Deep Exhale
When Failure Feels Like Relief
We checked our inbox this morning, and no one had signed up for our new program before the deadline. And we exhaled so deeply we almost cried. As an entrepreneur and career coach, we should probably feel devastated right now. We’re not. We’re relieved—and that relief is telling us something we need to hear.
Trying to build a thriving trauma-informed career coaching business for trauma survivors while working a rather large day job can be very tricky sometimes, especially during busy times in the day job. It requires a delicate balance of our limited capacity.
We all only have 100% capacity. The old adage of giving 110% is a lie. We have to be wise about how to divide the pie and prioritize the most important things. But, as a trauma survivor who lives with DID, the prioritization process can sometimes seem like advanced math or Congress trying to get a bill passed that includes funding needed for a pet project.
There are so many voices on the inside lobbying for system support for their special-interest project, which all seem worthy, but can lead to a very fat bill that is impossible to implement.
This is where we found ourselves this week. We’ve been working really hard to build a replacement income—the point at which our coaching practice makes leaving our day job a viable option — but we’re not there yet, and some parts are becoming impatient. We’ve launched multiple existing programs and created new ones, and we even launched a new podcast — we’ve done everything in our power to move this forward to the point where we can “retire” from our day job — to no avail.
Cue the day job: working as a Technology Delivery Lead on a very large project, responsible for 14 workstreams. That doesn’t sound like too much for one person, right? Well…we’re not one person, are we? We are a system that has some pretty impressive GSD (Get Stuff Done) parts. Even so, when we put a call into the system with an SOS and request All Hands On Deck, the challenge remains: we have multiple competing priorities both internally and externally.
Add in the complexity of critical deadlines, and it creates a sense of urgency that can be triggering to any system, but especially ours. We become overwhelmed. We are outside our Window of Tolerance, and our frontal cortex goes offline, making it impossible to think rationally, plan, or create a strategy to get things done on time.
We did not intentionally create a situation where we were over capacity, but that’s what happened. We thought we saw a lull at work…an opportunity to introduce a new program in our coaching business, but we did not recognize that it was the calm before the storm. There’s no way we could’ve known that we would be responsible for 14 workstreams. Surprise!!! And not a good one.
Without the ability to choose because our frontal cortex was offline, we were like a ship headed into the eye of the storm with no power to steer or get out of harm’s way. Hence, the deep sense of relief this morning when we woke up to zero enrollments.
Ahhhhhhh….deep exhale. Whew. Can you feel that?
This was not a failure; it was a blessing. Sometimes, our Higher Power (if you choose to believe in one) saves us from our own selves, which is what happened for us. But sometimes, we find ourselves grossly overcommitted for a good reason, and we need to figure out how to back out of those commitments gracefully. To do that, we need access to our frontal cortex, which means learning to regulate ourselves so we can return to our window of tolerance.
Digging oneself out of a self-inflicted hole is not easy. We know this because we have a lot of practice doing it…LOL. Overcommitting to work, becoming overwhelmed, and disappearing is something our former host was famous for. We are working to break that cycle, but even we can’t see everything that will hit us all at once.
So, here we sit, able to take a deep breath for the first time in weeks, and 100% grateful that we no longer have to deliver a coaching intensive for the next eight weeks. It is kind of humorous, however, thinking that being able to just focus on our 14 workstreams is a relief…LOL
One of the benefits of being a business owner is the ability to choose when it is the RIGHT time for US to launch a new program. For now, we are putting a pin in the launch to focus on our day job. There will be another opportunity in the future to launch it, or perhaps we will choose to do something different.
Zero enrollments wasn't our Higher Power telling us we aren't ready. It was our Higher Power telling us this wasn't the moment. There's a difference — and we're learning to tell them apart.