Quick, think back to your intention for the year, or your New Year’s resolution. Pause. Reflect on it.
How’s that working out for you? Probably, just about like it’s going for me. What in the actual hell.
Inspired by Brené Brown’s work, because, she’s my patron saint these days, I embarked on 2020 with an intention rather than a resolution. To spend 2020 working on living a wholehearted life. No biggie. Wholehearted life. A full, rich, lived experience. How to do that while sheltering in place and social distancing is a bit of a quandary, but it’s provided me inordinate amounts of time to think. It’s month nine and I’ve landed in the second to last mantra, or guidepost as Brené refers to them: Cultivating meaningful work: Letting go of self-doubt and “supposed to.”
Prepare yourselves, I have plenty to say and only four short weeks to let go of ‘supposed to’ and self-doubt.
Starting with…’supposed to’
I’m nearly 53 and I’ve spent around 99.9992% of my life listening to what I was supposed to do. Perhaps girls born and raised today have a different experience, I certainly hope so for my nieces’ sake and will do all in my Auntie power to support it, BUT, I’m of a generation of women, akin to many before me, who think about what we’re ‘supposed to do,’ as a default. While my purpose today is focused on ‘supposed to’ as it relates to meaningful work, easily, I could fill reams with the messages women receive. Be thin, smile, stay positive, serve a man, stay home with your kids, get to work, have children, don’t question authority…on and on and on.
Sticking with supposed to as it relates to meaningful work, I wonder how many of us entered a career job directly out of high school or college because we were ‘supposed to’? Gap year? Um, what even would that have been. Loafing, that’s what it would have been. Now? Perfectly reasonable alternative to straight through college. Entering a career that was meaningful? Yeah, meaningful because it gave me a paycheck. The model laid out before me was to start in a career and follow through. Not a bad model, but perhaps not the one for me. Nonetheless, entered a field and progressed, just as I was supposed to. After all, I’m a ‘good girl’.
Self-doubt = Midlife
I stopped covering my gray hair around age 48 and adapted the attitude, ‘gray hair…don’t care.’ That is the essence of midlife. I.don’t.care. Meaning, I don’t care what you think. I don’t care what I’m supposed to be doing. In reality, there are topics I care about inordinately more than the color of my hair or what people think I’m ‘supposed to’ do.
And if it were only that simple, I would not have a blog. A great big nothingness would fill my pages.
In midlife, a stronger sense of self-doubt enters the picture. Centered around doubting what we’re doing with our life. Are we actually engaged in work, activities, relationships that are more than ‘supposed to’? That career we entered because it’s ‘what you do,’ is it what you want to do? Quite possibly, we’ve been consumed with somebody else’s vision of how we should be living our lives.
Midlife is where we wake up to that. I can only speak for myself, but, and it’s a strong but, I have shared with many women around this phase, and the commonality is a sense of ‘what am I doing with my life’ and, ‘is this really how I want to ride it out’? It’s a time to question, to wonder, to consider, to dream – or our best approximation of dreaming. I occasionally wonder if I’ve forgotten how…it’s been eon’s since I’ve let my mind wander. I’ve been busy adulting, doing what I’m supposed to. When I allow myself, I see that self-doubt permeates because I’ve been on a chosen path so long. Not one I selected either, I defaulted to it. Similar to dozens of hundreds of other women, it’s the one that was laid out before me and I didn’t ask questions.
And I have questions now
If this Wholehearted Living guidepost is about cultivating meaningful work, I’ll start with that question. Is my work meaningful? To whom? The work I do may be meaningful to those I serve throughout the day, but is it meaningful to me? Yes, I said it. To me. It’s not selfish – and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise – to desire your work to be meaningful to you. Does your work help or benefit someone else? Maybe. I suppose in some ways our work exists because a service is needed, people naturally benefit from that.
But is it meaningful to you? Does the work you’re engaged in bring you joy? Are you passionate about it? Or, are you going through the motions, continuing in a field that you’ve done forever and as a result have become ‘good’ at it, so you don’t rock the boat. What would meaningful work consist of? That’s the question, isn’t it? Freeing ourselves from ‘supposed to,’ and pushing through our self-doubt to arrive at a place of wonder and curiosity. Ask yourself, what does meaningful work look like for me? Not your kids, parents, friends, spouse, co-workers, the guy next door…what does it look like for you?
I guarantee you we’re going to continue looking at meaningful work. This is our one and only wholehearted life, and we’re on the journey together. Be brave. Lisa