Success and Satisfaction: A Tall Order

At some point early last year, or maybe even before then, a little bubble of discontent began forming inside my mind.  I didn’t quite know what to do with it and I certainly didn’t know where it came from.  Life was good. Family was good.  Friends were good.  Job (and possibly career) was good.  Everything was really good.  So, what was the source of this discontent?

My old company had an exercise that involved measuring your own level of “Personal Engagement”.   My personal engagement, it seems, looked good on paper – I was heavily involved in the organization; in general, I was happy in my day-to-day work; I was surrounded by great people.  But when my career counselor started asking me questions about the future, I started getting itchy.

How could my success (measured by the praises of my clients, the respect of my colleagues, my promotions, and stellar reviews) not result in a more concrete feeling of joy and satisfaction on my part?  How did I deal with the conflicted understanding that my success was leaving me unsatisfied?

At that point I realized that, for me, success alone is not enough.  I needed satisfaction.  My success had to be a means to the end of satisfaction.  I had to learn how to achieve both. 

And so, Tall Orders is born. 

I’ve spent the majority of my life reaching for someone else’s expectations in order to achieve both success and personal satisfaction.  I got straight A’s more often than not.  I did student council along with a plethora of other activities.  I prided myself on putting myself into my extracurricular activities 100%.  For a long time, that was enough.

Now, I’m on a mission to learn how to set my own expectations in order to achieve that same success and personal satisfaction. That’s a Tall Order.