You're not failing…you're realigning.

Most of my clients don't arrive in crisis. They arrive in a subtler kind of angst — the feeling of not quite keeping up with a version of themselves they used to know and not yet seeing that the shifts in their lives may be calling for something different.

I recently had a coaching session where a very intelligent client at a top consulting firm had returned from maternity leave to find her role and the company had significantly changed in the year she was out.  She was struggling to find her place, worried that she wasn't producing what she used to (though her scope had changed), and like many people in these times, concerned about keeping her role.  Overall, she also felt she could be doing more.  She remembers a time where she was.

Rather than follow her deeper into the story, I slowed us down. I wanted to understand what she was actually working with.  I gently interrupted to clarify a few points I'd heard.

Whose standard was she actually measuring herself against? She paused. There had been no critical feedback from her firm…none. The verdict of underperformance was entirely her own.

I asked what else mattered to her right now? Her shoulders seemed to soften. Her children. Being present at home. And actually, she felt she was doing that better this time around.  

She also mentioned a passion project she'd quietly built during her maternity leave.  When she spoke of it, her excitement was palpable.  And there was a plan in her head for how she could grow it if she let herself focus on that.

I recognized that gripping feeling of not being enough that is alive in so many of my clients. I invited her to take a deep breath and focus on her body.  I asked what she noticed…

“I feel a disconnect.  Like my heart knows but my head doesn't want to go there.”

The worry she'd been feeling wasn't evidence of not keeping up. It was the friction of someone trying to move forward while still measuring herself against standards that no longer fit her life.

Her priorities, ambitions and desires have all shifted…it was a time for realignment.

And once we revealed this, then our real work started…

Sometimes the confusion, angst, or indecisiveness we feel around our careers isn't about performance at all. It's a signal. A quiet insistence from within that the definition of success we've been working from - one often shaped by others, by circumstances, by an earlier version of ourselves - no longer belongs to us. 

My client isn't failing. She is between a version of success that had served her and a new one still taking shape. That's not a gap to close - it’s an invitation to reconnect with yourself - passions, priorities, constraints - and to find the path that is aligned to the new reality that is coming alive for you.

What is shifting in your life that may be a clue that it's time to realign?