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Staying or leaving? Young leaders between a rock and a hard place …

70% young leaders are trapped in dissatisfaction, lack of recognition and under-challenge.

Many young leaders are in the starting blocks of quitting their jobs to take a better one or create their own business. In their work they are trapped between old leadership mindsets and communication structures and the wish to create something new and meaningful.

On the one hand, dissatisfaction gnaws at them, on the other hand, they have already proven themselves in the existing job and have taken up a certain position. But they feel repeatedly pushed back in their place. The agonising question of staying or leaving weighs heavily on their commitment and creativity.

This article is meant to help them get clarity! Let’s look behind the scenes of indecision and view the problem from different perspectives. Surely it is not easy to make a decision in a somewhat comfortable and safe position!

Let’s have a closer a look at the matter.

Where does the heaviness of the choice for one or the other solution come from? Why do we often move in a paralysing cycle of either/or?

To get to the bottom of this question, we need to look at what are the aspects involved in making a decision. There are 3 interrelated points:

Point  1: Concept

Point 2: Psychology

Point 3: Hope

Point 1: ConCept

Our concept of decision making involves the assumption – paralysing to the highest degree – of inevitability. We – consciously or unconsciously – assume that a decision is something final, something that we cannot revise and that seals our fate once and for all. This view on decisionmaking carries too much weight and is extremely narrow. We only see a small section of the situation and blank out the bigger picture.

This gives the matter an outsized value and – logically – makes it more and more threatening. The burden of responsibility resulting from this logic is unbearable. The incalculable consequences paralyse us and we simply cannot decide.

“I’ll have to think about that carefully.” Sure, sometimes thinking things through helps us to decide well and quickly. Great! Very often, however, it makes everything more complicated. We make pro/con lists, aks with trusted people, but does that get us anywhere?

What is missing, where is the blind spot in this concept? I claim that it lies in psychology, in fear.

Point 2: PSYCHOLOGY

We have seen: the narrowness of our thoughts blocks easy, clear decisions. So it makes sense to look at the origin of this narrowness, why do we lose sight of the bigger picture in which a decision is only a small part?

This is where fear comes into play. It often comes along subconsciously but with great power! We are not talking about the natural fear that we would develop in the forest facing a real, huge brown bear.

Rather, we are confronted with a fear that is a cocktail of adopted beliefs, collective experiences of suffering and personal trauma. This fear makes us narrow. We fear the pain of this mixture and take refuge in the conceptual world of thought. Here we squeeze the fullness of life between Right and Wrong.

This reduced view gives us apparent security. Here, spontaneity, love, passion and creativity have little place. We keep ourselves and our lives small. This works for a some time until we can no longer suppress the consequences of this attitude. This moment may have come, for example, in the increasingly urgent question of “staying or leaving” in the job. We can and no longer want to suppress our dissatisfaction, the feeling of working far below our potential.

Instead of openly and freely exploring the possibilities, this question almost becomes a question of life and death. This is absolutely understandable in view of the fears described.

But here’s the thing: what blocks us even more than this is that deep down inside there is already a completed decision, we have already decided! But our conscious mind cannot access this decision, we are not aware of this decision.

While we struggle with heavy thoughts in sleepless nights, the decision is made while we resist it and find us in an eternal back and forth, this or that.

The good news is that we have many ways to clearly see the decision we have already made subconsciously. Often it is enough to read an article like this to know: right, I know what I have to do. Sometimes it takes a little more than that. 

There exists a wide range of possibilities in the field of mindfulness-based arts, design, movement, embodiment, which in most cases create clarity in less than 30 minutes!!!

point 3: hope

They say: hope dies last. This means that hope is strong! Yes, it gives us strength, energy, endurance, comfort, … . Why is that? In hope there lies the natural, invincible longing for love and fulfilment.

Hope is what makes us doubt whether we want to go through life at 50%, i.e. with the handbrake permanently on. Hope drives us to want more, to live to our full potential and to exuberantly give the world everything that lies dormant within us. Hope never settles for less. That is why hope pushes us to make a decision and never rests – fortunately!

So the struggle over the question of staying or leaving is in fact a sign of life. It is an indication that there is something inside of us that wants to enter the world, that wants to be lived. This can be realised in different ways in every place! In this respect, staying or leaving is not the question, both are possible! The question is rather: how can I bring my truthfulness into life? And: how do I prevent myself from living my full potential and what can I do to change this state?

In this time of massive disruption and challenge we are in the wonderful situation that there are highly effective new tools – with roots going back thousands of years – that help us to see what needs to be done – in less than 30 minutes. They help us bring our unique contribution to the world into being.

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