🥀 Missing Ingredient, Part Two
Catch up on part one first:
🥀 Missing Ingredient, Part One
Where we left off . . .
This professional grief is more ephemeral than a single, whopping blow.1 It’s diffuse and hard to pin down and, therefore, hard to describe. With Doh as a container and your generous reading (and replying) here as witness, I have been conducting various autopsies on parts of my career and business that shifted under my feet these last few years: publishing, podcasting, and speaking, to name a few.
To be fair, I shuffled my feet by making choices too. I pruned. As my friend would say, my soul was already ready for whatever changes occurred, even if my mind (and identity) is still a bit jet-lagged.2
What happened? What worked? What didn’t? What do I need to do differently? What’s next?
I joke that I’m a flopologist now, but for what? What, exactly, flopped? It’s hard to say. By all measures, everything from the outside looking in seems hunky dory, if not downright privileged. #blessed
In the last post, I shared an excerpt from a pull-no-punches business book that offered a broader perspective, Necessary Endings, by clinical psychologist and leadership coach Dr. Henry Cloud.
He opens with the well-worn metaphor of pruning a rose bush so it can thrive that opened part one. Due to natural overgrowth, we must “remove whatever it is in our business and life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous,” despite our resistance to letting good things go.
In 2019, I stopped 1:1 coaching after a decade so I could free up time to work as an operator on my business, not just in it as a service provider. In early 2024, I paused my two podcasts and private community after nine years of running both. I thought that, for as much joy as they brought, pruning these would allow me to harness my focus and energy even more.
I have been pruning, haven’t I? Yet something must still be overgrown or in the way. There must still be a “necessary ending” I am not facing, otherwise I would have regained momentum by now.
New roses would be blooming, wouldn’t they? Or are they already, unbeknownst to me?
I started Cloud’s book in the early morning with my coffee: a chapter on normalizing necessary endings, followed by one on distinguishing between unhelpful hoping versus informed optimism. Later, on the subway, I gobbled up chapters on creating urgency and tackling resistance.
And then—as I sat in a torn leather chair in the gym’s seating area, delaying my workout because I couldn’t pry myself away from the book, I encountered a section that offered at least half a coda to my current state: