LiveWorkBalance

courtesy of Brawn

Last week, I came across a great article by Holly Hoffman, one of the other Brazen Careerist bloggers. For those who’ve read Holly’s writing before, you’ll know that she’s got a real knack for writing about her personal experiences in such a way that we can all take something from them. For those who haven’t read Holly’s work before, this is a good place to start.

So, if you’ve clicked over and read Holly’s post, you might be wondering where I’m going with this. Rather than make you guess, I’ll draw your attention to this quote:

What I really want when I imagine a good, fine life for myself is to own my own café, just as I envisioned it in December, an airy cozy shop full of funky vintage furniture, good coffee and an owner (me!) who knows everybody. I would be in a cool town, maybe not too big but too small. Somehow I got the notion into my head that it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like me. So I shelved it, said it was best left for retirement.

I realize that this is just a small portion of the post, but for me, this is what really struck a chord.

It’s Holly’s admission of not just her dream to own a cafe, but her reaction to that dream. She felt that this was her ideal goal, but that “it just wasn’t grand enough a business for a smarty-pants like [her],” and she “shelved it.”

How many times have we all done this? We have an idea, a dream or a goal that we’re really attached to. It inspires us, it resonates with us, and it can motivate us towards success, and we go and discard it because it doesn’t meet a certain artificial standard that we’ve set for ourselves.

By denying those dreams, we’re not really doing ourselves any favours. Sure, we may think we’re working towards our grand goals, but we need to ensure that the goal we’re working towards is actually the goal we truly wish to achieve. Otherwise, we may find that in several weeks, months or years we’ve been wildly successful at something that doesn’t satisfy us. We’ve spend down the wrong road, or climbed the wrong hill.

But what do we do about it?

The way I see it, there are two choices: the easy way and the hard way.

Now, I’ll preface the upcoming by saying that there’s not really an “easy” way, but we needed something to differentiate the two. In fact, the easy way is probably the harder of the two, or else there wouldn’t be a hard way.

(Confused yet?)

The hard way is basically as Holly experienced it. She went through a series of strong, difficult emotional events. With her emotional defenses worn down, she was forced to evaluate her current position in life and where she wanted to go from there. This isn’t an easy thing for anyone to go through, but if you are, you’re usually at the point where you’ve stripped away the masks you’d put in place, and are looking at things in a more honest fashion. This can give you some insight, but really isn’t the ideal way to do something like this.

So what is the “easy” way, then? Well, it’s pretty much just paying attention to your goals, and taking some time to reflect and reevaluate every now and then. Keep your eyes open for some of the signs that you’re out of sync with your dreams. If you’ve been succeeding but aren’t satisfied, take some time to reflect. If you’re doing what it is that you “think” you should be doing, but something seems to be missing, stop and look at your goals to make sure they’re what you honestly want.

This seems easy enough, but in reality it can be quite hard. Many of us have an image of what we’ve built up as to what we should be; what we’ve come to believe is our success personified. Looking beyond the outer layers of this image, to see if it’s really us inside, can be extremely difficult.

In Holly’s case, her masks were down, and she got a chance to look honestly at her dreams. Through her experience, and her honesty in sharing that experience with her readers, we can see that pushing the dream aside doesn’t change it or make it go away, it just makes it that much harder when it comes back up. But now that it has, well, in Holly’s words:

As to my business choices, I think I simply veered off course looking for something perhaps a little more glamorous, a little more grand than my simple dream of owning my own coffee shop. But now that I’m back there, it’s like a warm blanket, familiar and just right.

In some respects, I’m back where I was in December, which isn’t necessarily bad. I feel a little sheepish, a little humbled admitting that my ego inflated as I attempted to fluff myself up to meet these grand ideas. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I thought I was just putting on a brave face. When I put a brave face on, I only fool myself. And fool myself, I did.