There is a strange jostling, like a mad race happening at the moment. The race to keep up. At work, its AI, new technology, the economy, changing expectations of leaders, new skills and new ways of working, business wanting more with less.
On ourselves it’s to keep learning. Keep adapting. Keep building your profile. Keep proving that you still have something valuable to contribute.
And underneath much of it, I think there is a quieter fear: What if I become irrelevant?
I spoke about this recently with B&T, particularly in relation to the marketing and media industry. It’s an industry that has always moved quickly, and AI has added another layer of uncertainty. But I don’t think this fear starts or stops at work. It trickles out into how we think we’re supposed to live.
Are you on the property ladder? Do you have the right home, in the right suburb? Are you partnered? Do you have children? Are they doing the right activities? What do you drive? Are you wearing the right things? Travelling to the right places? Eating at the places everyone else seems to know about? Even down to recycling correctly?
Are you looking young enough? Successful enough? Interesting enough? It’s incredibly easy to absorb all of this without realising it. You can start making decisions against an invisible measure of where you think you should be by now – professionally, financially, socially and personally.
Should I be learning more about AI? Should I be posting more on LinkedIn? Should I take that opportunity because I might not get another one? Should I have bought property (or second one) by now? Should I be earning more? Should my career look more impressive? Should I look younger to get what I think I need? Should I be further ahead? Should my life look different?
Some of these might be useful questions. But when they are driven by fear, they can create a strange way of living. And together, they can create an exhausting spiral of thought. You become so busy trying to remain relevant to the world around you, that you stop asking whether the life you’re building is actually relevant to you.
What if keeping up is pulling you away from yourself?
When there is so much pressure to keep up, it’s worth asking who – or what – you’re trying to keep up with. That’s the more useful question. Your employer? Your industry? The job market? Your peers? Your parents? Your friendship group? An algorithm? Someone ten years younger than you? Or an imaginary timeline you’ve carried around for years?
And what happens if, in trying to stay relevant to all of them, you become less connected to yourself? This is one of the reasons I return to values so often in my coaching work, and why they sit centrally in Recalibrate.
Your values give you a point of reference when everything around you is moving or feels unstable.
If connection is one of your values, for example, how much connection is present in your life? Are you having conversations where you’re fully there? Are you spending time with people you care about? Are you making career and life choices that create space for those relationships? Or are you rushing between meetings, checking your phone while someone is talking to you and telling yourself you’ll slow down once this busy period is over?
If freedom matters, where do you experience space and true choice in your life? If growth matters, does it always have to mean another promotion, a bigger salary or a more impressive title? If presence matters, does the way you’re living allow you to be present for others, and more importantly, for yourself? If family matters, does your calendar know that?
Your values aren’t another set of goals to achieve. They help you check whether the life you’re building still belongs to you.
How are you measuring success?
This is where the conversation about relevance becomes bigger than work. Because work is one component of a whole life. So are your health, relationships, family, friendships, finances, learning, rest, creativity, community, experiences and whatever else matters to you.
There is nothing wrong with ambition. I’m deeply ambitious. But ambition without conscious choice can quickly become acceleration for its own sake. I’ve seen this with clients many times.
One senior leader I worked with realised that while he was working incredibly hard to lead his team and succeed in a demanding environment, he’d gradually stopped leading his own life. Work was consuming so much of his energy that there was very little left for his health, family or himself. Part of his recalibration was coming back to his values and asking what success meant to him, rather than what success looked like from the outside.
That’s the ripple effect I care about.
A change in how you lead yourself doesn’t stay neatly contained at work. It changes how you make decisions, how you partner, parent, rest, spend your time and show up with the people around you. Another question worth asking is: Are you shaping your life and choices, or has the environment around you started shaping you?
You can’t control what’s changing, but you can choose how you respond
There is a psychological concept called locus of control. At its simplest, it describes the extent to which you believe you have influence over what happens in your life, rather than experiencing life as something that simply happens to you. You can’t control the economy. You can’t control what AI will be capable of in another twelve months. You can’t control restructures, other people’s decisions, the job market or every expectation placed upon you.
But that doesn’t mean you are powerless. Research using longitudinal Australian data has found a positive relationship between a stronger internal locus of control and life satisfaction and mental health.
This isn’t about pretending you control everything. You don’t. It’s about recognising the points of choice that are still available to you. What can I influence here? What choice is mine to make? What matters to me in this decision? How do I want to respond? That is self-leadership.
