Transforming the Mid-career Crisis into Purpose, Meaning, and Joy

By Daryll Bryant and editor Lisa Morgan

Feeling less than motivated at work? The wear and tear of constantly running on the hamster wheel, fighting fires, attending back-to-back meetings, and dealing with an overflowing inbox can lead to feelings of overwhelm and lack of meaning. This can bleed into your homelife and infect your relationships. Taking a step back you may wonder, What am I doing with my life? How can I turn this around, reconnect with my purpose and values, and find joy at work?

OptimizeU Coach Daryll Bryant can relate. Listen to what Daryll said recently when interviewed about his experience with this crisis of meaning and how he dealt with it by shifting the focus off himself and onto helping others to flourish.

Daryll shared the following:

A little less than a decade ago I was VP of Manufacturing for Diageo Wine and Spirits. I was leading the organization through a $160 million dollar change initiative. It was an incredibly stressful business transformation project. A lot of changes were happening fast. We had to keep the current factory running without interruptions while we were building three new technology centers and getting production up to speed in the new facilities.

I was trying to balance constructing new buildings and running existing operations — while maintaining safety standards, meeting timelines and budgets, and making sure customers had products on the shelves.

I remember in the midst of this asking myself, Is this really all there is? As we finished up the project, a load was let off, but I also thought, Now what do I do?

Many leaders go through this. They’ve spent so much effort climbing to the top, almost like mountain climbers. They came, they saw, they conquered, but having reached their objective they still don’t feel fulfilled.

Oftentimes we think the solution is a new job or a new adventure. These can give us an initial feeling of motivation, but once the newness wears off, we’re right back to the same feeling, Is this really all there is?

For me, one day a light bulb went off. I thought to myself, Who can I help and support? It was time to look outside of myself. For my entire career it was what Daryll needed to be and feel successful. For the first time I started looking at leaders who were coming up through the organization with less experience and asked myself how I could support them.

Once I took the focus off myself and started to share insights with other leaders — things that I took for granted that I didn’t think were a big deal — they cherished what I shared. I could see how impactful my skills and experience were to them. This was more fulfilling and rewarding than any job, assignment, role, or opportunity.

I counseled managers who were overwhelmed, unmotivated and in a slump to find somebody they could help. That moment of sharing more of themselves as a coach or mentor for the good of somebody else, is so refreshing. Things that they have forgotten along their journey will be of immense value to someone just starting out.

Taking the focus off yourself can actually relieve a lot of stress and give you the bandwidth to do more. When you’re helping someone else, things that you currently perceive as roadblocks reveal themselves to be illusions. Instead of putting so much emphasis on problems and letting them become bigger and bigger, you shift your focus to helping someone. This enables you to look at things from a different perspective.

The Bottom Line

Whenever you’re feeling like you’ve hit a motivational wall, pause before making a drastic change. Instead, step back, and take the focus off yourself. Instead of asking “What can my job do for me?” ask yourself, “What can I do for someone else?”

To hear more, you can reach Daryll at https://optimizeu.com/who-we-are/
or dbryant@optimizeu.com
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/daryll-bryant