Why Your Turning Point Is Probably Not What You Think It Will Be
I had stage three cancer, two 9-hour surgeries, radiation therapy and several years of intense treatments. But that was not a turning point in my life. I'm a strong go-getter like you. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and the world applauds you for it.
The Long String of Little Things That Precedes Every Real Turning Point
Too often in our lives we sustain pain for too long, only because we can. We forget that if we start each day with absolute clarity on our life's higher purpose, and on the finite number of minutes we have left to live out that purpose, we can address any pain points around us in an offensive mode rather than playing defense when it's about to break us.
Here is what that string of little things actually looks like. It starts with complaints. One complaint about the boss. One joke about working weekends. One apologetic text to the group: "sorry guys, can't make it again, you know who isn't home tonight." Moments that call on you and your resources to become a hero for someone else's emergency. All these small events, strung together, start to form a pattern. And for many people, there comes a turning point where you finally get that ill, disgusted, sick feeling and you realize: this is the beginning of a long slow dying of what you would otherwise be, what you could be, what you should be.
How many times have you endured yet another toxic situation with a leader in your workplace, and responded simply by saying to a work buddy, "Thank God it's Friday! I need a drink or ten!"
It's a funny response and everyone's been there. But Monday will be here soon and the corrosive nature of your work leader's toxic attitude will continue to wear you down until no amount of TGIF drinking nights will relieve the anxiety you have about returning to work on Monday.
And yet, you might find that you just carry on with that cycle, despite the fact that your leader is clearly not the positive energy you need to achieve your long-term goals. In your mind you think "this is just a normal thing people deal with at work, and the way to handle it is to commiserate with peers and tell jokes when we're out at bars."
None of this is a joke. We joke-away too many things that end up literally wasting our lives.
Path A vs. Path B: The Fork in the Road That Defines Everything
What Path A Looks Like in Real Life
Employers who set up disordered "over-promise and under-staff" structures that leave you working 24-7 for decades are very literally putting your health at risk. Have you seen this happen around you? I've seen it happen and the way employees handle it truly determines the course of their lives. It becomes a key fork in the road, where Path A is for those who just sustain the pain, and where Path B is where employees use their clarity on their life's greater purpose to make critical, life-saving changes.
On Path A, I've seen workmates continually joke-away the fact that they have worked non-stop for 90 days, sitting at a desk, or sitting on airplanes, or sitting in meetings. To obfuscate how disordered the truth of that pattern is, it is masked as a sort of benevolent martyrdom to the business. But at some point, they can no longer joke it away. Severe weight gain, extreme diabetes, fragile mental-health, and lack of time to develop outside interests become too obvious to ignore. Eventually a "turning point" will occur, but it will happen to them, rather than them driving it. They'll be forced to take time off work, not to relax, or explore other interests, or take on fun health activities, but rather to sit in doctor's offices, or hospitals, to tend to all the medical treatments they eventually require.
What Path B Looks Like in Real Life
In contrast, instead of waiting around for a pain point to drag your life down to a screeching halt, you can be proactive, carefully selecting the people and environments in your life to ensure they align with your well-defined life purpose.
So at that same fork in the road, I have seen my peers proactively negotiate for their needs, and when necessary, leave their employer to re-choose employers or to launch their own independent consultancy.
As I'm in my fifties, I have the advantage of having empirical evidence of the outcomes of these two divergent paths. And from what I've seen over three decades, I know which path works. I have tried the 24-7 slave-to-work path but I'm happy to say I saw the dangers of that path early. Path B is for me. I work hard, but part of my work is furiously, energetically, stubbornly finding systems and solutions that make the work sustainable without sabotaging the other investments I must make in myself in order for me to feel good and in flow, expressing all the things I was put here on Earth to express.
Are You Duct-Taped to a Life That Was Someone Else's Idea?
