“What do you want?”
If you’re not sure how to answer this — what I view as the mother of all coaching questions — you are not alone.
Getting to the bottom of our heart’s truest desires — not the wants fabricated by society, the company you work for, or the unrealized dreams of our own parents for us — can be difficult.
Let me give an example.
I worked with Paval, a successful young professional in Turkey. Newly married, he and his wife were thinking about starting a family in the near future.
When I asked him to describe his ideal day ten years from now, his initial response included: driving a Land Rover, picking up his kids from an elite school, and living in a spacious home. He envisioned owning a thriving business.
I kept pushing.
Describe your ideal day for me, hour by hour.
Where are you? Describe your surroundings.
How do you feel when you wake up in the morning?
What’s on your mind as you fall asleep at night?
Author Cal Newport talks about the importance of “lifestyle-centric career planning“. In contrast to that oft-repeated narrative that is so prevalent (particularly among elite institutions) — follow your passion! Get that dream job! Go for the next promotion, always ask for the salary increase! — this approach asks you to dream in detail about lifestyle first. (Podcast here for those who are keen to listen to Cal expound on this in detail.)
In coaching career-driven parents, I combine this lifestyle-centric approach with an additional area of dreaming: what kind of parent do you want to be?
It’s worth acknowledging that if you’re like many of the people I coach — accomplished and driven — your success can be a double-edged sword. You’ve worked hard, often meeting or exceeding others’ expectations. But along the way, you may have lost your own compass. And when kids come into the picture, they can bring about a stark realization: all that success isn’t in alignment with the lifestyle you want, or is incompatible with how you want to show up for your kids.
Back to Paval: as he painted a clearer and clearer picture of his ‘ideal day,’ his vision began to shift: from material markers of what success looks like to how he wanted to live — and show up as a parent.
He wanted his relationship with his kids to be open and supportive. For them to be able to come to him with any problem and know he would have their back.
A theme emerged around his own health and fitness, because his own father had not been able to be as active with him, when he was a kid.
He wasn’t attached to running his own business, but strongly felt that high flexibility and independence were critical — allowing him to be present for his family in a country where long hours and exploitative work practices are still the norm.
After this session, we began referring to the distracting desires created by other people and society as ‘white Land Rovers’. (Note: I have nothing against Land Rovers!)
A month later, Paval shared an update with me. He had quit smoking, started eating healthy and running regularly with his wife (!) — and wanted support thinking through architecting his career in a way that would maximize independence and flexibility.
As Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens — it is the power of imagination that makes us uniquely human and so successful as a species.
Use this to your advantage.
It may take a few rounds to make it past the Land Rovers.
But by investing the time in getting really clear on the lifestyle you want and why that matters to you, it’s much more likely you’ll stick with it and manifest your vision into reality.
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