Episode XVI - Rebuilding the wrong way & "It's only work..."
Reframing how to (re)build & how work & life won't just separate on their own
Welcome to the 1 new subscriber who joined over the last week, bringing us up to 63 in total - I hope you can think differently after reading this 🙂
Questions I’d like you to ask yourself from this week’s episode:
What are you actually (re)building for?
Are you judging yourself from where you are, or where you wish you were?
Do you believe work & life are innately separate?
Are you taking any deliberate action to separate work & life?
The 2020s have been a shitter.
Whatever industry you’re in, you’ve been hit in one way or another.
And very likely more than one way, and repeatedly.
When you take hits like that, you only have two options - give up, or rebuild.
I won’t lie, I considered the give up option numerous times.
And as I mentioned last week, that feeling of clearing house & starting afresh still rears its ugly head now & then.
But I settled on rebuild.
What follows is an exploration of that journey & how badly wrong I got it.
Rebuilding the wrong way
I hate going backwards.
Anything that makes me feel like I’ve regressed chafes me. Hard.
So it’s worth exploring what I really mean by rebuilding.
It isn’t about getting back to where we were in early 2020 in terms of revenue or profit or any other measure like that.
To me, it was about returning to progress path we were on - because it is that path that had been the real victim of the 2020s for me.
So sure, there are some numbers that inform the trajectory of that path, but there are also feelings. Lots of feelings. And they are messy.
But to boil them down to something simple, it is about belief in future trajectory.
Not just the “facts” of my businesses, but whether I believe that those facts support a narrative of forward progress.
Let’s take a look at the position in early 2020:
The first few years up to this point had been (almost) linear growth.
Which set that expectation of (almost) linear growth trajectory.
Then all hell broke loose & the picture of the following 3+ years was very different:
Things became erratic & whilst there were factual improvements at times, they were false dawns in terms of future trajectory.
And I had no experience of anything but linear growth.
So where was I supposed to draw a new trajectory line for myself? How was I supposed to know what “good” looked like in this new world?
And you’ve probably gathered from the graph above that I didn’t draw a new line at all - I held onto the old one.
Which presented more than a few problems…!
By fixing myself to the original trajectory path, I continued to measure myself against it.
Not in the literal sense of comparing revenue or profit numbers to where we “should” have been, but certainly figuratively.
As I said, I hate going backwards, and I felt like I was only falling further behind.
And that only made me increasingly frustrated.
Plus it caused me to make innumerable poor decisions to try to shortcut my way back to that original trajectory.
Which only made the task harder!
And then the switch flipped…
Fortunately, there was an epiphany moment in early 2023.
Didn’t change the position I was in, but it did change my association to it.
My realisation was that I didn’t need to get back on the original trajectory path.
What I did need was to get back on the original trajectory angle:
The old trajectory path was dead.
And it wasn’t coming back, however much I wanted it to.
What changed my perspective was the understanding that it wasn’t the loss of scale that really matters but in fact the loss of the right trajectory.
The 2020s had taken from me the belief that we were on the right path.
I’ll be honest & admit that a solid belief in that trajectory is still to be found for me, but it is growing.
And the simple reframe of what I’m looking for has had a positive impact on how I feel.
So it has been worth its weight in gold.
If this week’s exploration resonates with you, please share it with others:
“It’s only work…”
How many times have I said that to myself when I’m struggling?
Or in response to friends or family who are struggling?
How many times have you said it to yourself or others?
And how often have you stopped to think that really it is total bollocks?!
Life requires that you earn money.
Money requires that you work.
Therefore life requires that you work.
Therefore it isn’t only work, it’s life too.
This idea that we can somehow partition “work” & “life” is a falsehood.
There’s no clear delineation, it’s all jumbled up together:
So why am I even saying this?
Firstly because I’ve messed a few work things up in recent weeks & it has impacted my life.
Nothing major, no long-term damage or lasting impacts, but cock-ups nonetheless.
And I can’t pretend that it doesn’t affect the person I am at home or the friend I’m supposed to be.
Secondly because accepting that there is no true barrier means you’re not fighting a battle you cannot possibly hope to win.
Acceptance allows you to implement real ways to ease out of your work personality & into your life one in a way that believing they are somehow innately disparate does not.
And for me this is principally about how I can stop work pressures creating life pressures.
Because I can only handle pressure in one of those places, not both!
Here are a few examples of this in action I have from both my own experience & from others I’ve spoken to about this:
Physical transformation:
I wore a suit to work every day because it was the uniform of Work Me. The first thing I did when I got home was take it off as a way of physically transitioning into Life Me.
External stimulus:
Listening to music whilst I cook is my method of creating separation after a tough work day. I sing loudly (and badly!) & I allow my brain to slow down. After that it is much easier for me to be present as a husband & put the business owner away.
Location change:
My commute always provided a time & location buffer between work & home. And now that I work from home much more, I still have to do that. I get out of the house for 30-40 mins at the end of every work day & when I get back, I’m in life mode.
All of these examples are of deliberate action, carried out by people who have accepted that work & life do not just separate on their own.
So if you find yourself saying It’s only work… I would strongly recommend that you think about the repercussions of that phrase.
And if it is causing you not to take any deliberate action to create the separation, you might want to consider if that’s really working for you?
The last word
I talk about a lot of personal challenges in this newsletter, and I know from discussions with others that they aren’t just my challenges!
So if you ever want to talk about your own, I keep my chat open for any subscriber to start a discussion:
Until next week,
- M