When Your Life Hasn't Caught Up With Who You've Become

The thought comes on a Sunday evening.

You have been trying not to think about Monday. You have had a perfectly lovely weekend, and a restful one, too, but as the afternoon merges into the evening, you can feel something. That familiar heaviness has started to settle. You think about the week ahead, the meetings already in your diary, the conversations you know you will have, the problems that will find their way to you because they always do, and somewhere underneath all of that is a thought you have become good at pushing away.

I don't think I can keep doing this.

And almost as quickly as that thought arrives, another part of you begins to argue with it.

Because what does that even mean?

You have spent years building this career. You have worked hard to get here. There are people who would be delighted to have the opportunities you have. You have responsibilities that depend upon the income you earn... people who depend upon you. And aside from all that, you are very good at what you do. You may even still care about parts of it, deeply.

So you tell yourself that you're tired. That work is difficult for everyone at the moment. That things will settle down after this project, this restructuring, this particularly demanding period. You remind yourself of all the reasons why leaving would be complicated, and all the things you would lose if you did.

And perhaps you aren't thinking about leaving at all.

You simply know, with increasing certainty, is becoming harder to ignore that something isn't right.

There are times in our lives when nothing changes in one dramatic moment. There is no single event we can point to and say,There. That's when it happened. Instead, an awareness develops gradually, sometimes over months or even years, that the life we are living no longer fits us in quite the way it once did.

And that can be frightening.

Because once we begin to take that feeling seriously, we also have to allow for the possibility that the problem isn't simply a difficult week, a demanding project or something that will disappear after a good holiday.

Something in us may have changed.

And the life we have spent years building hasn't caught up.

Our lives are often built around an earlier version of ourselves

This shouldn't surprise us as much as it does. Because we don't design our lives from scratch every morning. We build them gradually, through decisions made over many years, and that were entirely right for us at the time.

We choose work that makes sense at a particular point in our lives. We accept responsibilities, develop routines, make financial commitments, establish relationships and become known for certain things. One decision connects to another and, over time, what began as a series of individual choices becomes the structure of our life.

That structure may have served us very well and that's important, because when something begins to feel wrong, there can be a temptation to look backwards and question the choices that brought us here. To wonder whether we chose the wrong career, stayed too long, wanted the wrong things or somehow failed to notice something we should have seen years ago.

But I don't think that is necessarily what is happening.

The problem is that while the structures we build tend to remain relatively stable, we don't.

We continue to have experiences. We learn. We lose and gain things.

Our relationships change. Our bodies change. Our priorities shift. Things happen that alter our perspective on what matters. We discover strengths we hadn't recognised before and become less willing to use others simply because we happen to be good at them. Even our definition of success can change. But our life remains organised around assumptions we made years earlier about who we were, what we wanted and what we thought would make us happy.

There is nothing particularly unusual about that. In many ways, it would be more surprising if the life we constructed around who we were ten or twenty years ago continued to fit us perfectly without adjustment. So maybe the first question, when we find ourselves thinking I don't know if I can keep doing this, isn't :

What do I need to change?

It might be:

What has changed in me?

The uncomfortable gap between knowing and doing

And that question can open up something we weren't expecting.

Because once we begin to understand what has changed in us, we can also begin to see the distance between that understanding and the life we are currently living.

Maybe we begin to recognise how important autonomy has become to us, or that the environment we are working in requires us to behave in ways that no longer feel comfortable.

Maybe we acknowledge that the version of success we have been pursuing isn't actually the version we want anymore.

Or perhaps we finally recognise that we have been putting an enormous amount of energy into maintaining a life that doesn't give very much energy back.

The good things is that there can be relief in finally understanding what you have been feeling. But there can also be something else. Because insight can happen surprisingly quickly. Changing it, rarely does.

Our responsibilities don't disappear because we have understood ourselves better. Mortgages still need paying. Children or parents may still need our care. Organisations don't necessarily change because we have changed. Careers that have taken decades to build cannot always be reshaped overnight, nor should they necessarily be.

So for a while, we can find ourselves in a strange space.

We know something now that we didn't know before, but we don't yet know what we are going to do with that knowledge.

And I think we often underestimate how difficult that space can be.

Why we are so quick to look for an answer

For those of us who are accustomed to being capable, uncertainty can be particularly uncomfortable.

We are used to solving things. We gather information, assess the options, make a decision and move forward. It is an approach that probably serves us extremely well in many areas of our lives.

So when we recognise that something significant no longer fits, it is entirely understandable that we want to know what we should do about it.

Should I leave?

Should I stay?

Should I change career?

Should I reduce my hours?

Should I start something of my own?

What comes next?

