Mel,
Burnout can sneak up on you.
My first burnout I was in my 20s and forcing myself into overdrive. Laura was 8 months pregnant with our first child. She had just quit her job to be a full-time mom. I was working a new job, running a business on the side. Slugging down motivational tapes like espresso. I was getting an ulcer.
One night I came home from work and I was supposed to head out right after dinner and hustle some more.
I flopped down on the bed and gestured towards heaven. “I just can’t push myself any further. I surrender.”
I stayed home and took a nap.
The ulcer went away.
Fast-forward to six years after I started my current business. It had been slow at first, but a magic carpet ride ensued starting about 3 years in. Suddenly, for the very first time in my life, momentum had kicked in and I could sense some extra margin on the horizon.
I was entertaining a vague idea of a short sabbatical. Take a couple of months off, read some books, renew my energy and throw myself back into work?
My body and soul had different plans.
Literally at 10am one Thursday morning, a midlife crisis assaulted me like a sack of bricks and wet cement. I was speaking at a seminar two days later and the audience could feel my “off” energy. I got negative remarks in the feedback forms. For the next 6 months I was a mess.
In hindsight I can tell you that once my body had seen it was relatively safe, it decided to shut down for repairs. I was wildly off my game for a year.
This was the first time I developed any real sense of taking care of myself.
But I learned. Because of the work I needed to do to dig out, I realized the degree to which I had neglected my own sanity, my marriage, I became GOOD at self care. Certain things became non-negotiable. Like... not letting baggage pile up. Not shoving things under the rug.
A year and a half ago, I was working on some VERY exciting projects... burning the candle at both ends in a good way. Then a couple of people warned me about the tension between my vocational work and my life work.
They detected early warnings.
I paid close attention.
I downshifted in a major way. Changed the way I run my company and my life.
A major commitment suddenly shifted and I had even more space. I chose, very deliberately, to hold that space open. Nature abhors a vacuum, but I maintained the vacuum anyway.
Then Laura shifted into a new space of her own. I did not see that coming.
She had been working on stuff that had haunted her for YEARS. (Those who attended Intervention Seminar heard the Reader’s Digest version. At some point I’m going to share more of that with you.) She hit a major inflection point and decades of crap fell clean away.
We’ve been experiencing a renaissance in our relationship.
Two weeks ago, we went to Greenland together. Greenland might just be the most under-rated place on earth. 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle experiencing midnight sun, icebergs, tundra, the freshest air you’ve ever breathed, and a surprise solar eclipse in the air on the way home.
I got back from that trip last week and felt a new signal:
MOJO IS BACK.
I am feeling a new undercurrent of creativity.
Flowing from a surplus instead of a deficit.
Even before that, I’d been on a mighty creative streak this year. I’ve been mostly quiet about it though, because I haven’t felt ready to share.
But now I am.
The ancient Greeks had two words for time:
CHRONOS = clock time
KAIROS = divine moment in time
The window of opportunity when you release an arrow and it flies to its target.
This is a Kairos time right now. Just as we talk about thin places, this is a thin time.
In 2001, a month and a day after 9/11, the company I worked for got sold. They offered me a job and in the post-9/11 chaos, it was sooooo tempting. But one woman said to me, “Times of maximum uncertainty are times of maximum opportunity.”
I’d have a hard time naming a more uncertain time than right now.
And that’s the point:
Kairos.
Sense the signal to release .... and let the arrow fly.
Perry Marshall
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