The nitty-gritty of making a big life pivot

This post is about how to pivot your life to one of purpose and joy that is authentic to who you really are, instead of what everyone expects of you. 

I'll share what "Colleen, Inc." will be doing next, but want to start with a couple of behind-the-scenes stories of what my life pivot entailed. We don't hear enough about what growth looks like while you're in it. Doing the work while you're in the midst of it is the most important part of a transformation.

So here's the story:

Three years ago this month, my father-in-law passed away at age 70, filled with regrets. After his funeral, my husband Wes and I sat down and had a conversation we never thought to have before: "Is this the life we truly want to be living?" 

To an outsider, we had it all. But the truth was, we were miserable living our lives according to what everyone else expected. We were overwhelmed with work, constantly trying to balance travel schedules and all the demands of our life together, totally depleted by the time the weekend came, and unclear on what it was all for, anyway.


So we asked ourselves what we actually wanted, and the conversation became about:
 

• The pressure to follow the predictable life path our culture embraces, the fears that come with it, and the option to do it our own way. 

• This tiny voice inside of me looking for something more than quietly cultivating my creativity while working a corporate career.

• Wes's deep yearning to live in L.A., where he was born and his brother and friends lived, and to have a simpler, less stressful lifestyle.

We no longer wanted to live our lives based on what everyone else expected. We no longer wanted to make decisions out of fear. We no longer wanted to feel like we were not enough or that we had to take certain steps because that's what everyone else does.


Instead, we wanted to make decisions out of love, in a way that allowed each of us to be our whole selves and would allow us to create a lifestyle that gave us capacity to grow as individuals, and as a couple.

That sounds graceful, right? "OK, great! Clarity! Let's make a plan and flash forward to rainbows and sunshine!"

The thing is, when a seed is planted, it's buried under the dirt and grows in darkness before it finally blooms. The seed keeps doing the work with full faith that it will see the sun, even though all it can see is mud. 

And that's what this journey looked like for us over the past three years as we transitioned from overwhelmed and unfulfilled, to living on our own terms. It required each of us to stop operating from a place of ego, and be true to who we really are.

Here's a diagram to show what I mean by “stop operating from a place of ego,” because I think every human struggles with this:

To take your ego out of the driver's seat in your life, and create an authentic life of joy, you must develop awareness of your whole self.

This is hard, because we are not taught how to:

1. Deeply consider who we really are, so we can let go of all of the external expectations that drive fear and self-doubt.

2. Clarify what brings us joy (and what saps our energy), and influence the balance of them to be a net positive in the lives of others.

3. Understand the unique needs of our physical bodies to keep them healthy, vital and able to carry us through life. 

4. Look at our own thoughts objectively,  to understand ourselves and shift our mindsets to produce better outcomes.

5. Surround ourselves with relationships that help us to become better versions of ourselves, and develop boundaries.

6. Develop a money mindset that focuses on what we need and value, limits impulsiveness, and does not rely on increasing income. 

7. Surrender the (irrational) belief that we are in control of anything aside from our thoughts and actions, in this exact moment.

Last year, I published a book about how to answer these questions for yourself, covering what the best thinkers of humanity say about each one, how I applied their knowledge to my life, and simple steps anyone can take to do the same thing. 

But the book left out an important story, the one that enabled me to *actually* pivot my life.

 

Over the past few years, Wes and I have been at various stages of maturity on each of the above areas, which in retrospect was a blessing because he had strengths where I had weaknesses, and vice versa.


In reality, it was incredibly painful to try to grow as individuals, and in our relationship with each other. Especially if you begin said growth process by giving your partner tips on how to improve themselves, which I would *highly advise against* if you want to make *any progress.* 

The hardest and most important part for us was aligning on a shared money mindset. Wes is a CPA who calculates price per ounce when he goes grocery shopping and is also a shrewd investor, and I was allergic to the word "budget," talked about money as a "form of energy," and love buying nice things. It's one thing to talk about "strictly spending only on what we truly need or value, and pouring everything else into growth accounts" and another thing to actually do it––especially when what you value as individuals varies.

It was a constant fight until we landed on a common goal: build a healthy "eff it" fund, which would allow us freedom to live on our own terms. 


