“It’s too easy to get sucked back into the Vortex”
I’ve had several conversations with people this week about having great intentions to start something new and then they just fall in the whirlpool of every day stuff and the new thing gets pushed away, and the old feelings of resenting work get pulled in.
If you want something new in your life, whether a complete career change, or a change in how you feel about your career, you have to work for it.
The Vortex will come at you.
It wants you to stay in place.
Your work is to stay out of it.
One of my favourite books is Orbiting the Giant Hairball.
Gordon Mackenzie fully embraces the vortex of corporate life we can get sucked into, and which can suck the life out of us, but he explores how you can be part of it, but not in it - you can orbit it.
“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:
Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past...
Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions...
Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood...
Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.”
― Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace
So you don’t have to leave your 9 to 5, you don’t have to through it all in, you can stay where you are and still change how you feel about your work.
Your work is to help you enjoy your work. That is your job.
If you aren’t working on that - what are you working on instead? What is more important than your fulfillment?
The Vortex will always be there, but you don’t have to get sucked in. You can stay in the orbit, you can do great work in the orbit.
This feels like it needs more explaining.
Maybe a podcast episode in the making! What if I could get Gordon on the podcast! Wow - that would be amazing.
So while I start stalking Gordon, you start to think about the Vortex, and work on staying out if it. You don’t have to be in it, to win it. Quite the opposite.
eleanor
Like the idea … I’d be really interested in getting the ‘top X nuggets / solutions’ from the book / approach without having to spent X hours reading it!
I.e. the 80/20 rule of everything; that I can get 80% of the value of a book / many training courses, meetings etc. from something 80% shorter :) … and for too many meetings it’s the less well known 99/1 rule!! ha-ha