Starting Over
On #Life, #Career, #StartingOver
Today is the first day of my new “unemployment”. Earlier this week I signed away the business I had been building since 2012. Chalk it up to the ol’ “incompatible business partners” with a little burnout thrown in, but the reality is that somewhere in the madness that is building a fast-growing, successful digital agency, I found myself changing.
My Core Values
Maybe I wasn’t “changing” as much as getting clearer about what it is that is important to me. A few years ago, a friend and personal coach, Karl Staib, took me through an exercise I cherish to this day.
By a process of elimination, I had to choose what he called my “core values”. The exercise is relentless. You can't cheat it. It forces tough choices. When it was all said and done, this is what I discovered are my core values:
Freedom
Health
Authenticity
Fairness
Connection
Creativity
Fun
Happiness
Why isn’t happiness at the top? They way I see it, if I have Health, I can work on, and enjoy, my Freedom. Fairness, Authenticity, Connection, Creativity, and Fun, depend on me doing something about it. And when I succeed at all of the above, that's Happiness for me.
I Wasn’t Happy
That's the bottom line. Working crazy hours made me feel like a prisoner of the business, and even affected my health. I could only fulfill so many of my core values feeling like this.
So I started thinking more about my core values and realized that with an incompatible business partner pulling toward his own goals, I would not be able to live up to my values. I realized the business was not the vehicle to achieve them.
As I considered the options, it became clear I first had to end my business partnership.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” - Seneca
And so this quote about starting over reminds me that some times, one can juggle many things at once. And other times, the real important stuff demands you end other things before starting something new.
I hope you find out what is right for you.
Until the next time,
