to your development, why would you expect anyone else to -- including your employer?

I pose all of this as someone who has spent two-and-a-half decades either directly employed by, or supporting as a vendor/consultant, global technology and entertainment corporations. Sony. STMicroelectronics. Comcast. Netflix. Disney. More to the point, I am someone who habitually and without question abandoned my own course of personal development anytime a manager or exec started pounding tables, insisting we "finish the quarter strong." Fortunately, I am also someone who married up. My wife, Kristen, as a vocation, coaches women and men such as myself who over-think, catastrophize, people-please, and otherwise sabotage themselves either personally or professionally. Earlier this week, she wrote and published a *killer* podcast episode and article ALL about how people like you and me can actually stay on the path that's right for us. EVEN WHEN our employer gets in the way. EVEN WHEN home life feels too busy. EVEN WHEN the path inevitably bends and becomes obscured by obstacles. And -- because she's rad, DEFINITELY a better human than dopey Carol and her loud gum-chewing and elevator burps -- Kristen has proven that we can stay relentlessly committed to the path WITHOUT exhausting ourselves or burning out.

(Click/tap here to read the full article. It's so frigging good.)

I am paraphrasing, here, but the gist of the article and podcast episode is this:

When you fully commit to any path of personal or professional development, you're signing up for what is essentially a Hero's Journey: an ultimately successful trek positively metastatic with challenges, d*ckheads, angels, doubts, and - of course - hard-won lessons. But none of that actually matters. What matters is, you have committed to a relentless pursuit of self-determined growth.

And like any trek, it's all inspiration and let's f**king go and happy vibes for the first few miles (or "kilometers" for the benefit of those of you who live in countries that provide sensible family leave and discourage civilians who flunked basic algebra from owning closetfuls of military-grade assault rifles). Turns out, inspiration and happy vibes -- while nice -- are not in actual fact core motivators that will keep us treading forth. These are merely feeling states. And while these feeling states are wonderful -- and even help us to overcome the inertia of starting down a new and unfamiliar path -- they are but that: feeling states. And every feeling state -- EVERY feeling state -- is temporary. Fleeting, you might say. Here and gone. Blink, you might miss it.

A few miles/kms down the path, these feelings might fade and ultimately dissipate entirely. When you're hiking a path and inspiration fades, you begin to question the trek altogether. Good lord, you think, all I see is path. Ahead of me, path. Behind me, path. Is this all there is, just trudging forward on this path? What was I thinking?

And THIS is where so many of us, consumed by feelings of doubt and a distaste for boredom and routine, give up. F this, we think. It was exciting at first but now I hate this and I am bailing. Or, as Kristen put it far more eloquently:

All feelings are temporary. Including inspiration. Including motivation. Including excitement. If you’re thinking you need to hang onto inspiration, or that you must keep finding fresh inspiration, or that inspiration is the only motivation to keep you walking, then you are going to give up. You’ll quit. You’ll abandon the path before you will have really gotten anywhere.

In other words, if you interpret the inevitable wearing-off of inspiration and excitement as some indication that you’re on the wrong path, you will easily convince yourself to veer off the path to go hunting for new inspiration. And the cycle of getting nowhere will continue.

She provides some examples from our real life , and then she goes on to say this, which I thought was spot-on:

Stop thinking that the fuel which keeps you walking relentlessly on your path is inspiration or excitement or happy, positive feelings. They are really not important.

Now, let's say you power through the disappearance of inspiration and, like a fully functioning adult, you remain relentlessly committed to your personal Hero's Journey. If the first mental obstacle in the path was the vanishing of motivation, then the next inevitable obstacle -- again, mental -- is uncertainty.

This is because if you stay on any path long enough, it bends. Uncertainty lives in our blind spots, in the bendy parts of the path that may or may not conceal predators, pitfalls, and other things that really suck.

What your brain wants to do when presented with uncertainty is to create certainty. So it will start coming up with all the possibilities:

What will I do if on the other side of the curve is someone who’s going to hurt me?

What if there’s a cliff? What if on the other side of a curve is a dead end?

What if there’s a river with raging rapids?

What if there’s a giant boulder blocking the path?

What if there’s a pack of wolves or a bear or or or…?

What if what if what if…

Your brain will not run out of catastrophic things that could be waiting for you on the other side of the curve. It’s what the brain does, it’s what evolution has conditioned it to do.

And here’s the funny thing about this endless flow of catastrophic thoughts…when your brain goes here it’s not looking for answers! It’s looking for more problems. It’s looking for a guarantee that you will be safe around the corner and if there’s uncertainty, there’s no guarantee.

See? Told you, Kristen is the real deal. Anyway, let us now assume that you are Indiana Jones and have, against all odds, conquered the first two mental obstacles on your path to your Future Self. Guess what! This is where sh*t gets real. Literally. Yeah, you've overcome the obstacle of diminishing inspiration, you've defeated the obstacle of uncertainty. But those were mental obstacles -- inventions of the neural networks inside your head. Your reward, Hero, for making it this far in your journey is that you are now presented with real, tangible OBSTACLES in your path. This could be a refusal of funding for that laboratory equipment you need. It could be the acceleration of an already impossible deadline. Or it could be that Chief Whatever Officer you've been cozying up to decides she's going leave and now you're a lap dog without a lap. Point is, once you conquer your own imaginary hurdles, life will inevitably hand you real ones. And this is where five simple (maybe not easy), proven steps will keep you moving forward confidently on your path.

1. PAUSE

You’re going to ask yourself, Is this a safety-threatening emergency or simply an obstacle?

2. REGULATE

You're going to regulate your central nervous system. You do NOT want to be trying to solve non-emergency problems from your fight/flight response.

3. ZOOM OUT AND ASSESS

Because you’re able to access that higher-level-thinking region of your brain, you’re going to be looking at the boulder in the path like a scientist.

4. PICK ONE SOLUTION — just one.

If one of those high quality ideas jumps out at you as a solid front runner, pick that one. Notice I didn’t say, think a little bit more about it or, agonize over this decision. You’re going to pick ONE idea, embrace your selection, and try it.

5. KEEP GOING

You have successfully encountered an obstacle in your path and instead of quitting, you are still on the Future Self path. And, of course, you will now face subsequent mental and real obstacles. So...wash, rinse, repeat.

As Kristen relates in her article, obstacles are a non-negotiable part of any journey. Once you know how to move past your obstacles and the obstacles life hands you, there will be NO reason to get off the Future Self path.

This is how you stay relentlessly committed to creating the life you want, regardless of the quarter-end, regardless of your employer's hypocrisy, regardless of whatever life sucker-punches you with -- without exhausting yourself.

These 5 steps. Over and over.

Author's note: I am definitely not smart enough to come up with this on my own. Really. Check out Kristen Finch's website or YouTube channel to tap into some wisdom and perspective that will change your life.