You’re hitting every target, and you can’t quite explain why it doesn’t feel like enough.
There’s a particular stillness at sea that sailors have always feared more than a storm: the flat calm. No wind, no waves, the surface looks almost perfect and yet nothing is moving. You may never have experienced it on the water, but you might recognise the feeling from somewhere closer to home.
You are delivering, meeting the deadlines, attending the meetings and hitting the numbers. From the outside, everything looks exactly as it should, but you know yourself that the feeling of purpose and connection just isn’t there anymore.
It’s not burnout and you’re not running on empty, everything is ticking over as it should, it’s just that something has changed: the sense that what you’re doing actually matters to you.
It’s a tricky experience to get your head around, because there’s nothing obvious to point to, no crisis, no failure, just a sense that something else used to exist.
If you’re in this place, it’s worth paying attention to when the flatness lifts during your working week, even briefly, and noticing what you were doing at the time. That pattern is rarely random.
More on the psychology behind this next week.
Photo credit Johannes Plenio Unsplash