Today I sat in the parking lot by my apartment to look at the moon.
I don’t exactly consider skygazing a hobby or anything, but when you’re frustrated with life and about to lose your shit, you could say it grows on you as a coping mechanism.
I’d had a catastrophic week-long fiasco where my phone wouldn’t transfer service companies correctly, leaving critical gaps in my life I hadn’t anticipated. (Who knew you could get locked out of an apartment complex because your phone number was deactivated?)
There were plenty of reasons why this clusterfuck could have been less detrimental to so many areas of my life. The reality was, I either simply hadn’t had the time, money or energy to get specific things taken care of or I was simply not prioritizing my time accordingly. Those facts alone were maddening enough. Despite all the hard work I put into my self-care, mental health, and business, I still wasn’t getting ahead of daily life to my standards.
So when I saw that moon shining brightly, I had a realization.
For the first time, in what felt like forever, I wasn’t beating myself up or blaming me about it.
Now, I have been working with my inner critic for a while on how we need to work together to motivate each other. I need to be able to accomplish tasks without all the emotional baggage. As any ambitious person knows, having a perfectionism streak is useful in staying ahead of the curve and creating magic. The downfall is, that gift can be exploitable and society loves to set boundary-less high expectations and provide little of the rewards in return.
That’s where my realization came in: I wasn’t beating myself up about my lack of foresight and not accomplishing my tasks because I had ascended into some self-loving, compassionate yogi. I simply realized that it had nothing to do with me.
Now hear me out.
I am a firm believer that we have control over our lives and behaviors…to an extent. It’s quite popular right now to encourage you to blame control of your life for its quality. After all, if you could just find the right tool or the inner strength to push through this obstacle, then you’ll continue to make better choices, level up, and have the happy life everyone’s saying exists.
Contrary to what business leaders, influencers, and podcasters tell you, there are more keys to their success than what they talk about on camera. The reality is, having advantages like a social support system, societal approval, education, or health, it’s a lot easier for them to say you can be like them.
What nobody says about this so-called “happy life” is that it doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of areas in your life that will still remain a dumpster fire after all the work you put in. There’s no better analogy for this than upper management.
Enter any work environment and observe how it’s run. While there are plenty of great organizations out there moving mountains, even those aren’t perfect. A vast majority of companies and organizations out there contain a select few people who are profiting and the rest are simply trying to cope with someone else’s poor decisions or whatever conflict comes up at work each day. To some people, this is just life and they’re able to accept that it isn’t a huge deal. What people often don’t understand about job satisfaction and quality of output is it’s relative to the stakes you have in the company and what your capacity for life is.
That sounds like a generic statement, I know, but let’s frame it in the context of the title of this article.
The way the world of adults works is chaotic, messy, and inconsistent. Let’s face it. After you graduate from school, the ability to find linear guidelines in life falls upon your upbringing and what society tells you it wants. When I started working as a finance professional, I was initially appalled at how many companies I saw making obviously poor decisions in various aspects of business. I was holding the world to the standard that I had in my head that anyone who didn’t communicate appropriately was lazy or an idiot, managers who didn’t know what they were doing were corrupt, and I was a lone ranger who was the only one who knew what was going on.
So now, looking back on that version of myself after having been a manager and now running my own business, I can only laugh. Now that I’m my own boss, I have realized how little I knew about what it takes to get things done and keep a ship running. There’s a certain point in leadership when you learn that messes are always going to be made, it’s about how you manage them. But when you have to treat yourself like an employee, the techniques you used on others go out the window.
Because, deep down, I still thought I was useless.
I couldn’t hide behind a mask of what was happening when I wasn’t taking care of myself or meeting my goals, no matter how hard I worked. There wasn’t a team or an external source to blame for why something didn’t get done or failure. Now that I’m fully responsible, the weight of everything I was doing before was debilitating.
Honestly, I wasn’t leading myself at all: fear was. It was making me a shitty boss I didn’t want to listen or work for anymore.
In therapy, I learned about how our capacity to safely manage life varies and how trauma can significantly impact that. For example, you can absolutely have the time and money to work on a project. However, if you have limitations affecting your ability to execute a task (like traveling or executive dysfunction), it can impact the amount of energy required to complete the project. Thus, your capacity is reduced.
After taking the time to schedule out reasonable expectations of myself as if I were an employee, I realized just how insane an ask I was making of an already traumatized version of me. Not to mention how abstinent and critical I was, more than I ever would consider for someone I worked with. I wasn’t falling behind because I was useless due to my mental health: I needed to stop taking personal failures so personally.
If my boss yelled at me and called me worthless every time an unimportant task wasn’t completed, but he dropped an important project or deadline, I would be calling him a hypocrite and where he could shove it. Understanding that I was accepting that behavior in my own head, the place that only I can occupy, hurt. My attempts at controlling the limitations in my life were only slowing me down and lowering my self-worth.
We don’t have to have everything all figured out to find the happiness we deserve. We also don’t have to do everything right, especially the first time. Being a great leader for ourselves doesn’t necessarily come from a job. It should really start with how we treat ourselves, especially when things are going wrong. And if work is getting in the way of your relationship with yourself, it’s time to take a pause and leave the mental office for a bit. You’ll thank yourself later. And who knows, maybe it’s what you needed to do to finally get you started back up again.
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