Is That All There Is?

Sometime between college and 30 many adults begin to review their lives and ask, "Is that all there is?" The incredible pace of learning has slowed. Life's routines have become mundane. A rocketing career may be leveling off and not as engaging as it once was as unconscious competence sets in. What to do?

No doubt, reflection and review can be helpful. A career coach may be helpful to you in developing a sense of how far you have come and where you can go. Even so, a lingering question may remain. Even with a new career, new locations, new relationships, once you master these you will return to the same question, "Is there more?" Here is an approach to stay engaged life-long: Get curious and ask questions about everything that interests you. In other words: Develop a habit of life-long inquiry and learning.

As a professional coach, I have worked with recent college grads and early career professionals who are high performers yet disillusioned by their careers. They expected their brains to be fully engaged in problem solving and product/project development, which would give them a sense of fulfilling their potential - something they were told by adults when they were children along the lines of "You can be anything you want to be." For these clients, the day-to-day routine has become mind-numbing. They feel underemployed bordering on depression while pushing themselves to deliver high quality performance on the job. They dream of leaving their current employers to start new jobs, new careers, or new ventures. They may want to find new opportunities. Some feel trapped due to real life obligations. Even so, they acknowledge a reality and responsibility of making a living. So they continue to daydream about finding ways to fulfill their potential living with dissatisfaction setting up a vicious cycle of perturbation.

During coaching session, this sense of feeling trapped becomes evident quickly. There are a few approaches that can be taken. Generally, professional coaches will advise their clients to "keep their day jobs" while exploring new opportunities after hours, either as part-time ventures or hobbies. This is typically sound advice. Yet, there's another approach that doesn't get as much attention - developing a life of appreciative inquiry.

Appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider, 1995) can be viewed as a formal research method and an informal approach to investigating one's own life. It's a way toward self-determined change in individuals, groups, and organization. To learn more, check out:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appreciative_inquiry

To leverage appreciative inquiry in your life, it helps to reframe one's thinking about life as a learning journey - that life is more about experiences and lessons learned along the way to develop wisdom rather than the destination itself. In other words, it's less about attaining the goal and more about what you learn along the way that lends value and meaning to life (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2009).

If you adopt this frame of thinking to your life, then appreciative inquiry is a helpful tool to begin understanding your life and your relationship to others and the world in constructive ways. In future posts, I will explain further how to use this approach to not only make sense of your life and engage fully in it, but also how to become comfortable with complexity and uncertainty, which are increasingly perplexing humans as they face increasing sociological alienation due to rapid technological advances resulting in isolation and pathology.  Today, it feels as if, on one hand, we're gulping life from a fire hose. That's all doing, doing, doing. On the other hand, we're wondering whether the numbing info overload is all there is. What's missing is human being, being, being. After all, we're human beings not human doings. Let's explore how to make your life's journey a worthwhile adventure in terms of human experience that you value most.

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