The Four Idols That Hold Us Back
I am six months into my one-year career break. Having tipped over into the crucial second half, I am now teetering on the ‘will I, won’t I go back’ question. When people ask me about my plans, I say - a year is not long enough. But I am a courteous employee so I will let my employer know my intentions in due course and fill out the relevant paperwork…
When I marked the first 100 days¹, I was extremely harsh on myself in terms of evaluating my achievements. My inner critic told me that I hadn’t achieved the impact I had hoped for and my inner nurturer forgot to remind me that I had no clue what I was measuring. In November, I descended into a two-month period of ‘wintering’, a fallow period where it was as if I had fallen into the crack between two worlds, the past I wanted to leave behind and the future I had yet to create. I was in ‘career purgatory’. Me and my depleted sense of self lamented together, with only slabs of cake and pints of gin for company. Somehow, I had imagined I would walk out of one life and simply start a new one. I had completely failed to comprehend the disentangling process I would have to go through.
In January, I re-emerged into a new year with fresh eyes and renewed energy. I reflected on many conversations during my autumn tour of cafés in East Belfast. Everyone I talked to was looking for something. I had been looking for something too. It was a lengthy list - purpose, meaning, happiness, recognition, success, peace.
But, what I had actually been looking for was freedom - freedom from continuing to strive for all those other things. Rather than finding myself during the career break, I was freeing myself. The first half of the career break had not been wasted because it was never about doing, it was all about un-doing.
“Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place”. (Paulo Coelho)
Deconditioning, deconstructing, deinstitutionalising - whatever you want to call it - takes time.
There were four idols I had worshipped and upon which I had hung all my self-worth - identity, busyness, validation and comparison. The culture I operated in actively encouraged their worship. They were holding me back. Somehow if I was going to move forward, I had to let them go.
The Idol of Identity - What do I do?
‘What do you do?’ is how we size people up. Give me a job, a profession, a title, a calling, something concrete I can fix my judgement of you on.
I can no longer give a sensible answer to this. Sometimes, I am deliberately mysterious. I have updated my LinkedIn profile and my Twitter bio dozens of times. My inner monologue is in constant turmoil because I keep changing my mind.
We use time, money, fear of failure as excuses, but it is our desire to hang on to a particular identity which is the biggest barrier to change. It is disorientating to even contemplate being anything other than what is most familiar to us. That’s why retirement is so destabilising.
I don’t know who I am because it has been attached to what I do for so long. It is complicated. I’ve turned to the songwriters for inspiration. “I’m a million different people from one day to the next²” or “I’ve been a poet, a preacher, a fool, and a rake and I don’t regret a single day”³ seem like valid suggestions to describe me on LinkedIn (watch this space).
My identity is no longer based on my vocation. And that’s ok. It gives me much more scope.
The Idol of Busyness - How much do I do?
Today, I didn’t get one single email⁴. I’m not ashamed of that. During the first few weeks of the career break, I had to wean myself off my laptop. I was no longer a member of staff but I watched my Outlook intensely anyway, just in case. A bursting inbox and a diary full of meetings were excellent measures of productivity in my organisation. We all bought into the lie - busyness = importance. In October, I eventually closed the MacBook and put it away. I only bring it out on special occasions now.
I am enjoying a different kind of busyness now, physical exercise, mental stimulation, interspersed with rest. I sleep well at night. I am building relationships, not connections. It is the depth of my network that matters, not the size. My face to face coffees have no agenda. Email is no longer my primary communication mechanism.
This lack of busyness is restoring my soul.
The Idol of Validation - How well am I doing?
External validation is a drug, an addiction that can never be satisfied. It is only ever a temporary hit. When someone recognised my abilities, complimented my skills, affirmed my opinions, liked my tweet, commented on my post, requested to connect, praised my ideas, I felt good. When they didn’t, I felt bad. It became an unrelenting self-inflicted viciousness.
But if I choose validation as an idol, I also choose to stay small. When what people think of me matters more than what I think of myself, it reduces my capacity to take any risks. This career break is my once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experiment. I can’t let that pass me by because I am reliant on the approval of strangers. I have all the right environmental conditions to thrive because I have created my own psychological safety.
Basically, how well I am doing is irrelevant when there are no rules⁵.
The Idol of Comparison - Am I better than you?
Ultimately identity, busyness, validation is all about how we compare to others. Our worthiness wholly depends on being more worthy than others. We are always looking ahead of us and over our shoulder to see what and how everyone else is doing - their social status, their professional standing, their awards, their gifts, their promotion, their grade, their salary, their possessions, their lifestyles.
Yes, everyone I talked to was looking for something - but they were also relentlessly comparing themselves to everyone else.
“Comparison is the crush of conformity from one side and competition from the other - it’s trying to simultaneously fit in and stand out. Comparison says, ‘be like everyone else, but better’”⁶. (Brené Brown)
‘Be yourself; everyone else is taken’ is such a cliché (although it seemed to work out for Oscar Wilde). It’s much more sensible to just acknowledge the futility of comparison, then resolve to cast it aside and just get better at something, anything. I have chosen to focus on my backhand.
And so, these are the four idols that have been holding me back. It is incredibly hard to let them go. This is no theoretical piece, I am living it. It is painful to acknowledge that you may have spent the best years of your life (or at least the ones when your hair was dark and your knees were firm) searching for self-worth in all the wrong places.
I’m curious - are any of these idols holding you back too?
[1] https://dj-sloan.medium.com/the-first-100-days-going-out-on-your-own-ec348e547c22
[2] Bittersweet Symphony (The Verve).
[3] The Best Mistakes (The Divine Comedy) - I’ll be working on the preaching!
[4] My email address is contact@deborahsloan.co.uk if you want to get in touch!
[5] As an experiment, I am telling little stories about love at https://www.instagram.com/a_little_story_about_love/ (external link)
[6] Atlas of the Heart (Brené Brown).