Ready and pressured are not the same thing
I had a conversation with a client recently who was trying to make an important decision. There was pressure to decide quickly. We talked it through and eventually arrived at a very simple idea: Why don’t you sleep on it?
Not metaphorically. Literally. Take another night. Wake up tomorrow and see what you think then. We use the phrase sleep on it so casually, yet we rarely give ourselves permission to do it when the stakes are high. We confuse speed with decisiveness. Feeling pressured to decide is not the same as feeling ready to decide.
In Recalibrate, I write about the Five Foundations of Wellbeing: sleep, breathing, hydration, movement and fuel. They sound basic because they are. Yet they can be some of the first things we neglect when work and life get busy. We search for another framework, more information or someone else’s opinion when sometimes you might need to eat something decent, drink some water, move your body, breathe – or go to bed.
Research into sleep and decision-making gives us another reason to take that seriously. Insufficient sleep can affect our judgement and decision-making, particularly when we’re dealing with uncertainty, risk and complexity. The sleep test deserves a comeback.
Not every email needs an immediate answer. Not every opportunity needs an immediate yes. Not every problem needs to be solved in the meeting where it appears. Not every career decision needs to be made because you’re frightened the world is moving without you. Sometimes leadership looks like saying: I’m going to think about this. And then giving yourself the conditions in which you can think.
Don’t race to December
September is an interesting point in the year. We’ve done enough of the year to be tired, but there is still enough ahead of us to think we should keep pushing. Then October arrives. Then November. And suddenly we’re all racing towards this imaginary finish line somewhere around the 20th of December.
People get ratty, I know I am feeling it right now too. Patience gets shorter. Calendars become ridiculous. Everything suddenly feels urgent. Our energy reserves are getting lower, yet instead of adjusting our pace, we push harder. Just get me to Christmas. But there are still more than three months of your life between now and then. Do you really want to spend them screaming towards the finish line? Or could you manage your way there? This might be the time to check your five foundations of wellbeing.
How are you sleeping? How are you breathing? Are you hydrated? Are you moving? How are you fuelling yourself?
And beyond those foundations, how are the other parts of your life travelling? Your relationships? Your energy? Your attention? Your enjoyment? Resist getting guilty and making up more should’s. Before you decide you need to be more disciplined, productive, motivated or resilient, ask whether you’re simply running low.
Experiment a little: Take back a point of choice
Sometime this week, notice one moment when you feel the urge to react quickly. It might be an email. An opportunity. A difficult conversation. A request. A work decision. A financial choice. Or simply another demand on your time.
Before you respond, stop and ask yourself:
1. What is creating the pressure here? Is there a genuine deadline, or do I just feel like I should respond quickly?
2. What matters to me? Choose one of your values and bring it into the decision.
3. What is within my control? Separate what belongs to you from everything you’re trying to predict, manage or control.
4. What would I choose if I wasn’t trying to keep up?
5. And if the decision can wait? Can I give it one sleep?
You don’t have to opt out of ambition, technology, progress or change. Quite the opposite. We need to be ready for what’s coming. But feeling ready is different to feeling pressured. You can learn about AI without becoming an expert overnight. You can develop new skills without treating everything you already know as obsolete. You can remain ambitious without sacrificing your health. You can move quickly when the moment calls for it, and slowly when something deserves more thought. You can evolve without abandoning yourself.
Staying relevant isn’t about keeping pace with everything around you. It’s knowing yourself well enough to decide what deserves your pace at all.
Keep recalibrating…
If this has given you something to think about, these are exactly the kinds of conversations I explore in Recalibrate: Align inner clarity with outer influence as a leader.
The book is designed to help you step out of the noise, reconnect with what matters to you and make small, conscious shifts in how you work, lead and live. It includes the five foundations of wellbeing, alongside practical experiments you can return to whenever you feel yourself getting pulled off course. If you haven’t read Recalibrate yet, you can purchase your copy here.
And if you have already read it, I have one small favour to ask: Could you take 60 seconds to leave an honest review? As a self-published author, reviews make a huge difference in helping new readers discover the book. I’ve loved hearing how people are already using Recalibrate. The pages they’ve returned to, the experiments they’ve tried and the conversations it has prompted.
If it’s been useful to you, I’d be incredibly grateful if you shared a few words about your experience here.
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