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What does success mean to you? Are you a high achiever? Are you successful?
All of my clients are successful in their own right. They definitely look successful from the OUTSIDE. But I know, as their coach, that many of them do not feel successful on the INSIDE.
A lot of my clients are women. They are professionally successful. They have a good education, usually having easily excelled at school then university. They secured a good graduate position and have worked their way up through a company, industry or profession, being regularly promoted and earning a good salary.
Many of my clients are in a loving relationship and have children.
What a successful life they have. They must be very happy. But, oftentimes, they're not VERY happy. They're just OK. Which you might think is OK. But they're not OK with being OK. They thought that, having hit all the milestones, they were going to be ecstatic. But they're not.
What went wrong?
"You're a human being, not a human doing"
This was a phrase I heard for the first time during my coaching training and it's a phrase that a lot of my clients have found useful to consider.
Having spent a decade or two ticking off the 'traditional' success criteria (good grades, good job, promotion, marriage, promotion, children, return to work, promotion), it's not surprising that they feel more like a human doing. Add in the busyness of modern life and it's easy to forget the human being bit completely.
This is why a lot of us end up in the middle of our careers and lives wondering who on earth we are any more. Between the labels 'boss', 'colleague', 'friend', 'partner', 'parent', 'child', 'sibling', who we REALLY are can get lost.
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, I'd like you to start checking in with your 'human being' again. A great place to start is by identifying some of your energising strengths so that you can reconnect with what you're good at, yes, but also what you actually ENJOY. I've created a free mini-course to help you to do just that, which you can access here.
Another simple exercise, that I recently heard on the excellent Enough podcast with Mandy Lehto. It's this: simply asking yourself the question "what do I want?". Either go for a walk and keep repeating this question to yourself and see what comes to mind OR use the question as a journal prompt to do some free writing and just keep writing down whatever comes to mind until you run out of ideas.
Making space for yourself to reconnect and just "be" rather than always "do" will be so valuable. Make a plan for how you can give yourself that space right now.
As ever, if you want to talk about this stuff, just book a free Discovery Call with me.
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