Accelerating in the Wrong Direction
Stephen Covey once said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster”. How often we are speeding forward, and careening on the wrong path at full steam.
I was reminded of this earlier this week. I was having a coffee with a bright young professional woman who happens to be the single mother of a young girl. I mentioned that I too was a single mother early in my career- a fact which seemed to take her by surprise. We began discussing the challenging realities of being in this position, and I shared with her one of the biggest mistakes of my life…
As a young professional on Wall Street many years ago, I was singularly responsible for the upkeep of myself and my two kids- and when I arrived in New York, I was not only broke, but in debt. It was a white knuckle experience for me — not knowing if living in this incredibly expensive city with the demands of work that were way beyond what I had ever experienced — was something I could hack. Bills were stacking up and I was treading water very, very fast.
I remember my first bonus was a huge disappointment to me- it was actually contractually agreed but I didn’t understand that it would be prorated, and ended up therefore being a fraction of what I had planned for given that I had been employed for only half the year. In the evening on bonus day I spent the mandatory drinks session with colleagues at a bar trying not to cry, not knowing how I was going to pay my kids school tuition.
Because of the stress, and determination to succeed, I worked. I worked and worked and worked, and I began to find myself in a position where no longer was there that stress and worry about paying bills. But I kept working just as hard- a modern day version of Scarlett O’Hara playing in my head “As God is my witness I will never be hungry again!” The thing is, I never really stopped to figure out at what point do I no longer need to worry. The worry was hard wired, and I kept working to make sure (absolutely and totally sure) that I wouldn’t have to deal with that worry any more. And so my kids slept some nights in conference rooms at the office while I worked. And I logged more frequent flyer miles than I care to count — and wasn’t at home where I was needed. My ladder had shifted to the wrong wall but I was aggressively climbing it.
So today, I am older, and I have the benefit of hindsight. I know that spending time to figure out what matters is the first step- and you shouldn’t press the accelerator until you have the car pointed in the direction you want to go. It is also important to frequently reevaluate to make sure that the goals are still the right ones. So spending time on making the right decisions, about where and how to spend valuable time, what false assumptions we have swimming in our brains, and who needs us most, are some things that really help to reorient to get to the place we want to get to. It’s all about getting the ladder on the right wall.
