Recently, I was on the phone with a friend who is going through a difficult season in his life and career. As we spoke, I recognised something of my own journey in what he was describing.
Three years ago, I was an executive leading a technology team in a listed company. On paper, life was successful. In reality, I was running on empty.
My work no longer filled my cup. Things that should have been minor bumps in the road became disproportionately difficult because I simply had no capacity left. I could still do the job, but something in me had begun to disengage from it.
One moment remains particularly vivid.
I was writing a six-month departmental update. It should have taken an hour or two. Instead, I spent almost an entire day trying to engage with it. At one point I looked across at my bookcase, almost everything I was reading was about people, leadership, business culture, team culture and faith – very little about technology.
That stopped me.
I had always been more of a people leader than a technical leader. I could understand what skills we needed around the table and bring the right people together, but I didn’t have the deep technical expertise of many of my colleagues. Increasingly, when I found myself at industry events or in technical conversations, I held back.
It wasn’t only that I didn’t know enough – I wasn’t interested in knowing more, and that frightened me!
How could I be an executive in technology and no longer be interested in technology? What did that say about me? Somewhere in that gap grew a feeling that perhaps I was a fraud.
The identity trap
Recognising that something was changing was probably the easy part. The harder question was: If I’m not this, then who am I?
By then, an enormous amount of my identity was tied to the life I had built. I was an executive in a large company; I earned a good salary, I had prestige, security and responsibility. More importantly, I believed being a good husband and father meant providing financially for my family.
We had already experienced the financial trauma of losing a business. The thought of voluntarily walking away from security and potentially putting my wife and family through financial uncertainty again felt irresponsible.
I felt boxed in. The best image I have for it is one of those scrapyard crushers that compresses a car into a block. The beliefs I had built around who I was and what success was supposed to look like seemed to be closing in around me.
Yet ignoring what I was experiencing wasn’t making it disappear.
Becoming still enough to hear
What began to change things was not having an immediate answer, but rather it was learning to become curious.
I began journalling, meditating and praying. I spent time being still … with myself and my thoughts, beliefs. Coaching also gave me something I could not always give myself: another person curious enough to notice the places I might unconsciously gloss over and open a doorway into further exploration.
These practices can sometimes be dismissed as soft or “woo-woo”. Yet they are hardly confined to people who have withdrawn from serious or demanding lives.
Robin Sharma builds reflection directly into the 20/20/20 practice behind The 5 AM Club, describing solitude, prayer, meditation and writing as ways of deliberately creating space to think rather than simply remaining “busy being busy”.
Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights grew out of diaries he had kept for 35 years. He eventually took those journals into the desert and examined decades of successes, failures, beliefs, questions and forgotten lessons.
Richard Branson has written about his habit of carrying notebooks, listening carefully and recording ideas, plans and personal as well as business goals. The practices differ, but the principle resonates with me: creating enough space to notice what ordinary busyness can drown out.
For me, slowing down allowed me to be more. More with myself, more present, more able to hear parts of myself that had not had a voice for many years. One of those voices had apparently been speaking for much longer than I realised.
My son found my matric yearbook and read something I had written in matric. Amongst plenty of youthful nonsense was an aspiration I had almost forgotten. I wanted to become “the school psychologist’s psychologist”. I remembered then that I had wanted to study psychology. My marks took me elsewhere, and life followed a very different trajectory.
Decades later, when I entered coaching, I knew within months that I had found something that felt like home.
The wheat and the chaff
That realisation did not make the transition easy. I have had to unlearn things I believed were essential. I have watched savings intended for other purposes fund the beginnings of a new practice. I have grieved status, security, income and the comfort of a salary arriving every month.
But I have also begun to separate the wheat from the chaff.
For me, the wheat is service: serving people, helping leaders become better leaders, and increasingly exploring how we might contribute to restoring redemptive masculinity and better male leadership (not leadership over women, but men learning to lead well alongside women, bringing their strength, responsibility and contribution in ways that allow both to flourish). It is also becoming a better husband and father and understanding that provision means far more than money. Perhaps most significantly, my definition of success has changed.
Success is no longer something other people get to define for me through title, salary or status. It is increasingly measured against my internal compass, the unique purpose and mission my life is asking of me.
In that sense, my life today feels far more success-full — success has become something I am still living into rather than something I possess.
The view from here
My transition meant leaving corporate life, beginning a coaching practice, moving from the city to the country and buying a guest house. That is my story, it is not necessarily yours.
Three years into the journey, I am not yet at the top of the mountain and perhaps there isn’t a final summit, but I know the view from where I am already standing is profoundly different. The climb has been painful, frightening and, at times, almost soul-destroying – but I would still do it again, in a heartbeat. I am excited about what the future might hold and increasingly less concerned with summiting … the journey itself is the reward.
So if something in my story feels familiar, perhaps the question is not immediately: “What should I change?”. Perhaps it is simply: What is life inviting me into? What have I become too busy to hear? What parts of myself have been quiet for so long that I have forgotten their voice? And if I gave myself enough space to become still, curious and non-judgemental, what might begin to emerge?
More than likely you will not need a new career, a move to the country or a guest house. But perhaps there is a different view waiting somewhere further along your own path.