Why you should stop running on your willpower and start surrendering
3 Lessons on making difficult decisions
I’m writing this after having had a call with Philippe Vandenbroeck, so I hope he will be fine with me sharing this article — and thus his advice with those who can too benefit from it.
Let me start with giving some reference.
In January 2020 I decided to leave my golden cage and take the courage to make a living as a freelancer. My main motivation for that decision is that I am a creative generalist, and therefore it’s very difficult for me to find my whole self into just one job.
Above that, I’m also a highly value-driven person which makes it ethically very difficult for me to work on projects that seemingly are not relevant to me or don’t have a clear purpose or positive impact.
I felt motivated to create a ‘slash career’ for myself — if you are (or even have a sprinkle of suspicion you are) also a creative generalist I’d say How to Be Everything: A Guide for Those Who (Still) Don’t Know What They Want to Be When They Grow Up is a must read. A slash career is a path in which you find multiple projects, so that combined they would fill all of your buckets and interests.
I gave myself about a year to explore the existing landscape in which I want to navigate. Who’s working on impact design? On future-proof innovation? On ecosystem-approaches? On biomimicry / nature-inspired design?
I’m a strong believer of cooperation so I met with everyone who seemingly was on a similar path (thanks LinkedIn for making it possible to find them so easily). I felt it was a good approach to plant a lot of seeds; with some additional attention and time at least some of them would hopefully be sprouting sooner than later. I was confident I’d be able to make it work.
When several of those seeds were falling into my reach to turn them into projects, our notorious little Covid-19 came shaking up our world. As if a life doesn’t have enough uncertainties already, it magnified every uncertainty.
On top of that, I was blessed with the news that there is a little human being growing inside of me. I’m sure many women will relate that being pregnant of your first kiddo is an extreme privilege but accompanied with so much responsibility, making you even more vulnerable.
Fast-forward to today, I find myself struggling to see a path ahead of me. I’m lost within the 5, or honestly seemingly endless, options in front of me. All of them with their weighing uncertainties, with their opportunities and challenges.
So now what…
How to make big life decisions in times of uncertainty?
It’s time to properly introduce Philippe Vandenbroeck. He is one of the many connections I made via LinkedIn in my search for like-minded people. We only (virtually) met once while I have the feeling we know each other for years. Speaking the same languages — even when sometimes using different words — we understand each other.
As a systems thinker and scenario planner, and being the founder of ShiftN — an organization that helps changemakers image new futures, and to find clarity in complexity — it seemed like he was in a place where I would see myself in the future.
How did he get there? How did he find his focus? What are his guidelines when he makes difficult decisions? How can you be value-driven while still functioning within the boundaries of our society (which often doesn’t hold your values)?
A first big life lesson he shared is the transformation he made (and still needs to mindfully apply) is the shift from running on willpower to letting things happen with a mind of surrendering.
Willpower takes a lot of energy, and unfortunately it’s finite. If you do everything from that place, at a certain point you won’t have enough energy left to keep going.
Thanks — that explained my feeling of “I thought I was entrepreneurial but I’m not feeling that energy anymore?!”
Surrendering, on the other hand, is regenerative.
To surrender, he added, it’s important to realize in which phase of your life you are. Philippe believes there are life cycles of approximately 18 years. While for each person these phases will have their differences, there are some general patterns within them.
Your first life phase is pretty constrained within society’s expectations of you becoming an adult. It’s mainly directed by your parent’s choices and context.
In the second phase, you’re trying to craft your own path. The focus here is to understand who you are and which career path you are interested in (or not). You’re starting to settle down a bit.
In the third phase, the focus is on walking that path. Pursuing your career, focusing on your family life, and living through the commitments made during that second phase.
In the fourth phase, things start to free up again; as most people are have gathered significant professional and life experience and are ready, and have the freedom, to reframe and reinvision their future by exploring new paths.
Each phase comes with opportunities and challenges; determined by your emotional, physical and financial context. While you can’t control everything (remember, let go of your willpower once in a while) you do have the power to surrender to which phase of life you are in.
In my case, it’s okay to surrender and focus on becoming a mom. It’s a reason to slow down a bit career wise, to take time to decide what is providing me energy and what not. That realization offers guidance in how to make decisions — at least based to my current context.
Don’t ignore your own values
A second interesting topic we discussed was being value-driven*.
Can it hurt? Can it limit yourself?
* If you have no idea what your values are, get yourself distracted for a few hours and figure them out. This article How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You) will guide you through it.
For value-driven people the “why” of something is much more important than “what”.
For example, I could see myself working either as business strategist or as marketing strategist, as long as it is for a project that is relevant to me and that seems purposeful.
I know that it would be smart to invest spare money on the stock market, however, I can’t seem to convince myself doing it as I don’t believe in companies that are IPO-driven.
That made me question if I was limiting myself to function properly (read be successful; whatever that means) in our society because I hold on to certain values too much?
Again, the answers can be found in what’s giving you energy. What are you willing to surrender to and doesn’t actually require all that much willpower?
Your values determine who you are, so being able to follow them and live up to them, is what will drive you. Especially when things will become uncertain. Because you will feel and thus know you are focusing on what’s important to yourself.
Find your coherence
As a preparation to our meeting I made a mindmap for myself to list all the different options I couldn’t seem to navigate through.
Even though I believe a slash career works for me, I couldn’t seem to juggle all the projects I was working on. I felt lost, frustrated, and unproductive.
I was focusing too much on the “and” — Can I do project A AND project B AND project C? Surprisingly resulting in a view as if everything was disconnected. That gave me the pressure that by choosing and focusing on only 1 or 2 options I’d start to feel less restless and insecure.
But… What if Project A, Project B, and Project C actually all fall under one focus?
What if I reverse my thinking, and looked for the coherence, the connection, between the different options? What if I can find a way — a common denominator — and that would be my focus?
I used this reverse thinking to update my mindmap (showing only 3 options for sake of simplicity). While it might seem messier it actually allowed me to evaluate the different options according to what gives me energy and supports my values — especially when considering which are most relevant in your current phase of life.
Important side note: you will need to run some low-risk experiments (you can find inspiration in Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You) to explore your options somewhat further to properly evaluate and not just using your assumptions (because they are full of bias).
While I still don’t know what exactly I’ll do, it does gives me a better direction to what the path I want to craft looks like and what options will support me to effectively craft it.
I’m not as much lost as I thought I was.
My next step is to practice surrendering to that path and exploring which of the opportunities that are on that path will give me energy and which won’t.
If you see the coherence between different options/opportunities than that should give you the trust and motivation to drive you.
Don’t let others’ beliefs and willpower determine/derail your from your path. If they don’t agree to collaborate on terms that work for both, and thus supporting your own values, then it’s not a collaboration.
While navigating through difficult decisions is a never-ending exploration of life — and thus this article has no real hard stop — I’d like to encourage to dare and ask for advice from those in different life phases. It helps giving you another perspective on your own context. They will ask curiosity-driven questions rather then judging-driven questions. Judging because for those who are facing very similar challenges it’s extremely difficult not to compare it to their own context/situation.
As a final piece of advice he gave me, and I want to pass on to you:
Give yourself some slack, trust your intuition and your path, have confidence in yourself!
