Walk on By

Seven weeks ago today, right before my work day started, I made the final decision to quit my job and go back to working for myself. What led me to that place, and the many things that happened along the way, are stories for other times.?

What’s important today is this: when I made the decision, I simultaneously committed to two things. First, I would firmly set my last current-job day at the end of July and I would not start pursuing my business in earnest until after Labor Day. I would take that time, instead, to reset and plan and think – and not think at all. Second, I would reserve 50% of my available work hours through the end of the year for the projects I want to build. Those hours would be sold to myself and not available for purchase by anyone else, no matter how tempting the project. By the time I gave notice the next morning, half the remaining available-to-sell hours were booked. Two weeks later, I found myself with zero hours left to sell through the end of the year - and I could have sold most, if not all, of the hours I’d reserved for my own projects.

This was both a powerful affirmation that I was on the right track and an equally powerful test of my willpower. Some of the projects and organizations that have come my way in the last few weeks have been exactly the kind I want to jump on… eventually. It has been so very hard to stick to the promise I made to protect “my” hours. After all, who knows if the business will be there in January? Who knows if the clients who say they’ll wait really will? Who knows if my passion projects are going to pay? What if I’ve just thrown away my most lucrative potential? I’ve second-guessed myself so many times, but I always come back to the same place. I am making the move back to self-employment for very specific reasons and for once I have a very clear vision, a very clear purpose.

Yesterday, I faced a different kind of enticement: an unbelievably well-paying long-term contract with a status client to do work that I’m very, very (VERY) good at. The catch? It’s work I’ve committed to no longer doing because it makes me miserable – and I’d have had to give up ALL my protected hours, plus a few more. This is not a new temptation for me. It is, in fact, my old nemesis, the snare that catches me every single time I decide to commit to pursuing the projects I feel called to. It’s the one I warned myself about before I made the decision, and yet it took me by surprise. I guess I thought it would show up sooner, because it usually does. This time it waited till I’d been lulled into a false sense of security — and it very nearly startled me into a yes.

Writing a “thanks so much for thinking of me, but I’m not offering those services at this time” was indescribably difficult. It took them about an hour to respond the way high-profile corporations typically do: they offered me even more money. I’d like to say I easily said no because PURPOSE!! But my timeline is full of people struggling to find jobs, to make ends meet, to find something that says their expertise is still valued and valuable. I’m not capable of walking away from what is, in many ways, an incredible opportunity, not without thinking about those folks. I am not more special, more talented, or more called to purpose than they are. I just have a lot of privilege, including no one to take care of or consider when I make major decisions, and I’m maybe in a different place in life and have a different kind of purpose - not better, just different.

So I waffled. I held intense internal debates. I ran if-thens. I did math. Ye gods, so much math. I considered giving myself a loophole in the form of “I’m booked through the end of the year, but I’d love to take on your project in January.” But something in me wasn’t ready to commit so much of my time in the new year before I’ve even given those passion projects a solid chance. As hard as it was to make myself say no, it was somehow more impossible to make myself say yes. Call it fortitude or foolishness, I said no thank you. But I still woke up a half dozen times last night wondering if I made the right decision.

And then this morning, I sat down with breakfast and coffee and opened my morning reading to this message. This is not the first time in 10 short days that this book has delivered exactly what I needed to hear in the morning, but this is the first time it stopped me so hard in my tracks that I literally paused mid-chew. Kids, I’m a fluffy lady who loves a homemade spicy breakfast burrito. I can keep chewing through darn near anything. But this got me. Because it’s so spot-on.

How many times have we all - in love, in life, in career - celebrated success after long struggling to set down something that no longer serves us (and maybe never did) - only to find we’ve picked up the exact same thing somewhere down the line? It’s easy to do, to be so invested in being able to fix it, to save it, to solve it – to finally get it right this time - that we just keep Groundhog Daying our way through an endless cycle of putting down and picking up the same thing that weighed us down last time. It’s easy to do because that thing, whatever it is, has a tendency to repackage itself, to wrap itself up in new paper (or skin) and show up on our front porch like that 1980s urban myth about the burned up ouija board.?

We get frustrated with ourselves and we may go see a coach or a therapist or a bartender to try to figure out how to stop the cycle. But we have a tendency to focus on putting down the version of the thing we’re currently carrying — and yes that’s important. What I hope I’ve finally learned is that the putting down is less important than the never picking up again. It takes iron will to keep walking by that thing no matter how sexy it makes itself or how often it reappears or how much it looks like exactly the thing we need at the moment. I hope I’ve developed that iron will, finally.?

I don’t have an ending for this post. No pithy one-liner, no deep question to invite reflection and engagement. I read the page, I heard the word, I felt compelled to share. You’ll have to figure out for yourself why the universe stuck this post in your path.?

Then again, maybe that’s the whole message.

The journey is not how you place down what's weighing on you, but how you learn to stop picking it up. Not when you decide to stop, but the strength of your resolve not to begin again--with the habits, the people, the thoughts, the behaviors that you know can only lead to your own self-destruction. It's how you release your familiar unhappiness, how you decide you've outgrown the emotional crutches that have soothed you and distracted you and held you when you most needed it. How you move forward is what you begin to reach for in their place - Brianna Wiest, The Pivot Year