#102 Stuck in a Pretty Good Life: Why You Feel Restless When Nothing Is Wrong
Career, pretty good. Business, pretty good. Relationship, okay. Kids, if you have them, healthy. Bills paid. And a deep yearning for more, with guilt on top, because you should be grateful for everything you have.
You are adulting quite well. You took responsibility for what matters in life and now everything is in place. So why the restlessness? Why the unease?
I made a full video on this. Watch it here, or keep reading for the short version.
You are, unfortunately, very normal
Two engines drive true personal change. Pain pushes you. Possibility lives in your dreams and pulls you towards change. When you have a pretty good life, both engines are switched off. Nothing hurts, so the pain engine stops. The life you know you could be living has been postponed for very good reasons, so you stopped filling the dream tank.
I hear this often with clients. This is silly, there is nothing really wrong, I should be happy. So I ask what they would rather be doing, and they go blank. There is no dream, so there is no fuel. And without either engine running, it is easy to start believing the problem is you.
The cruise control problem
Somewhere in the last few years your life switched to cruise control. Cruise control holds the speed and stays in the lane. It has no concern for where you are going. That is how a life on cruise control can take you past your most important turn-offs without you noticing.
You can be moving every single day and still feel stuck, because you are no longer moving away from something or towards something. And the cost is hidden, because we do not pay by the week. We pay in years.
So finish this sentence. This season of my life is about. Can you finish it with clarity? When you cannot, your days and weeks go on cruise control.
When gratitude becomes a hiding place
The moment the restlessness shows up and you ask, is this it, gratitude arrives. I should be grateful. Look at my pretty good life. Gratitude is healthy, and I practise it myself. But we also use it as a hiding place, so we never have to face the question about what this season of life is for.
You can be thankful for the life you have and still need to steer it. Both at the same time. That restlessness is information. It is the part of you that has not switched to cruise control yet.
Say this out loud. I have a pretty good life and I am stuck. I have a pretty good life and I want more. Both halves are true. There is no minimum amount of suffering required before you are allowed to want more.
The RUT: routine, uncertainty and trance
Cruise control wears grooves into your weeks, and three are the most common. Routine: your weeks run on repeat, comfortable enough that you never rebel against it, you are just tired often. Uncertainty: you find it hard to choose a direction, and instead of acting you look for more information or more advice. Trance: other people's demands and emotions determine your day, and a whole month can go by without you being able to say what you did.
Usually one groove runs deeper than the others, and knowing which one matters, because it decides which way out will actually work for you.
One hour of steering
You cannot change your whole life with one video. So take one hour this week, with your hands on the wheel. Sit with a notebook and finish that sentence twenty or thirty times. Or have a coffee with your partner or a friend and ask them the same question. It will probably be awkward, slow and frustrating. Steering feels strange when you have not touched the wheel in a long time. Do it anyway. If an hour feels like too much, make it twenty minutes.
If you want to know which groove runs the deepest for you, take the RUT Diagnostic. It takes three minutes and tells you which way out will work.