Where Your Disconnect Is Coming From
Disconnect sneaks up on us. Everything will be fine and then one day… everything’s not. Of course, everything isn’t completely fine beforehand; there are little signs and warnings that we will pass off as “part of the process” or “a low week” without piecing them together as symptoms of a larger issue: feeling disconnected from what you’re doing. Like an iceberg we can slowly, millimetre by millimetre, become dislodged and start to drift away from our joy; and only notice when we’re completely surrounded by sea with no land in sight.
Let’s talk about those early warning signs. There is the feeling that you are far away from what you really want to be doing, and that every action you take seems to move you backwards not forwards. You see other people hitting goals and while you don’t want what they’ve got, you just want to have a win too – rather than this constant, reward-less slog. This is the kind of thing that can very easily be called “a part of the process”. This is work so it has to be hard! But there’s the kind of hard that challenges you, and the kind of hard that grinds you down – the latter is a sign that there is a disconnect between you, your work and your fulfilment.
Another sign is procrastinating and doing busy work. This one is a tricky customer because you can use it to prove to yourself that everything’s great: there can’t possibly be anything wrong if I’m doing all this stuff and focusing on renovating a sailboat whilst my business dream languishes. Busy work is a sign of a lack of focus while putting things off is a sign of a lack of motivation, and both of these together are a sign that there is a disconnect between what you have on your to do list and what you find joyful.
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, is a craving to feel more purposeful and grounded. It makes sense because, like the iceberg, you’ve become untethered from the landmass of your joy and your intuition knows it. But of course, as modern humans we zoom in on the symptom and want a quick way to fix that so we try to drop an anchor where we are and call that a job well done but we’re still disconnected from where we truly need and want to be.
These are the big ones, but disconnect can show up as just a small nag in your chest, a worry or a constant underlying dissatisfaction. It can be in a wandering eye where you start looking at what other people are doing, for “inspiration”, more regularly. It can be in a new goal you set that is out of character. Because when disconnect comes, we look for something to blame, and something to fix it.
For me, in a period where I was disconnected from what I really wanted manifested as a feeling of not doing enough. I felt that saturation of standing still in my business, the worry of being somehow left behind and the need to do something, anything, to feel like I was getting somewhere. I blamed myself, naturally, “Not enough energy or get up and go, look at all these people doing stuff, you’re standing still because you need to make things happen!”. And so I tried to make things happen. I rushed out offerings thinking I’d work it out before I went along, but ultimately wasn’t excited by them and didn’t sell them. I set big financial goals that I’d never been interested in before but convinced myself I was “stepping into my power” by aiming for these arbitrary numbers. I started saying yes to more things I didn’t want to do.
Those were the sticking plasters. Perhaps you recognise them too. It is so easy to convince yourself that they’re right because they aren’t inherently wrong: taking action! Growth! But ultimately they only add to the disconnect because these sticking plasters are, themselves, disconnected. They are a thing laid on top of a problem, not anchored in anything – least of all, your values.
As much as we might hate the idea of it, the only way to really reconnect is to go backwards – to stick out little oars and steer the iceberg back to the land mass and tether it there. While our impulse is to do more, grow, take action, we actually need to trace our steps back to where we feel most aligned: to get back into daily communion with our values and purpose and let them guide us, to stop ignoring those fears and work alongside them, to create a plan of activity based in what you truly want, not what you think you should want and to regularly check in and consciously choose every action you take. This is the map that will always guide you back.
We work through this map in The Trail – sign up to the wait list here to get notified of secret openings.
