You’re Successful. Now what?

I talk to a lot of successful leaders. They open up to me about their challenges, their frustrations, doubts and dreams in a way that is vulnerable. I get to see what I’ll describe as the behind the scenes version of them.

While from the outside, they are examples of achievement and success, their inner reality feels different than what most would imagine. They feel the same ups and downs, moment to moment, that is normal of the human experience and that we sometimes think go away with success.

You see we’ve been told that if our outer life looks good, we should feel good, but that’s not how it works. And while we all know this at some level, we still live our lives believing that if we “fix” our outer world, our inner world will be transformed.

Not true.

Typically, when we accomplish something, we feel good for some amount of time, and then we settle into the new reality and things continue to fluctuate, with the natural ups and downs of life, leadership and career.

Except now, a new thought may also creep up; “I have all of these things. I have accomplished what I set out to do and I still feel crappy. What’s wrong with me?”

(Allow me to be direct.) Nothing!

The outer stuff always mattered less than we thought, but because we still didn’t have the “it” of our innocent desires, we hoped and we really wanted THIS “it”, to change things for us, for good, finally!

It doesn’t.

So shall we search of the NEXT “it”? Are we doomed to a career and life of struggle and unhappiness? Is there something else to consider?

Let's play the ‘what if’ game.

What if:

Life, leadership and careers have their natural ups and downs, no matter what level of success we’ve attained. We don’t always wake up in a great mood, ready to tackle the world. We sometimes lose our way and mess up. This doesn’t have to be a problem. It’s simply what happens, sometimes. The need to change and our effort to control is what makes it look problematic.

What if:

Connecting with joy, peace and calm is available in any given moment, and not dependent on what is going on in our world. The more we see that this state of being is always available, underneath the thinking and noise in our head, the more we see that there’s no striving or efforting required. “It” is already here, it’s simply quieter and less noticeable than our loud thoughts about all the stuff we need to do and be.

What if:

None of the outer stuff brings us ultimate happiness, anyway. Why not go for what we want to experience rather than what we want to achieve? Have a goal for the fun of it, for the growth of it, for the mere experience of it. This doesn’t mean that it’ll be fun all of the time, or that we’ll be happy consistently (see point 1 above), it simply means that we’re in it for the full experience of it, and not some made up version of what we think it should be.