Re-Write Your Re-Entry - Part I
At the start of summer, it’s an interesting moment here in the U.S. There’s a thawing, akin more to spring than to summer. And after all the prognostications of the new normal, the time is upon us.
But, are you feeling it, too? A bit hesitant to come out of this pandemic cocoon? I’m not quite ready to jump right back into whatever awaits us out there.
Instead, I sense the need for a collective pause and centering. Or better yet, a collective time of renewal, reconnection, and reinvention.
So, I’d like to challenge you to take this unique moment that’s meeting us at this summertime, a moment of slowing down, to think about re-writing your re-entry on your terms. This moment presents a prime opportunity to pause and power up your imagination to redefine your world.
I was inspired by my conversation with Christine Bader and Eva Dienel, the founders of The Life I Want, in Episode #16 of The Sustainable Ambition Podcast. Christine and Eva are doing work to shed light on the structures and systems that need to change to make work better for all.
They both make points that are good lessons as we think about rewriting our re-entry.
In the episode, Christine speaks to the fact that modern work structures often don’t leave enough room to accommodate other aspects of our lives. It shouldn’t have surprised me to hear this, but it jolted me to recognize that many of us are slaves to our work. As Christine and Eva talk about, we are living to work as opposed to working to live. So, what would it look like to re-write your entry and renegotiate part of your work structure to accommodate more of your life?
Also in the conversation, Eva talks about defining our own measures of success. Right Success, the first pillar of Sustainable Ambition, is about defining success on your terms. Well, what if you were to create your own measures of success, as Eva has done. She shared: “When I quit my job I said I want to run as many miles a week as I work, I want to spend more nights camping outside. Those were going to be my measures of success for my life.” In this moment of reimagining your world, what metrics would you create to define success in your life?
I think this is an important question to consider as you rewrite your re-entry. I mean, who would be more successful—someone who met their own measures of success, or someone who met society’s measures of success? What would be more fulfilling and rewarding—experiencing internal rewards or external rewards?
So as you start to emerge from the pandemic, I encourage you to think about and get inspired yourself to re-write the script and re-imagine your re-entry on your terms.
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