Here is an image from the video that I keep coming back to. If you are living in your current job, your current relationships, your current patterns, using your minutes in a way that is not aligned with what you were put here to do — it is as if you are duct-taped across your mouth, across your eyes, with your hands behind your back. You have agency. You have the ability to choose what you are going to do today and make that a new pattern of what you work to accomplish before you die.
It is not funny to ignore that thing in the back of your head. It is not funny to ignore your gut and let that go on forever and ever. And yet that is exactly what most of us do — because we can, because we are strong, because the world rewards us for enduring.
The question worth asking is not whether you can endure the current situation. You clearly can. The question is: is enduring it moving you toward the life you were meant to live? Or is it consuming the minutes that were supposed to go there?
How KindEdge Turns Turning Points Into a Proactive Practice
I built the KindEdge steps as the detailed doable steps to make all these pieces come together, taking the highest level clarity of purpose, and working it down into the details of what you do in each day, week and year to ensure it stacks up to the story you want your life to tell when you reach the end. This is not woo-woo… we get this whole thing into a spreadsheet that gives you a visual of how all your life minutes stack up to success at living in whatever way you feel you were meant to.
The KindEdge core steps start with 18 key steps that get you through that process of defining the big picture and then getting it down to the nitty-gritty daily choices.
We also do the important step of building systems and processes to keep this thing running, and to have a clear visual that can be refined year-on-year as your life goals evolve.
And in parallel we do ongoing work on the KindEdge360 activities to ensure that while you drive toward your main goals, you are also optimizing the foundation of your daily life to ensure it runs smoothly and sustainably. This ensures that you don't "bonk" as the cyclists say, working hard in one endeavor while ignoring the needs to fuel your mind, body and soul on a daily basis. In KindEdge360 we gain easy skills for making sure it all works together so that every one area of your life buoys all the other goals. More energy, more clarity, more daily rhythms that make you feel in flow with the work and the play cycles… It all comes together in KindEdge.
My Turning Point Was a Puppy
My turning point was not with an employer, or in dealing with my cancer, or in seeing my house getting flooded. My turning point was seeing my innocent little puppy, Donovan, get treated as badly as I'd been treated over twenty years.
For me it was always, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But when I saw my brand new innocent puppy getting yelled at and yelled about to my face, a switch flipped. BOOM. DONE.
You can mess with my life. You can mess with my heart. But don't FK with my puppy.
And that, my loves, is a longer story for another time. But the lesson therein for you is, don't wait until you break. Don't wait until the injustice swells from an ongoing annoyance into an explosive event. Don't lean on the crutch that is martyrdom.
Martyrdom is murder of the gift that is your life.
Are You at a Turning Point? Here Is How to Launch Your Own — Today
Are you waiting around for some breaking point to knock you down and give you the excuse to make the big change you so desire? Are you so strong, so resilient and so professional that you keep patiently sustaining some sort of pain point week after week?
If you keep your eyes and ears open for the signs, you might begin to notice moments wherein common jokes are used to numb the true pain of a disordered situation. A woman might roll her eyes sarcastically as she apologizes to her PhD study group for having missed five of their last eight study sessions because her spouse never gets home on time to watch the kids. Turning this awful offense and total disregard for her life goals into a joke numbs the pain of the situation, but does not address the root cause of the pain.
Have you considered that you can decide to launch your own turning point today?
You could begin to turn the ship by:
- Reinvesting your strength in negotiating for you, enabling you to redesign your life to ensure your daily rhythms keep you on a sustainable path.
- Reinvesting your resilience in fighting the good fights that support the people, causes, and goals you care about most.
- Reinvesting your professionalism in leading by example, demonstrating to all with whom you work that you unabashedly invest as much in your own goals as you do in the goals of the company.
Your life is serious business. You have every right to make radical change today to ensure your daily life supports your long-term goals.
Join a community of people who aren't waiting for the dream they crave. We're taking stupid-easy daily actions that get things moving in real life: kindedge.com/subscribe
And if you're multi-tasking but want to carry on, just pop over to the latest video about your journey—The Project of You—to unlock the alternate ending to your life: youtube.com/@kindedge
