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Are you feeling lost, high achiever?

I heard about a CEO recently who retired from a long and successful career at a renowned UK public company.


Despondency and despair on retiring

Within months, he’d begun to experience feelings of despondency and despair, and he called his company's HR department for guidance. After a year, he had full-blown depression.



His plight is not uncommon among those who were once high achievers. 


According to an excellent post on LinkedIn by Steve Bartlett of ‘Diary of a CEO’ fame, people who complete a significant leg of their career, or, as he puts it, “close a professional chapter”, are likely to suffer from at least one of the following:


  • An identity/purpose crisis with up to 70% of executives experiencing a significant lack of meaning and direction after leaving long-term leadership positions.

  • Post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by 33% of entrepreneurs after the high-intensity work that gave them their sense of meaning.

  • Impostor Syndrome affecting up to 82% of high achievers.


Personal experience supports this

I have experienced two of these personally. 


I lost a job I loved, building and running a private client fund management operation in a medium-sized English law firm. While we’d grown well through the late 90s, we hadn’t reached critical mass by the 2000-3 market meltdown, when UK market indices fell 50%. Prospects of a return on the firm’s investment evaporated, with little hope of a near-term improvement. 


The operation was sold, and I was redundant. As we say in the City, there was blood on the streets, and little appetite for hiring.


Although I tried to put a brave face on it, I experienced a complete loss of purpose, and my hitherto latent feelings of impostor syndrome became very apparent. I was rudderless, and regarded myself as a failure, and while I wasn’t necessarily aware of it, I’d lost my zeal for life. 


Causes of despair

Bartlett explains the causes of high-achievers’ feelings as follows:

  • They feel, even if subconsciously, that their role defined them and that it was their life’s peak experience. It would be only downhill from here.

  • Their brains’ neural pathways had adapted to high-intensity activity. This can take at least 18 months to reset.

  • They now know what it took for them to reach that pinnacle. Had they known then what it would take, they might not have attempted it. But they do know now, and with their delusional bubble burst, they don’t want to go there any more.

  • Their role was an area of complete competence - their competence cage - within which they were powerful and respected, but outside of which, they feared they were not.

  • They perceived a purpose-drift - an existential void with no meaning.


I can relate to all of these, especially the experience of purpose-drift and rudderlessness. But perhaps not the neural pathways problem. My wife believes that, based on her knowledge of me, my neural pathways never adapted to any high-intensity activities.


What can you do?

If you find yourself in the slough of despond, feeling low after completing a prominent part of your career, what do you do?


It is definitely not about putting your feet up, according to Bartlett, but about engaging in eudaimonic activities - things that challenge you but which also contribute to a higher purpose. And to do so in a climate of productive discomfort, i.e. challenge without trauma, so that you pace yourself and maximise your contribution.


He recommends designing a life that balances:

  • Purpose - contributing to something much larger than yourself;

  • Challenge - taking you beyond your current level of competence;

  • Mastery - continuing to grow, progress, and learn;

  • Autonomy - maintaining personal choice over your actions;

  • Community - doing what you do with people you like and who are similar.


As Bartlett’s solutions imply, we must discover our own life’s meaning and purpose, and contribute to the greater good while taking care of ourselves.


First, why did your transition happen?

Perhaps the transition from your old role was a natural conclusion to a career phase. But what if your transition were unexpected? What if life stepped in and you experienced an unexpected, possibly cataclysmic dismantling of your old life?


Such events can be the consequence of something much deeper and seemingly beyond our control. What we call unforeseen circumstances may really be your higher Self stepping in and shaking your tree: “Wake up! Wake up! You’re not doing what you came here to do!”


In these cases, we have failed over a period of years to heed the prompts, hints, and whispers of our higher Self, which always encourages us to follow our heart’s desire rather than our head’s desire. Instead, we have designed our life around the demands of others or the need to be seen to have made it. We haven’t followed our calling using our gifts and talents in pursuit of it.


Your higher Self will have prompted you, but after years of your inattention, it has had to crank up the volume to force you to make some more appropriate choices.


