The executive leader called VIM Executive Coaching in the waning days of 2020 to explore a no obligation business coaching consultation. The executive, an engaging woman who felt stuck in her career, started our meeting with an all-too familiar refrain based on the all too familiar contradictions:
“It was my intention to make great headway on several projects this year, but nothing panned out. I’m thinking about giving up the fight and going back to my old profession.”
“You can always do that,” we considered. “But did you like your old profession?”
“I think I mostly disliked it. In fact, a lot of people told me that what I said I liked I may have not have really liked.”
“Then are you conflicted?”
“Maybe. I don’t know anymore.
The Victims of Intention
There is a conundrum that affects many executives and entrepreneurs. This group of executives and executive leaders occupy the peculiar, but all too familiar space between feeling insignificant or ineffective with the “new” job, but having a sense of doom that they cannot return to the profession or field that they left. They have become trapped as victims of intention. They intended to have a fabulous and fresh start in a different career with opportunity and intellectual curiosity only to find their situation had not fundamentally changed. Their grand intention reverted to bitter disappointment.
Please don’t feel as though it has happened to no one in the history of time before you, and that surely, no one after will ever feel as trapped as you may feel trapped right now. As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, this feeling of dashed intentions will surely happen again to someone else.
Victims of intention often fall into a brand of delusion. We certainly don’t say this to sound unkind. Delusion is basically a misunderstanding or misapprehension. It hardly means the person who changed careers or companies is suffering from bouts of madness, but it does mean that results fell far short of expectations.
The question those “victims” never ask in changing careers is not a matter “How could I have been so wrong?” rather, “Why did I not see the problems?”
When we fail to envision the problems that may befall us in a new career, it is often that our intentions did not align with reality. Of course, it is easy to blame a lack of due-diligence, but in this age where we pre-suppose that all of human knowledge is only a mouse-click away, the available information is often as faulty as not. In addition, and let’s face facts, we tend to click on propositions and information that favor our points of view.
We can often drown in research and opinion. Certainly, our intentions can be clouded with facts rather information we are able to gain from our inner journeys. We can become leading experts in our future careers and yet, our imagined expertise does not prepare us for reality. Perhaps it is because we have asked the wrong questions where we’re certain of getting the answers we expect rather than need.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness comes through our core and not from the external. The questions that come through mindfulness are the questions that only we can answer. The questions are not ethereal or pie-in-the-sky or in the parlance of some who reject meditation, “Hippy-dippy.”
The questions that come from within, are rock-solid real.
We cannot escape the questions we ask ourselves that come from mindfulness. A hundred friends, neighbors and business associates may want to tell us what our intentions should be, what we should be doing or where we should be going but unless it is internalized, but what have we gained for ourselves?
Though we may spend countless hours in due diligence, the intention to change must also reverberate with our values, our focus and from within the center of the center of our very breath. Mindfulness, when practiced, can answer those questions that only we know how to honestly answer.
Our executive will work it out because she has become motivated to work it out. VIM Executive Coaching is proud to help her, but we are even prouder that she is finally being authentic to herself.