There is almost a sense that once we have identified the gap, leaving it unresolved is somehow irresponsible. If we know there is a problem, surely the sensible thing is to solve it.

But not every gap needs to be closed the moment we discover it.

Sometimes there is important work to do between recognising that something has changed and deciding what that change means.

We may need time to distinguish a passing frustration from something more fundamental. We may need to understand whether it is the work itself that no longer fits, the environment we are doing it in, the way the role has evolved, or the way we have evolved. We may need to notice what repeatedly gives us energy and what repeatedly takes it away. We may need conversations, experiments and experiences that allow something still quite indistinct to become clearer.

And most importantly, we need to resist turning the discomfort itself into another problem to solve.

The space between insight and action is not wasted time. It is our where understanding deepens.

Learning to stay with what we can now see

I know from my own experience that this is much easier to write about than it is to do.

Because there is something deeply reassuring about having an answer. An answer gives us direction, and direction creates a sense of movement and control. Sitting with something we can see but cannot yet resolve asks something rather different of us.

It asks us to tolerate a degree of uncertainty.

And when the thing we are uncertain about touches our work, our income, our identity, our relationships or the life we have spent years building, that uncertainty can feel deeply uncomfortable.

But maybe we don't always need certainty quite as quickly as we think we do.

There is be value in simply being able to say, This doesn't fit me in the way it once did.

Not as a verdict on the life we have built, or evidence that we made the wrong decisions. And not as an instruction to dismantle everything.

Just as information.

Because recognising that our needs, priorities or sense of ourselves have changed does not invalidate the choices that came before. A role can have been exactly right for us once and not be right for us now. An ambition can have been genuine and still be outgrown. A way of working can have supported one stage of our life and become unsustainable in another.

Both things can be true.

And a more compassionate ways of understanding change is to stop expecting our previous choices to be right forever.

Realignment doesn't have to begin with reinvention

There is another reason we can be reluctant to acknowledge that something no longer fits.

We are afraid of what acknowledging it might mean.

If I admit that I don't want this anymore, do I have to leave?

If this career no longer fits me, does that mean starting again?

If the success I worked so hard for isn't what I want now, what was all that effort for?

Those are not small questions, and that's why it can feel safer to keep pushing the original thought away.

But recognising a gap between who we are and the life we are living doesn't tell us what we have to do about it. And wanting to realign to who we have become doesn't necessarily mean we have to reinvent everything.

Sometimes it begins much more easily, and quietly.

We have a conversation we have been avoiding. We stop automatically saying yes to something we no longer want to carry. We use more of a strength that has been neglected. We become clearer about a boundary. We investigate an idea without needing to turn it into a plan. We spend time with people whose lives show us possibilities we hadn't considered. We experiment with doing some part of our work differently and notice what happens.

Some of those small shifts may eventually lead to something bigger, and maybe they don't. But they do do is begin to bring the life we are living into a closer relationship with who we are now. And that, for me, is a much more useful way of thinking about congruence. Not as a perfect state in which every part of life is beautifully aligned and nothing ever feels uncomfortable again, but as an ongoing relationship between who we are becoming and the choices we make about how we live and work.

A life that can evolve with us

The deeper challenge is that we have been taught to think about many of our important career decisions as if they are permanent.

We choose a profession.

We build expertise.

We establish a reputation.

We progress.

We become successful at something.

And with every year that passes, we invest more in the life we have created so there's more at stake in questioning it.

But a career that fits us does not have to be a career that remains fixed. The opposite is true. If we are going to continue changing throughout our lives, then the structures around our work need to be able change with us.

Sometimes that will mean significant transitions and at other times it will mean small adjustments... in where we focus our attention, how we use our time, what we agree to, what we stop doing, which environments we choose and what we begin moving towards.

We will be not be able to control all of it. Because real lives have responsibilities, constraints, other people and circumstances that cannot simply be wished away.

But inside those realities, there is often more room to shape our outcomes than we initially see.

So maybe the first act of agency isn't making the change.

Maybe it is allowing ourselves to recognise that a change has already happened.

Inside us.

And then giving the rest of our life time to catch up.

Listen to the full episode

In Episode 27 of Proactive Empowered Careers® Podcast, I explore Congruence, the fourth dimension of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, and how to begin shaping our work and our lives to more closely reflect who we are today.

Continue exploring

You can also continue exploring the wider ideas around identity, curiosity and career change here:

• Connection: The Starting Point for Real Change

Exploring what happens when we begin paying attention again to what

energises us, drains us and feels like us..

• Curiosity: Opening the Door to Possibility

  Because we need to allow ourselves to explore before expecting ourselves to know what we need to do next.

  
  

• Clarity: Seeing Yourself More Clearly

  A different way of looking at possibility when the life or career we've built no longer quite fits.