Desire, Destination and a Next Step (part one)

I feel itchy. 

Not the kind of itch that sits on your skin, annoyingly begging to be scratched. It’s the kind of itch that is present just enough to make you feel uncomfortable. It’s invisible, so scratching it is almost impossible. It’s uncomfortable enough to keep my attention, to keep me feeling discontent enough to not forget the itch. I long for it to be gone. To soothe the discontent. I just can’t seem to find the right salve. But I know the discontent is a symptom of the deeper dis-ease of desire. My soul is hungry for change. I just don’t know what change that is.

If you want things in your life to change, you have to change things in your life.

It sounds so simple. It’s not. That’s the truth, But life is hard and as I keep hearing from one of my mentors, Codie Sanchez, you get to choose your hard. Life can either be hard working for someone or it can be hard working for yourself and building multiple businesses. 

So if I can choose my hard then I choose the hard task of change. Of following this discontent to the desire and figuring out what it’s moving me towards.

We all have agency to change. We can change easy things from our hair colour or couch to hard things like our careers or personality. The easy things will give you a peak of joy but see you quickly plummeting back into feeling like nothing has changed. Because those changes are superficial. They are surface level. It’s like changing the garden furniture on your lawn but still having a terrible lawn. The change is superficial but ultimately changes nothing long lasting.

Conversely, changing the quality of your soil will drastically alter the look and feel of your garden. But every change that seems small isn't always insignificant. Sometimes the smallest changes done consistently over time deliver the greatest results. It's the compounding effect.

It's the small changes made on the right things, the big things, the things that will change the trajectory of your life, that matter the most. But where do you start? What are the right things to be focusing on? How do you know what small changes to make today so that where you find yourself in 10 years time is dramatically more aligned with where you want to be?

I feel this is a tension I have wrestled with most of my career. I’ve never had a clear career path. I’ve kind of always gone where God has led me, opening doors I never could have wished to open on my own. As I have journeyed along this undetermined path, I have come to know more and more about what I’m capable of. Skills and mindsets that lay dormant have, over the years, surfaced, surprising me and leading me in a direction I never thought possible.

The career journey has been a wild ride which I have enjoyed but lately I find myself wondering where to next? Because there has been no defined career goal, what comes next is unclear.

Normally for me, that’s not a problem, I generally like the evolving nature of my career. Something has shifted though. The desire bubbling up inside me has me constantly thinking about balance and what a satisfying work day or week would look like.

I’m currently a CEO and truthfully I enjoy being the decision maker, leading the team and helping them thrive, setting vision, developing strategy and seeing those strategies drive results. It’s also the hardest job I’ve ever had and the most challenging. But if I’m entirely honest with myself, owning a business was awesome. Yeah it didn’t get to the point where it could pay me a decent wage and the way it all ended was disappointing. But being able to take what I now know I’m good at and apply it to something that was my own (well partly my own) was awesome.

I find myself thinking more and more about those days and the way I could, to a certain extent, determine what I did with my time. 

A couple of days ago, I woke up with the itch of discontent strongly begging to be scratched. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I took out my journal and started to write, allowing a stream of consciousness to pour out of me in the hopes of finding clarity. Whilst journaling my frustrations and exploring my feelings of discontent, a question popped into my mind. 

What if I stopped trying to figure out what the desire is and just took a step towards the desire?

I had no clearer direction. Just a thought that if I took one step in the direction of the desire instead of trying to define the destination before I took a step, then maybe I’d find the destination along the way.