7 Assumptions That Have Gotten You This Far…But Are Now Holding You Back (part 1)
There’s one lesson from my time in business school that’s still seared into my memory.
We were talking about a hypothetical person who had just gotten promoted and was struggling in their new role. They were doing everything that made them successful before, and it just wasn’t working — in fact, it all seemed to be backfiring.
The takeaway from that lesson was this:
The traits and skills that bring you to one level actively hold you back from succeeding at the next level.
The things that made you a great individual contributor directly make you a terrible manager.
The things that made you a great manager directly make you a bad VP.
As you go from one phase to another, your strengths become your weaknesses.
Nothing has gone wrong when this happens. This is totally normal.
It’s just that different phases, different roles, different goals often demand not just different skillsets but totally opposite skillsets.
And what you need to do when that happens is not just “change and grow a bit” but reboot and rebuild all the assumptions from the ground-up.
So many of my clients are in this transition phase — whether they’re actively changing something in their lives, or they’re just looking around and noticing “hey, the way I normally do things doesn’t seem to be working anymore…”
And the more I talk to them, the more I notice common patterns in the assumptions that have gotten us all this far…and are now holding us back.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to dig in to seven of those assumptions. Here’s the first one.
Old Assumption 1: There’s a clear path that I’m supposed to follow.
Why this assumption has served you so far…
From childhood to early adulthood, there’s a pretty clear set of things “most people do.” Go to school. Go to college. Get a job. Get a couple promotions. Maybe go to grad school and then do the job/promotions thing again.
And this is not a bad path to follow! You’re young, you don’t really know what you’re doing or what’s out there in the world. Following the set path is not a bad way to figure out who you are, who you want to be, and what’s out there in the world.
…and why it’s holding you back now
But now you’re at the end of that prescribed path. You did all the Things You’re Supposed To Do. But now there are no more clear, singular Supposed To’s.
You built some skills. You have some qualifications. And now you can do whatever you want.
This is the first time you’ve faced a set of multiple good but mutually exclusive options.
Do you want to keep climbing the ladder where you are? Climb a different ladder? Find a chill job and focus on your hobbies? Quit and start your own business? Go part time at work and create streams of passive income?
All of those are totally fine.
If you look around, you can probably find peers doing every single one of those things.
The only catch is that you can’t do all of them at once. You have to choose.
You would think that freedom would be a good thing, but for most people the freedom at the end of the prescribed path is confusing and scary.
And that’s because you’re using to having one clear, obvious choice that you can feel totally certain about choosing.
And when you’re faced with set of all good but mutually exclusive options, your brain freaks out because it’s like: “Wait - why don’t I feel confident and certain about what I should do, like I’ve usually felt in the past?”
Now here’s what most people start doing, when they’re confused about their lack of certainty.
They start looking outside themselves for certainty.
They take career tests. They ask themselves what their passion is. They get lots of advice. Sometimes they even jump around between different things and can’t figure out why nothing is “clicking.”
None of which is bad, necessarily. Research and experimentation is great. But it can quickly turn into spinning and confusion when you’re waiting for something outside of you to magically make you feel certain.
Here’s the reality about being at the end of the prescribed path. When you can do anything you want, you have to create your own certainty.
There are no more singular, obviously good choices that jump out above everything else. A lot of your choices look pretty good, and so making a choice is really about…
Committing to solving one set of problems vs. another - because no choice is perfect
Creating your own certainty - in the thing you chose, and in your ability to make good choices
So if the old assumption was There’s a clear path that I’m supposed to follow, here’s the new one:
New Assumption 1: I decide what I want. I choose my tradeoffs. I create my own certainty.
And PS: the mental and emotional skillset for actually doing this is totally different than the one you needed on the Prescribed Path. So if you want some help figuring out how you actually put this in practice, come talk to me :)
Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
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