“What if this is as good as it gets?”

I work with awesome, high-performing individuals and teams, and yet I’ve lost count of the number of people who, underneath it all, are wrestling with this question.

👎🏻 They feel like they’ve peaked and their best days are behind them.

👎🏻 They’re feeling shackled by “golden handcuffs” – so well-paid with what they do now that they can’t imagine starting out on ground floor again.

👎🏻 They’ve done everything right and climbed the corporate ladder, only to find out it was leaning against the wrong wall.

There’s nothing worse than believing that this is “it”, and it’s all downhill from here. 

Hopeless, helpless, and stuck

There’s no chance of improvement.

Starting over seems impossible.

Staying stuck seems like the only option. But it’s not!

Yearning for more

Despite the doom-and-gloom overshadowing even the most down-hearted person, there’s always a yearning for more. A tiny glimmer of belief that maybe, just maybe, there’s a way out of this stuckness. A sense that change is possible – even if you’ve got absolutely no idea how to go about it.

If you’re feeling that yearning for more, listen to it. Sit down with the feeling, and pay attention to what it is nudging you to do.

At the deepest levels, you know exactly who you want to be, and what you want to be doing.

In my experience, once you start paying attention to your longings, hopes, and dreams, and taking small, consistent steps towards it, you WILL transform your life and work.

And you don’t have to change jobs, or blow up your life to start completely from scratch, to do it. As James Clear points out in his book, Atomic Habits [affiliate link] a daily 1% improvement results in a 37x change within a year.

Change your thinking

There’s a saying attributed to Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them”. While the evidence that he said this is shaky at best, it nonetheless bears out in daily life.

So, the first step to transforming your life and work is to shift your “What if…?” thinking from “my best days are behind me 😞” to “my best days are yet to come 😄”.

Kickstart your change

Use this three-step strengths-based process to kickstart your change from hopeless, helpless, and stuck to energised, engaged, and achieving:

💥 Figure out what you’re great at and love doing – the things that light you up and feel like the truest expression of you. I call these your Genius strengths.

💥 Identify 2-3 new ways to dial up these things in your daily life and work. Start experimenting.

💥 After 4-6 weeks, review your results. Keep what works, discard the rest, and go back to step 2 for another round.

You’ll be amazed at how small, consistent changes add up over time.

Track your experiments 

In my work as a coach and trainer, I know that one of the most effective ways to make powerful, lasting change is to write down not just what you’re working on, but also: