Are you drifting?

Deep down you know you have more to contribute but you’re feeling stuck and frustrated with where you are now?

Have you ever been white water rafting? After the excitement and adrenaline-fuelled journey through the rapids, it is a delight to drift on flat water, and we use this time to re-energise for the next set of rapids.

If our career is like a river then we can see that there are times when we need to be actively navigating the rapids, times to flow with the current, times to paddle against it, and times to enjoy drifting on the calm water.

There are challenges with staying in any of these phases too long.

When I look back on my long career in finance teams I recognise that there were periods when I allowed myself to drift for much too long.

The story I told myself was that I would be flexible and open to new opportunities but in truth, a period of taking an ‘easier’ option so that I could manage my family commitments became aimless drifting. For me, aimless drifting and accepting a status quo that I was unhappy with led to disengagement, disengagement led to lacklustre performance, lacklustre performance led to a fall in confidence.

There was also an element of “when?x?happens,?things?will be different' and yet I was not taking responsibility for making?x?happen or figuring out what those?things?might be!

Looking back, I can see that I never sat down to reflect on what my strengths were and how I might leverage them more effectively, or to consider which particular elements of the role, the team, or the environment I was enjoying so that I could craft the next role accordingly.

Without that clarity, it was hard to paddle in the right direction and I remained becalmed!

I am not a fan of having rigid plans and goals but I now realise that having a sense of purpose makes everything clearer, and the only way to cultivate that sense of purpose is to carve out time and space for reflection. From there you can be intentional about the direction you are heading, and you can be intentional about the speed that is right for you right now.

So ask yourself:

Am I drifting or am I being intentional about where and how I am paddling?

with love,

Sue