During the first 6 months after my daughter was born I lost all drive/motivation to grow my agency or the other ideas I had been thinking about.
My goal was to use the Paternal Leave Policy I set for the agency, a full 12 weeks off.
Up until then, I had only completely ‘unplugged’ from the agency twice since I started the company 15 years ago. The first time was for my wedding and honeymoon (June 2016) and the second was for our Babymoon (August 2022).
Come to reminisce, I didn’t completely unplug on either of those trips. Sure, I had an OoO email responder BUT I also included an email address that I would check twice a day.
Why do I have such a hard time completely unplugging? That’s a topic for another day but a lot of the breadcrumbs are going to follow in this post.
Back to it.
I only ended up taking ~2 weeks off when my daughter was born. I ended up getting back to work, mainly due to a couple of good potential deals coming into the pipeline.
For the next few months, I worked, on average, 3-4 hours per day, and spent all of the other time bonding with my daughter and helping my partner as much as I could.
Everything was different but for the life of me I just didn’t know exactly what I wanted to focus on.
My drive to grow the agency wasn’t there.
I didn’t want to become a full-time stay at home dad.
The SaaS company I was thinking of diving into didn’t sound appealing.
I was stuck.
Was I sleep deprived? Yeah, absolutely, but it was something deeper.
It wasn’t a midlife crisis or an identity crisis, I refer to it as an Identity Paralysis.
I had no idea what to prioritize nor in what order to prioritize those things.
There was no easy solution to figuring it all out, during this period of time I was also doing a lot of deep personal work to uncover & process deep grief.
I cried more last year than I have in my entire life, combined. There was a lot of emotional baggage that I didn’t want to face but I did, and it sucked, but coming out the other end of it each time I felt a little lighter, more attuned to my true self.
Had I just stayed busy I wouldn’t have had the time and space to allow this stuff to come up.
I have always been very good at staying busy.
Speaking of busy, while I was ‘just’ working 3-4 hours per day, I had a lot of guilt around it. My inner critic kept lambasting me that I should be maximizing my time to earn as much money as I possibly could!
Why?
I asked myself that exact question and it’s such a simple but often the hardest question to answer.
The answers I conjured up were not very good. The answers were more focused on what other people thought and that I should always be trying to level-up.
In therapy they call this mindfulness or awareness. My inner critic had been running the show for a long time but in the years I’ve been working with my therapist, he would use those words, slowly but surely they started to imprint on me.
They sound so cliché, don’t they?
I would cringe when he used those words, picturing some snooty know-it-all sitting in a yoga pose while sipping some herbal tea, incense burning in the background next to a sound bath waiting to be tapped.
I don’t have that same image now but you get my drift, if not, maybe you should meditate on that.
Instead of just blindly following the guidance demands of my inner critic I started to question it. I know it serves a purpose but why was it constantly peppering me to get busy?
It was trying to keep me distracted/busy because it knew that if I wasn’t then this deep emotional baggage would finally have the space to show up.
My inner critic wasn’t trying to hurt me (the way it talks to me is really mean), it was trying to protect me.
I needed that time to allow the harrowing stuff to show up, process, and release.
It took most of 2023 for me to process it all and I don’t think I’m entirely done either.
That’s kind of the point, I’ll never be done with this type of deep work, that only happens when my ticket gets punched into the next plane of existence.
Doing this deep work last year allowed me to look at my life in a completely different way. Instead of just focusing on external metrics of success both professionally & personally, I really started to focus on what it would take for me to live a fulfilled life.
Slowly but surely things started to fall naturally into place and my motivation now is entirely based on enjoying the path that leads me to the destination professionally & personally.
I no longer put conditions on my happiness.
What do I mean by that?
I’ll have a post going over that in way more detail but here’s a quick example.
I believed once my company was doing 7 figures in revenue I would be happy, I would have ‘arrived’. I’d feel happy, accomplished, and successful.
Well, once I got there, I ‘arrived’ for a very brief moment of time. The numbers just got bigger, more people to employ, more clients, more taxes, more accountability, more responsibility.
Happiness is an inside job and I’ve been guilty of comparing my insides to everyone else’s perceived outsides.
If you find yourself in a type of way like an Identity Paralysis like I was regardless of the life situation you’re in, maybe it's a good thing.
It sure as heck won’t feel that way, trust me friend, hopefully you know by now that I have been there. Maybe something much bigger than you out there in the universe/void is giving you the time and space to let some uncomfortable stuff come up and be seen, processed, and released.
My hope is you embrace it and not let the inner critic ‘help’ you get distracted with a shiny new opportunity.