Such dislocation is only seemingly beyond our control because we chose not to listen. Allow yourself to listen to and be guided by your higher Self, and your experience of life will change dramatically.


Personally

I’ve experienced four potentially cataclysmic moments in my life when Providence demanded a significant change in my arrangements. Each generated in me serious misgivings and blows to my confidence. Each necessitated a complete overhaul and reevaluation of my life view. 


However, each also brought me closer to living my life more authentically. That is, living my life with a greater sense of meaning and purpose. One that is increasingly aligned with who I want to be and what I want to do - spending my time doing what I love and making a real contribution while doing it. 


Counter your mind’s survival thinking

You may be nursing misgivings and resentments about your situation. If so, you are highly likely to be subject to your mind’s ‘poor-me’ survival thinking, which leads to the negative high-achievers reactions quoted above, and is all about you and how you compare in the world. Survival thinking  is contracting rather than expansive and tends to focus your attention on you and how you will fare. 


Discover your life’s meaning and purpose

Whether you’ve experienced cataclysm or have just come through what you consider to be your most significant role, you still have a purpose now for which your previous role may have just been the introduction. But you have to find your purpose and pursue it.


You also have gifts - even more after your previous role. These are meant for others. Your task now, as eudaimonia suggests, is to configure your life to pass on your considerable gifts and when you do, to experience joy, fulfilment, and inner peace.


How to overcome a career transition

In navigating a career transition, including retirement, I am assuming that you have time before needing to earn, which may not be the case. Even if time and your wallet are pressing, these activities will apply - you just have to be a little more strategic in applying them.


You may be feeling you are a failure, lost, directionless, with no purpose or plan, and with no particular place to go. If so, you are far better positioned than you think.


Now you are being required, if not forced, to ask and listen. Now is about listening, and the whole game is to discern, choose, and commit to your life’s real purpose, and enjoy the ride.


There are stages, as follows, and each affects the others ongoingly (that is, not continuously, but more often than not):

  1. Start working on your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being.

    1. Physically, tone-up. I found a regimen of Hatha Yoga and regular excursions in nature highly beneficial. If nature is unavailable to you locally, take care to walk not plugged into a device, each day. The opportunity to slow down and contemplate is key.

    2. Mentally, take care to find the time to listen to and run with some of your deepest thoughts. These are your guidance. I introduce a period of doing nothing except monitoring my thoughts into my morning routine - before the world gets going. At least twenty minutes each morning, sitting and doing nothing, except listening and noting insights. 

Also, I found, particularly if you are experiencing a void after a high-intensity role, a Mindfulness regimen to be exceptionally helpful.

  1. Spiritually, read any of the books listed on my posts. Start with those below. Reading books on spirituality will give you perspective on your life. But spiritually, Meditation will strengthen your physical, mental, and spiritual muscle. In particular, my participation in Ananda.org’s online meditation programme, enabled me to be:

  2. More grounded;

  3. More focused;

  4. More confident;

  5. More peaceful;

  6. Calmer;

  7. More accepting of my situation, and

  8. More accepting of myself and my own worth.


  1. With your well-being established and nurtured, it helps to take a stock check on your life. Get complete with your past and get clear on where you are in your life, and, if you do nothing to change it, derive your probable, almost certain future. That is, if you keep doing what you are doing, and nothing changes, what’s likely? Getting complete and clear on where you are in life will give you the foundation to make the necessary changes to embrace a new phase of your life.


  1. Create:

  2. Who you would like to be;

  3. A life you would love;

  4. A working purpose and vision for your life.


  1. Create a plan to live a life of contribution and get to your vision.


In my experience, my life’s pivot points, or transitions, though tough at the time, have proven to be major turning points in my life, opening up hitherto unappreciated directions and possibilities, while utilising skills, experiences, and contacts from earlier phases. Nothing has been wasted.


As Henry David Thoreau said: “When you advance confidently in the direction of your dreams, endeavour to live the life that you have imagined, you will meet with success unexpected in common hours.”



Recommended reading:



Christopher Jones-Warner

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