In this week’s The Effortless Rich email, I included a photograph of myself from over ten years ago.
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When people on the outside saw me at that point in my life, they saw me as very successful.
And by society’s standards, I was.
But there was a hidden story underneath – as I’m sure there is for many people we currently think are ‘successful’.
Over the previous 20 years, I had been engaged four times. On each occasion, looking back – I was saying ‘Yes’ to marriage proposals from men I knew, somewhere deep down, weren’t right for me.
But this is not a salacious relationship story.
It’s a story about how intelligent people can know something isn’t right, yet still construct enough logic to persuade themselves to continue.
In fact, I spent a surprising amount of my life waiting for my real life to begin.
I didn’t think of it like that at the time, obviously.
I thought I was being sensible.
I would think: stay in this job for a few years, earn some more money, get some more experience, and then I’ll do something I really want to do.
I would put up with the manager who made going to work miserable because leaving without another senior role lined up would be irresponsible.
I would accept an income that didn’t allow me to live the way I wanted because I was earning a perfectly respectable salary and should probably be grateful.
I stayed in relationships long after I knew I wasn’t happy because, on paper, they made sense.
Clearly, on four occasions, they made enough sense to accept a ring.
I stayed in friendships where I didn’t really feel I could be myself, with people who weren’t loyal or who let me down quite unforgivably.
I tolerated behaviour that, looking back now, I can’t quite believe I tolerated.
And yet, if you’d asked me at the time whether I was settling for my life, I would probably have been quite offended.
Of course I wasn’t settling.
I was ambitious.
I was going places.
I had plans.
This was all just for now.
Until I could build the life I really wanted.
Eventually I would earn more money.
Eventually I would have more freedom.
Eventually I would do work I loved.
Eventually I would have the relationship I really wanted.
Eventually I would live somewhere I loved.
Eventually I would have the kind of life where my choices were based on what I actually wanted, rather than what was sensible, affordable, expected or practical.
There was always an eventually.
And that’s the dangerous thing about eventually.
It makes almost anything tolerable today.
Because you’re not accepting it forever.
You’re just accepting it for now.
What I hadn’t realised was that the years I was calling “for now” were my life too.
In the photograph I shared with this week’s email, I’m wearing an orange dress and black jacket – all very proper and corporate, smiling at the camera.
You would never look at that photograph and think:
There’s a woman tolerating an awful lot of things that make her unhappy.
But I was.
The thing is that dissatisfaction doesn’t always look like dissatisfaction.
I was definitely not crying into my pillow every night.
I was not waking up every morning thinking my life was awful.
There were lovely dinners. Holidays. Laughter. Career successes. Nice clothes. Good friends. People I loved. Days when I felt happy.
But I still knew that there were entire areas of my life that weren’t what I wanted.
I think that’s why we can stay in these situations for so long.
A life doesn’t have to be terrible for it not to be the life you want.
In some ways, I think “fine” is harder to leave than awful.
Awful eventually makes the decision for you.
“Fine” can last for years.
Especially when you’re good at explaining it to yourself.
Everyone has difficult bosses.
No relationship is perfect.
You can’t expect too much from friends.
I’m earning good money.
I have responsibilities.
It would be ridiculous to throw all this away.
Maybe I should just be grateful.
All perfectly reasonable.
All completely logical.
Except logic is only useful when the premise it’s built upon is true.
And quite a lot of mine wasn’t.
My mind had created rules – without me even knowing it – about what was sensible, what was responsible, what I should tolerate, what I could earn, what I could expect from people and how much of what I really wanted I was allowed to ask from life.
I didn’t experience those things as beliefs.
I experienced them as facts.
That’s the distinction that fascinates me now.
It’s also why I eventually coined the term False Logic®.
False Logic is not a ‘limiting belief’
It’s not irrational thinking.
Often, it’s incredibly rational.
It’s the perfectly logical conclusion you’ve reached from a premise that was never actually true.
And once you’ve mistaken that conclusion for reality, you organise your life around it.
I did.
For years.
I don’t say that with regret, because those years also gave me my children, my career, extraordinary experiences and much of the person I am today.
And I certainly haven’t reached some enlightened state where I never tolerate the wrong thing.
I still catch myself doing it sometimes.
The difference is that now I’m much more interested in the sentence that comes after:
“I can’t because…”
Or:
“I have to because…”
Or:
“I should because…”
Because what follows is very often not a fact.
It’s an argument my mind has constructed for why the familiar is safer than the unknown.
Sometimes that argument is right.
Sometimes staying in an arrangement is sensible in the short term.
Sometimes waiting, really is the intelligent thing to do.
But sometimes we’re so busy preparing for the life we’re going to live eventually that we miss something rather obvious:
This bit counts too.
The years in the job you don’t want count.
The years in the relationship you know isn’t right count.
The years accepting less money than you want count.
The years spent around people who make you feel worse rather than better count.
They aren’t the waiting room before your life begins.
They are your life.
And I think that’s what I wish I’d understood sooner.
I could have saved years of ‘settling’ for things that really weren’t right for me.
Because “for now” has a peculiar habit of becoming five years.
And five years has a peculiar habit of becoming ten.
So perhaps there is something in your own life today that you’ve put in the eventually pile.
Something you know isn’t quite right.
Something you want to change.
Something you’ve been tolerating while telling yourself that it’s only temporary.
The thing is – the longer we tolerate things we know deep down we don’t want, the less of our life we will have to enjoy the things we do want. Because this isn’t an infinite number of years that we’re given here.
So question the logic that says you can’t do what you really want to do.
Because your real life isn’t coming later.
You’re already in it.
And realising that can change everything.
Expect Extraordinary.
Guinevere