How to get through a tough personal slump
When an all-consuming project moves off your plate and you’re faced with a sad chasm of emptiness inside
The general manager of a major sports racetrack in the United States and most of his staff spend the calendar year preparing for a handful of giant races. Hundreds of thousands of people fill the seats for one event.
At the racetrack, they pour everything into these weekends. It’s hard work and the punch list never seems to end. Deep planning creates a sense of build-up until the final hurrah of the day of the big race. Then there’s a phenomena that happens after each of these events end: The Monday after, everyone asks, “Well, now what?” and as the general manager will tell you, there’s a trough in motivation and productivity.
The racetrack is just one illustration of post-project rigor mortis that can be a difficult adjustment in any profession. If your mornings, noons, and nights were consumed by a project or a client for months and months and then it suddenly disappears, it can lead one into a serious identity-crisis and even depression.
Being caught in between projects or careers can haunt professionals. The fear of the unknown and visionlessness keeps many leaders tossing and turning at night.
One millionaire president of a prominent U.S. commercial real estate firm who shall remain anonymous, experienced this space when an enormous five-month investment project with a major client came to a successful close at the end of the year.
“When that ended, I looked around and asked myself, ‘What do I do now?’” he said. “It’s not that business is down. Business has never been better. That’s not the issue. The problem is more opaque. It’s internal.”
The 54-year-old shares four ways to work through these tough personal times and explains how he finds resilience. Visualize everything below in quotes.
4 ways to work through life’s tough seasons
- Realize you’re not alone. Other people have “crap”, too. Every single person I know, when we feel down, we isolate. When we feel inadequate or insecure, that’s when we need others most to speak truth into our lives.
- Talk with people you respect and trust. In our society today we don’t have community like we used to. We fabricate or numb the pain. We work harder. We buy stuff we don’t need and is really not meaningful. I try to surround myself with people who want to come alongside me and lock arms so we can help each other get through this journey together. We need friends we can be honest with and say “Here’s the good, bad, and the ugly.”
- Find another interpretation of the data. When we look at our lives and assess what’s going on around us, we can interpret stories that aren’t always true. We need other people to tell us: “Here’s what you might want to consider with the way you’re interpreting this data… the story I see is different and I’m willing to walk through it with you.”
- Invest in some relationships, prune others. I tend to fill my plate with needless stuff. I need someone to ask: “Hey man, are you just trying to look good and accomplish all this stuff?” Who is challenging you to go deeper? In Bill Hybels’ book “Simplify”, he talks about pruning relationships. Over time, we develop more and more relationships and eventually, shallow ones begin to emerge. At some point there are seasons when you’ll have to prune in order to have fruit. It seems counterintuitive sometimes to prune relationships — and this is not an excuse to be a jerk — but when it comes to investing in relationships, ask yourself: who is challenging me to go deeper?
Two mentors who have had a significant influence in my life have always said to me: “The best way to walk out of an inner downward spiral is to give away your life to somebody else.” Sometimes, when we focus on helping others work through problems in their lives, we tend to forget about our own.
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