What I wanted, from quite early on, was to work with people and help them develop. I had almost fallen into managing people, and Human Resources seemed the obvious route. So I did the qualifications, and there were years of them, applied for the next job, then the next one, and gradually worked my way up.
I do not want to dismiss any of that. I learned a huge amount, achieved things I was proud of, and much of what I know now came from those years. But I was also frustrated, although I could not have told you why at the time. I had gone into HR to make a difference to people, and much of the work did not feel as though I was doing that.
The difficulty was that I did not hate it. I was good at it, I kept progressing, and I had three children to provide for, which, as I wrote in The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration, was a very powerful reason to keep going. But it was not the work itself that was pulling me forward. It was only years later, when I moved into one-to-one coaching, that I found the part I had been looking for all along.
I think many of us know some version of this. We work towards something we are convinced we want, achieve it, and then wonder why we do not feel quite as we expected. Sometimes there is nothing significant going on. We may simply be tired after the effort, or the achievement mattered, and the satisfaction has naturally passed.
But there is another kind of flatness, and that is what I want to look at here. Nothing seems to be calling us forward anymore. The things that used to matter do not have the same pull, and we cannot see anything obviously wrong either. This is different from motivation running out because the reason for it has disappeared. We got where we were trying to go, and getting there did not give us what we thought it would.
What We Were Really After
I have come to think that many of the things we pursue are really standing in for how we want to feel.
We tell ourselves we want the job, the house, the money, the qualification or even the number on the scales. But underneath, we may actually want to feel secure, valued, free, successful or simply more at peace.
We can become so focused on the outcome that we never ask what we expected it to give us. Then we achieve it, and wonder why something still feels missing.
Once we identify the feeling we were really after, we can see that the thing we were pursuing was only one possible way of finding it, and sometimes not even the best one.
The Question Underneath What a Client Asks For
A client once came to me because she was deeply unhappy in her job. She was highly qualified and had plenty of options, but she had lost confidence in her own judgement and could not decide what to do next.
Rather than focusing on which job she should apply for, I asked her what she wanted a new job to give her. Then we kept asking the same question of each answer until we got underneath the job itself.
What emerged surprised her. She wanted to feel trusted, have more freedom and feel that what she was doing mattered. Looking for the right job became much easier, because she knew what she was actually looking for. She had genuinely outgrown her role, so this was not about finding a different way to appreciate what she already had. It was about choosing what came next for the right reasons.
Instead of concentrating mainly on job descriptions, she began looking at the organisation, its culture, how people were treated and how much freedom she would really have. Most importantly, she began trusting her own judgement again. Her goal barely changed, but she now knew why she wanted it.
When We Turn What We Love into a Goal
Somebody in my family loved music. He and a friend bought a couple of inexpensive mixing desks, taught themselves music production and had a great time doing it. He loved it so much that he decided he wanted a career in music.
So he went to university to study it. Music production turned out to be a small part of the course, and most of his time went on assignments and academic work, which he had never enjoyed. Added to that was the expectation that the degree would lead to a career in an industry that is notoriously difficult to get into.
He was not lazy or lacking ambition. He simply struggled to motivate himself to do a great deal of work he disliked for something that no longer felt much like the thing he had loved in the first place.
Psychologists call this the overjustification effect. When we add external rewards, expectations or requirements to something we already enjoy for its own sake, they can begin to replace the original reason we wanted to do it.
Eventually he realised that what he really loved was not the idea of a career in music. It was how making music made him feel. Once he understood that, he no longer needed music to be his career for it to have a place in his life. He is finding that same feeling in other areas too, alongside a job he is perfectly happy to be motivated to do because it pays the bills.
When ‘Have To’ Takes Over From ‘Want To’
A friend of mine loved dancing simply because she enjoyed it. Then she entered a competition. She wanted to win, and gradually she began to enjoy the dancing less.
Nobody had attached anything to her dancing. Nothing about the dancing had changed, only her reason for doing it. Something she had done purely because she loved it had become something she was measuring and trying to succeed at.
This was when the idea really clicked for me. There is a difference between our love to do and our have to do actions. We need both, of course. The problem comes when all the measuring, achieving and succeeding of have-to-do begins to overwhelm the reason we loved doing something in the first place.
Competition was not the problem, and plenty of people love competing. For her, comparison had simply taken the place of enjoyment.
Fortunately, the enjoyment had not disappeared. She needed to stop measuring herself against everyone else and rediscover why she loved dancing in the first place.
Before You Start Climbing the Ladder
Looking back at my own career, I sometimes think of the old analogy about putting your ladder against the wrong wall. It was only when I discovered coaching that I realised there had been another ladder, with far fewer rungs, that could have taken me much more directly to the work I wanted to do.
I do not regret the route I took, and everything I learned along the way has been useful. I made the best decision I could with what I knew at the time, which is all any of us can do. What I did not know to ask was what I expected HR to give me.
When we make decisions about our future, we research the practical things: the qualifications, the money, the opportunities it might create and how long it will take. Those things matter, but they are only half of the research.
The other half is questioning what we are assuming the outcome will give us. If I get this job, earn this amount or achieve this goal, how do I imagine I will feel? And what evidence do I have that it will actually give me that?
We cannot know how any choice will turn out. But we can talk to people who are already there, find out what the day-to-day reality is like, and test the assumptions about ourselves as carefully as we test the practical facts.
Sometimes the ladder will still be the right one. But it is worth checking the wall before we spend years climbing it.
Ask What You Want It to Give You
Perhaps the most useful question, then, is not simply What do I want? but What do I want it to give me? That does not mean abandoning goals or ambition. It means understanding what sits underneath them, and it opens up possibilities, because there is usually more than one way of finding what we are really looking for.
For me, this is where our higher self comes in. Beneath all the things we think we should want, there is a quieter sense of what actually matters, and it is remarkably persistent.
Try This: How Do I Want to Feel?
Think of something you are currently working towards and ask yourself a simple question:
How do I expect to feel when I get there?
Once you have your answer, ask what else could give you some of that feeling now. Do not dismiss the smaller things, because they may tell you more about what you actually want than the goal itself.
Then come back to the original goal. Does it still feel right? It probably will. The difference is that you are no longer expecting one achievement to provide something that may be available to you in many other ways.
Where We Go Next
We have looked at what inspires us and what happens when we lose touch with it. But inspiration does not only come from within us. Sometimes another person brings something out in us simply through the way they are, and they do not have to be famous or even trying to inspire anyone.
Most of us have known somebody whose presence made us think differently, or see more possibility in ourselves. So what is it about some people that makes them inspiring to be around? That is where we go next.