I seem to be in confessional mode lately so please bear with me…

I know if someone else’s post really sticks in my consciousness, there is some powerful stuff there. Curt Rosengren offered just this kind of post yesterday when he talked about one of his success criterion: Time Abundance.

Here’s the part that I keep turning over in my mind. Curt writes:

Over the last few years I’ve grappled with a fear of success. In a
recent conversation with a friend, I realized that fear has its roots
in an outdated, unconscious belief of what success means and what it
has to look like.

That belief says that if I got really successful, I would have to live this unbalanced, over-committed life again. And that’s something I absolutely DO NOT want to go back to.

Honestly, I never thought that I had a fear of success. And yet, with a couple of paragraphs I’m being forced to reckon with my current notions of personal achievement. Consider my workaholic quiz results which suggested that I may connect my identity too tightly with my work. Also consider that I hold my non-work time as very important to my overall well-being. There’s that tension that so many of us grapple with where we want to succeed at work as well as all the other portions of our life. It harks back to the topic of trying not to divide myself into ever smaller chunks only to give my family and friends the remainder.

Okay, so perhaps I share Curt’s same outdated, unconscious belief of what success means and looks like. Let’s be frank here: it’s not as if our culture hasn’t thoroughly programmed us to believe professional success is accomplished through sacrifice to the organization (you know, the one that doesn’t exactly sacrifice itself in return). However, this is but one concept of success. Curt’s outlined his and now I am inspired to develop my own set of success criteria. Let’s see where this goes…