By Chad Lefevre | Founder, CEO & Chief Visionary Officer, The Most Important Conversations | Creator of the NearWin™
I want to tell you about the most ungrateful thing I have ever done. I was twenty five, and I had a job in public relations and communications in the energy sector. It paid well, and there was a clear path upward in front of me that a lot of people would have been glad to be standing on. Everyone I knew agreed I was lucky, and I could not tell a single one of them that I did not want the job, the career, the path that was opening before me.
This is the part I most want you to hear, because I think some of you are living inside this trap right now. There is a kind of unhappiness that gets no sympathy at all… ever. It is the unhappiness of a life that looks great, correct, and responsible. If things are visibly hard for you, people show up to help. But if your life “looks good” on the outside, yet feels wrong from the inside, you still get congratulated. After a waterfall of congratulations you simply stop bringing it up, because you can hear how it sounds coming out of your mouth, and you can see how it lands on those who are ostensibly so happy for you. You start to think there might be something wrong with you for not wanting what, by all societal metrics, you are supposed to want.
Newsflash: There is nothing wrong with you.
I could not name a single legitimate complaint. I was not overworked. I was not treated badly. I was not underpaid. Nobody was doing anything to me. I just did not believe in what I was doing. And every day I did it well, I felt a little further away from myself. Nobody has a word for that. There is no box to tick that says the job is fine and I am slowly becoming someone I would not choose. So I said nothing for about four years, and I got very good at it.
Here is what I understand now that I could not see then. Your brain is not trying to make you happy. It is trying to keep you alive. And the way it does that is predictability. Predictable means known, and known means survived. You did this yesterday and you are still breathing, so do it again tomorrow. But notice what your brain never asks:
It never asks whether the predictable thing is truly good for you.
It never asks whether it makes you come alive.
It never once asks whether it is even remotely who you are.
We are social creatures. Isolation or exile from the tribe is a punishment for human beings, because our nervous system, our endocrine system, and the neurochemical ecosystem in our brain are only activated in the context of an other. Oxytocin is released as a pare-bonding chemical when we relate intimately or meaningfully to others. Dopamine floods our brain when we engage in and overcome a challenge, exercise, eat food and have sex; all things we do with or in the context of community with other people. This is why prisons are punishments, and the ultimate punishment is solitary confinement. When we are alone, our nervous system is depleted of the neurchemical ecosystem required for us to have the feeling we call “good”, “happy”, “joyful”.
So we are taught to not be selfish, to defer to the “other”, to put others before us, and leave our desires for another day, which over time becomes never at all. Why? Because of the fear of displeasing others and being ostracized from the group. But this is madness. Being in the service of something is very different than deferring your desires and visions for your life to those of another. Who do you think that “other” will be? It will either be a sociopath, or narcissist, someone who lacks empathy and couldn’t care less about what other people desire; unless that other is a rare individual who has enlightened themselves to realize that you can be selfish, which simply means to put your self’s thriving first, so that you can then be in service to something outside of you from a place of power, alignment, and therefore integrity.
Being in the service of something is very different than deferring your desires and visions for your life to those of another. That is not service. That is self sacrifice. To be in service you must be whole and complete; living an aligned life by-design with honour and integrity. You cannot do this without being selfish.
But your nervous system doesn’t operate that way, and therefore, it needs to be mastered in order for you to create and architect the conditions for your personal thriving. Were you to defer your desires to the conditioning and expectations of the society, in this case stay in a job that you were suffocating in, this would also mean the job you had quietly hated for three years, ten years, seventeen years is, as far as your nervous system is concerned, a triumph. It kept you alive every single day, so why on earth would it let you take that apart? So your mind does not argue with you, it just hands you reasons, excuses; stories to assuage the angst burning deep inside you. “The market is uncertain”, it says. “Your family depends on this”, “other people would be grateful”, give it one more year”, and so on. Defer, defer, defer. Put others first. Don’t be selfish!
In 2005 I stopped negotiating with my mind and said one sentence. I am dissatisfied. That was all. Not “I have a plan”, because I did not. Not “I know what happens next”, because I had no idea at all. Just the true thing, said plainly, without softening it or apologizing for it, or immediately explaining why that sentence was selfish and unreasonable of me.
I want to tell you how hard that is, because almost nobody gets this honest with themselves and says it out loud. We will say we are tired. Busy. Stressed. “I’m just going through a season” or “figuring some things out”. We will say almost anything except the one sentence that would actually unlock something and ask something greater of us. Because the second you say it, and let it stand, there is now a gap between the life by-default you are stuck in (convinced its what you want), and the life by-design you would choose and could create for yourself; and that gap does not close by itself.
I quit with nowhere to go, and I want to be honest with you about what followed, because the version where it all works out immediately is a much better story and a much worse piece of advice. Nothing worked for a while. I sold advertising for a month, poorly. I did some public relations and strategic communications work. I became a partner in a hedge fund that got its approvals a month before the 2008 crash, and was gone by Christmas. Years of that, over and over. None of it felt brave. It mostly felt like not knowing, and I was frustrated for years.
I would do it again tomorrow.
Because staying was never the safe, aligned or thriving option. It only looked like one within the confines of my own self deception. Staying was spending twenty more years getting excellent at a life I had already quietly declined, and arriving at fifty with everything in place and knowing I had never actually shown up and lived.
I am not going to tell you to quit anything. I do not know what you are carrying or who is counting on you, but I will ask you for one thing. Be honorable. Say the true sentence out loud to one person, or write it on a paper where you can see your own handwriting. Not the soft version, not the “things have just been a bit off lately” version. The real one. Watch how much resistance one sentence can produce in your body. That resistance is the whole mechanism I discussed above. That is what it feels like from the inside.
The bottom line is, you are allowed to be unhappy inside a life other people envy. That is not ingratitude. That is information, and your thriving depends on your having the courage to get honest with yourself and begin to take steps to do something about it. If what I have shared moved you I some way, or if you would like to explore how I and my team can help you unlock your power to create a life by-design, book a conversation with me @ chadlefevre.com. Because you shouldn’t feel like you are drowning in your life. Simply put, that’s not a life. That’s dying.
Chad Lefevre is the founder and CEO of The Most Important Conversations, a design thinker and business philosopher who coined the term NearWin™. Since 2005 he has worked with more than thirty thousand leaders at organizations including Coca-Cola, TELUS, Shell and Caesars Entertainment. He co-produced the Sundance Thought Leader Summit and SANG, which convened Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield and Peter Diamandis.
Let’s explore how we can work together: chadlefevre.com & tmicglobal.com