If you've been here awhile, you'll remember The Year of Less that kicked off this process. (It also taught us to think about Marie Kondo'ing in reverse: look at all the clutter you don't want as wasted cash, and guesstimate how much it would be worth if you'd invested it in your "eff it" fund). 

We evaluated our assets (house, car, stocks, etc.) and liabilities (i.e., bills and necessary expenses), decided what we could sell or eliminate in order to invest into our "eff it" fund, and outlined what our minimum viable income model would look like for us––that considered both of our individual values for spending. 


The idea is don't spend on what you don't value, so you can spend on what you do value (I'm happy to shop at Costco, clean my house and paint my own walls because it feeds the "eff it" fund and allocates dollars towards my art, design and style-related purchases).

If you let go of what other people think, and strictly focus on what you truly need and value, you can create financial freedom. Wes and I realized we were happy to live a much smaller, simpler life in exchange for freedom––of our time, of our choices, of our paths––and fearlessly create our future on our own terms.

Creating financial freedom allowed me to take a leap of faith in my whole self, to align what I do with who I really am––here's what "Me, Inc." means:

I've worked full-time for my consulting firm for almost a decade––and the whole time, I've been afraid to be who I really am, hiding or minimizing the parts of me that didn't fit the corporate mold, afraid of being judged.

Publishing my book was the first leap of faith I took in my whole self, and the second was asking my firm for 6 months off to explore how arts-based organizations teach "human skills of the future" like empathy and creativity––and what we can learn from their approach to help address the empathy gap and other social and emotional skill deficits.

What I didn't tell my firm is that feeling pressured to fit a mold was stifling my creativity, and I felt like a hypocrite advising clients on how critical skills like empathy and creativity were in the future of work yet seeing a deficit of those skills in my own organization and doing nothing about it.

The world has radically changed since I started my sabbatical in January (*understatement of the year*). 


COVID pivoted my workshops at The Art Institute into research, and taught me that fear, judgment and lack of self-awareness block our innate capacity for skills like creativity and empathy...

...and the aftermath of George Floyd's murder helped me to see that the problem-to-solve was much bigger and more pervasive, that I'd been looking at it through a privileged lens.

So I decided to take a leap of faith and share with the leaders at my consulting firm:

• Who I *really* am, how afraid I've been to be myself––and how painful "the mold" must be for my colleagues who check even fewer boxes than me.

• That research says how we define who "fits" and who "doesn't" in a social group creates an empathy bias that reinforces systemic racism.

• How fear and judgment limit the social and emotional skills necessary to thrive in the most diverse, dispersed workforce in human history.

• How we meet art (defined broadly as the output of creative self-expression) with curiosity, suspending our fear and judgment to step into another human’s experience, how scientists have studied how it impacts our emotions, intellect and changes how we think.

• How art offers us a pathway to humanize one another and reframe our social group ––and without it, we will continue to expect others to adjust to our version of reality and engage with stuff that reinforces our worldview. 

And they received it with an overwhelmingly positive response.
 

Next week, I'm launching The Better Human Project––a pathway that brings art and creativity programming into the workplace to foster true belonging.


I'm forgoing my full-time position and collaborating with my firm instead, and pivoting my career focus to helping others become their highest, best selves, and creating cultures where every human feels that they belong.

In this process, I've learned that our real job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some sort of ideal we think we ought to be, but find out who we are and become it.


I am simply focusing all of my attention on the work that my highest, best self was meant to do. In many ways, I've been it doing all along––but doing it in a bolder, more impactful way as "Colleen, Inc."––my highest, best self who shows up every day and does the work she's here for as a professional, instead of Colleen-In-A-Mold with an amateur side hobby.

In addition to collaborating with my firm and others, I am devoting two full days a week to my writing, creative pursuits and partnerships––and my blog and newsletter will continue as a shorter, more digestible version of what it's been for the past 6 months. I will include updates on The Better Human project along the way.
 

If you made it all the way here and are willing to spend another minute, please tell me one thing you're struggling with when it comes to charting your own course. 

Thank you so much for reading, and for growing with me as a writer, and more importantly, a human. 

Your Internet friend,

Colleen