So You're Successful, Now What?

Our brains are designed to continuously detect threat in a world full of larger, faster predators. As such, when activated, the limbic-alarm system feels real, urgent, and important to us - regardless of true threat level. During the time this alarm system was most functionally adaptive, instant action was life saving. Accordingly, taking the time to accurately process threat stimuli as opposed to instantly reacting, meant the difference between life and death.  

Having trained thousands of people for over two decades, I've found that additional features meant to keep us alive include an inflated sense of self-importance and a vastly distorted sense of individual significance. With this, problems are often personalized. In our minds, the self is almost always the main character, so we tend to distort narratives based on cognitive biases. Consider the billions of humans who have come and gone. Like us, they experienced physical symptoms of stress and anxiety that signaled the belief, “these problems are urgent, important, and need to be addressed immediately.” An elegant design during a nomadic, high-threat, high-risk, time for humankind. Adaptive when the average life-span was a third of what it is today. Not always a great fit for sheltered humans in the digital age.

But shouldn’t our brains have evolved for today’s environment?  How long have we been modern humans? Surprisingly, it's estimated that humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for 99% of our history on Earth. Needless to say, modern problems, or lack of life-threatening problems, are not what the emotional brain center is designed for.  In cognitive-behavioral leadership development, we often work on strategically addressing maladaptive mechanisms that were once adaptive. For example, the leader who presents as an aggressive know-it-all in the workplace, might have been reinforced for this style in a high-risk, high-conflict upbringing, AND this automatic style might currently interfere with impact and talent retention. Nevertheless, as opposed to "over-pathologizing" our more primitive anxious reactions, gratitude is in order. We should be thankful for our brains' warning systems. Afterall, though they might not be as essential as they once were, anxious and ruminative brain processes are doing their jobs. Moreover, those alarm system brain parts didn’t tell us to develop AI and stop walking all day, everyday.

For many successful entrepreneurs, daily stressors, funding strategies, staffing problems, and rumination about exit strategies were the decades-long focus of our hunter-gatherer problem-searching brain architecture. As such, even though we thought we didn't like it, there was purpose in evading catastrophe. In this context, revenue was often the ultimate representation of a job well done - shelter built, food captured, and the ability to live another day. For those who are fortunate enough to reach a “successful” finish line, it’s time to turn off the threat-detection system and sail into the sunset, right? Perhaps you believed that when you became truly career and financially independent, you would never need to figure anything else out again. The alarm architecture would no longer be active. You would feel ongoing contentment and happiness. But as Ray Dalio insightfully highlights in his stages of life chart, none of us are immune to existential angst, health issues, relationship changes, and ultimately death. Though the content changed, the alarm processes likely stayed. 

Now for the good news. If this blog title appealed to you, you're likely in a very fortunate and powerful position. You used your ancient brain architecture to form grit and make high ROI sacrifices. You elected to put hard work into meeting objective after objective, until finally, work became more of a choice than a necessity.  Within your career-life, the fight is over. Congratulations, you won. Maybe you spent a year traveling or bought your dream home on the beach. During these life stages people will also deal with loss, divorce, health issues, or family struggles of some kind. 

For many, work identity was so central to their being that they feel a bit lost without it. In any case, it is essential to reset and become intentional about your current actions and values. You've proven that with wisdom and grit you can create great things. With the right blueprint, you can use those same attributes to design the most rewarding chapter of your life. A Psystrong position is that with the understanding of core values, insight about individual biases, and values-based experimentation, an evidence-based path toward thriving is within reach.