The Tiny Key To Fulfilment
In 2019, my Word of the Year was Fulfilment. That didn’t work out so well for me. I had set it with the expectation that that was all I needed to do; speak and it would be so. The Word, along with a Pinterest vision board, would be enough, and then something would happen and I would become fulfilled. It would be three more Januarys until I would be.
At the time I was setting that word of the year, I had been self-employed for a year and a half, and the business was really all I was. I was at the beginning of what would, in a few months, slide into full blown burnout. I was beginning to see the underbelly of self-employment: the limitless opportunity could become endless striving, the freedom to make my own hours meant I used all the hours, the “doing what you love for work” meant there was nothing else to just love. I was at the point of thinking, “is this it?”.
The “is this it?” stage can happen at any point in any part of life. Often it hits us hardest when we’ve put something on a pedestal, created a talisman out of a skill or situation that is going to change our lives. We work hard at building the business, or retraining, or renovating the house, and at the beginning it’s exciting because it’s really happening and we’re making progress and this is going to change everything – but then. Then we’re just, doing it, and our life hasn’t changed and we’ve got this whole new set of problems and although we’ve moved forward we still feel like we’re exactly where we always were. Is this it? Is this all that’s possible?
We want to think we know better than to seek a quick fix, but we don’t. When we are experiencing discomfort or disappointment we want a way to fast forward through it and end up in the happy ending. I channelled my year of fulfilment into buying a house, making that, instead of my work, the magic talisman that would make me happy. No wonder I wasn’t fulfilled, I didn’t have my own space, I couldn’t decorate, I didn’t have a garden. With a house I would be able to have all these creative hobbies and I would be able to feel more in flow with my work and really it was the only solution.
Spoiler alert: it was not the solution. I didn’t move into the house and turn into a different person. I didn’t move into the house and become a DIY queen and take up painting and have instantaneous work/life balance. I moved into the house and became overwhelmed and stuck, and realised that it was never living in rented that was actually the problem. There were many problems, it turned out, but the one that pertains to this is a lack of connection to, and acceptance of, my true self.
Three years later, I am not, by most measures, very successful. I do not own a house, I do not earn more money than covers my bills, I am single and I am childless, my business numbers are not growing, nor do I have a backlog of life-changing travel/work/life experiences. In traditional terms, and for some onlookers, I have not really got anything to show for my 30 years on earth. But I am happy.
The difference between then and now has been tiny, but key. Back then I focused on what I wanted to make me happy; now I focus on what does make me happy.
In 2019 I wanted to be a woman who owned a beautiful character home and pulled up vegetables from the garden in her linen apron, a woman who was partnered, who had started painting and wasn’t she good at it, a woman who was smart and successful in business, earning an impressive income without seeming to break a sweat, a woman who was so balanced. Being that woman was what would make me happy, and those were all the things that would make me fulfilled.
In 2022 I am a woman who loves to hike alone in the mountains, a woman who loves her friends, a woman who loves to write and so does that for her work as much as possible. I am a woman who reads because I like my thoughts better when I’m reading, a woman who makes herself a chamomile latte every night, a woman who won’t settle for someone. This is the woman who knows where her fulfilment lives, and so she lives there too.
The move from there to here was of a to-and-fro, a piece of flotsam on the tide moving in and out, never quite settling on the shore. It was not something I experienced as a capital-P Process and yet, looking back, there was a momentum beneath the waves pushing the to-and-fro ever forwards. I can see how there were stages and lessons and things that came together in a process toward a truer form of fulfilment.
First, there was reimagining. Reimagining the way the world worked, questioning the defaults, considering different possibilities. Unravelling the beliefs around what would constitute fulfilment and what it would take to get it, stepping out of the march of linear progression, bringing my mind and body back together. Letting go of the tick boxes and turning inward to see what else might be there.
Then there was redefining. Building on the reimagined reality to redefine my life within it. Creating specific visions about what I really wanted, not what I wanted to want. A long period of extreme radical prioritisation, cutting things out, bringing a few back in, whittling down commitments and responsibilities, redefining what was important and holding those things in the palm of my hand. There was redefining who I was, shedding the layers of all the versions of a self I’d wanted to be and all the things I could never be towards touching distance with the truest version.
Next there was reclaiming, drawing back all my power from all the places I’d left it. Becoming my own source of permission, and being the one that got to decide even if the decisions didn’t make sense to other people. Reclaiming my time and space so I could spend it on my newly defined priorities. Not letting the excuses and reasons not to do things become barriers to my path.
And then all that was left was to reignite, to live a fulfilled life above just survival. Getting to know my energy and how to best create and maintain it. Experiencing what I call The Ooze, and finding ways to revel in it more and more often. Keeping going, keeping committed, and continuing to choose my own world. It’s all small things, but they are huge.
This process I’ve described – Reimagine, Redefine, Reclaim and Reignite – forms the basis of Mapping, a programme for you to navigate to your truest, most fulfilled life. You can read more about Mapping here.
