Your next chapter lies in wait. You may not be there yet. You may not know what it is. But it’s in front of you somewhere. It could be retirement, selling your business, or some other life event. Perhaps you’re under pressure to get on with it. Or there is no impetus to create or find it.
I worked with a client, Thomas, who owned and ran a great specialty manufacturing business. As we began working together and unraveling his world, it became interesting very quickly.
He’d bought the business from his father several years prior and had been extremely successful. He’d at least quadrupled it, and that high growth rate looked solid into the future. He had a good business, a good family, and a good life. Plenty of wealth.
And he was tired, bored, restless, and called to something more.
He wasn’t in crisis. Nothing was urgent. He was just living with this nagging sense that he was ready to find his next chapter.
We began thinking about a five-year plan. It takes some time to get a business ready, get it to market, and close a sale. There’s the business side, and then there’s the “Thomas side”.
He dreaded the process. He had plenty of limiting beliefs, thought habits, and outer activity habits that were all squarely in his way.
Consider a person who is fully engaged in running a business or pursuing a career. Busy, running around with a three-page to-do list. Then, there’s this event. Retirement, business sale, whatever it is, and everything is different. Except it’s the same person with all that same internal wiring, simply stepping into a new set of external circumstances.
What would the other side be for him? Who and how would Thomas be?
