“More coal, more smoke, more heat,
more steam, more pressure, more speed.
― Martin R. Jackson
I have operated with several gears for most of my life. Gears is my metaphor for my work/lifestyles that I move in with ease. Life and work require us to have a full range of gears — and the wisdom and flexibility to choose the gear that is best for the situation.
My primary gears are:
• Full Steam Ahead — acting quickly to make positive things happen.
• Reverse
• Run for the hills
• Take my toys and go home
These preferred gears are a reflection of my personality style — Myers Briggs Type Inventory, DiSC, and others — the role modeling I have been exposed to in life; and the formative experiences which have shaped my values, mindsets, and learned competencies.
I am aware that my two primary directions — forward and reverse — are not very deep, developed, and mature. If I react to a triggering event my amygdala may override my mind and I will respond with a primal reaction. If I react shallowly, I have to double back and reset.
As my self-awareness has grown, I have learned to manage the speed at which I travel in opposing directions. I have even tried intensely to incorporate the pause into triggering experiences that can send me into fight or flight.
My career involves helping leaders, managers, and others to learn to use their strengths, round out their flat sides, and grow their capacity for flexibility and use of as many gears as they can, and do so wisely.
I couldn’t ask this of others without learning how to do it for myself.
Aren’t we all just:
• Works in progress?
• Hopelessly flawed and remarkably gifted?
• Wounded and resistant?
With life, our daily experiences, and relationships as our fodder for learning, are you
• Open?
• Evolving?
• Experiencing a transition?
I am. And today my mindset is curious, eager, and desiring.
The past few years have been packed full of change, challenge, and opportunity. If we are objective, we can see we are constantly changing, transitioning, and reinventing ourselves and our lives to keep up with the environmental changes around us — aging, competition, and all the many disruptions of technology, expectations, invention, the economy, and so much more.
In year one of the pandemic we assimilated more change than in the previous ten years. In year two we found new ways to work, live and play. The third year was marked by fatigue, burnout, and re-calibration as we caught up on vacations and family rituals, and made decisions on how to structure our work and lives.
Here in this fourth year, I find myself letting go of still more structure from my life and asking myself:
• What is my passion?
• What is my greatest contribution?
• How do I want to spend my time?
• With whom do I want to spend my time?
• What will my work life, volunteer life and life life look like, feel like and act like?
Some of the changes that are raining down upon me are planned, some unexpected, and some unplanned yet predictable.
Now I need to spend the time and take the pause to reflect upon how to use my time, talent, and the days of my life going forward.
I have watched many individuals retire and use their first year to redesign their lives. I didn’t expect that I would do such an overhaul right now – but the opportunity has presented itself.
• Are you currently in some kind of transition?
• How are you approaching it?
I am just beginning the process of making good decisions. I will always be a ‘move quickly’ kind of person and ‘grab the opportunity’ and run kind of girl. Yet I also know to take it slow and not make big changes of direction unless all the indicators are driving me in that way.
On my criteria-list for beginning this process are aspirations for:
• More collaboration
• Go where you are invited, do what you are asked
• Discover and explore new roles, in new places with new people
• Put myself on a learners track
• Skinny down the priorities….to be less busy and more focused
• Be the opposite of what I already am:
• Verbal… quiet, listening
• Doing ….. being
• Gifting……Accepting
• In motion ……Still
What is on your aspiration list for your next phase of work and life?
Any advice for me?
Leslie
“As your life changes,
it takes time to recalibrate,
to find your values again.
You might also find that retirement
is the time when you stretch out
and find your potential.”
– Sid Miramontes
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