The choice is yours

If your work life isn’t giving you satisfaction, you do have a choice. It’s not an easy one, granted. After coaching many women over time, I can see clearly that there are two options for you. Two roads. So let me save you time by giving you the download for each one, and let you pick.

The first road is to keep going. By this I mean keeping the same thinking, which will keep you more or less in the same place. You might change here or there professionally, but nothing profoundly changes. We are all on this road, because our brain default setting is to keep us safe.

This is the comfort zone: the environment, tasks, people are quite familiar. When something is off – your work-life balance, interest in the job, or your performance – you keep going. Even if deep down you are uncomfortable, you stay. You may have desires to go somewhere else, but they do not turn into action.

You keep pushing because it’s what you know. You might read books, think a lot, talk to people close to you, go to a seminar. But in the end nothing changes as far as results go. You might take another job, hoping it will be better, but 6 months later you find yourself back to where you were.

The other road – less often travelled – is to voluntarily get outside your comfort zone. This path makes you find ways to change your thinking. It makes you discover who you really are at that point in time, and adjust course accordingly. This is a path of exploration, where you expose yourself to judgment – both your own and externally.

It’s the unknown, which triggers our fears. Because we don’t know how to deal with uncertainty. On this road you openly consider new options, and might change careers or fields. This is where coaching is a great fit, because it gives you perspective. This road solves the problem. It takes you to the next level, and in the end is very rewarding.

Many of you say that you are ‘stuck’. This is because you are trying to find a third road in the middle. Where you don’t have to change too much, or that remains safe. You do want to get onto the second road without quitting the first. Sadly that third road doesn’t exist (trust me, I also looked for it for a long time!…).

In my experience, when we resist making the choice, one day life pushes us one way. I see examples of this around me, and this is my story too. Ultimately if the road you are on does not work for you, and you ignore the signs, you will be taken onto the next. I’m yet to meet someone this hasn’t happened to.

So this leaves the following choice for you: do you want a bit of hard for a long long time, OR do you want the fast hard now? What are you saving yourself by choosing the known discomfort over the unknown one?

When you aspire to something else, you set the wheels in motion. It does not go away. If you can learn from people who have gone through this experience, it is that you can choose to change now. You can open yourself to changing your thinking, to being challenged, to growing now. Recognise that your current thought process isn’t going to solve your current problem. It’s time for an upgrade, to get to the better version of yourself waiting right there. So are you coming?