Getting Ahead

The feeling of getting ahead is addictive. Whether you are getting ahead to crush your to-do list or to make Forbes 40 under 40, most of us yearn for this feeling. I know I do. 

Since I didn’t write as much about the actual “Trap” in my first Newsletter, I thought I’d use today’s edition to share the story of experiencing The Young Professional Trap in my own life. By the end of this, my goal is for you to begin to recognize what it might look like for you AND to have some tools that help you respond and grow. 

Disclaimer: My story is about a transition in my family and having kids. This is far from the only scenario that applies, it could be a new job, a move to a new city, or all kinds of things big OR small that shake up your routines in life. That said, let’s dig in. 

In December of 2021, we welcomed our second son, Sam, and I completely underestimated how much his entrance into the world would rock me. 

At this stage I was seven years in to building The Grit Group, which had grown into a 7-Figure business with 10-12 employees. Up until this point, I’d always found a way to continue getting ahead at work with just one kid in the house, but this time something broke. 

I’d had the idea for the YPT for about five years by this point, but it was during this adjustment to becoming a family of four that I more fully grasped what the YPT really was. So let me explain.

The Young Professional Trap is NOT:

• Having too  high of a value for success and working hard for it

• Struggling with work-life balance

• Feeling the need to put in extra work at home so that you can beat your goals

These things play a role in the YPT, but they are absolutely NOT the real trap.

The real Young Professional Trap sounds more like:

• Resenting your work because it is keeping you from being a GREAT parent/friend/spouse

• Resenting your home responsibilities because they are inhibiting your work success

• And Ultimately, resenting yourself for feeling either or both of these, making it a vicious cycle to be stuck in

You see, the YPT is NOT about time management or having your priorities straight. It is about your identity and how deeply engrained success is related to how we view ourselves as people. 

Here is my current best try to turn this into a definition.

Translating that back to my story:

When our second kid was born, I experienced a work-life balance challenge, but underneath that was the bigger issue. Because I wasn’t able to get ahead with the amount of time I was working, I felt I was compromising my level of work success, and therefore, my identity was threatened. 

My identity has always been connected to being ahead, to being better, to being impressive. From the outside, my level of work success likely appeared perfectly acceptable to most, even to those who have high ambition. But as the phrase goes, perception is reality, and my perception was that it wasn’t good enough.

While this description of my identity may sound pretty bad, my life experience in getting to know people through family, school, work, church, and sports tells me that I’m far from alone. 

When it comes to connecting identity and success, I think most of us struggle for three reasons:

• We fail to recognize just how deep of an issue it is 

• We recognize it, but we are too afraid of the vulnerability required to address it 

• We recognize it, but we are too addicted to success and choose to ignore it

I have so much more to say about identity and self-worth, but for now, I want to focus on driving home this differentiation of work-life balance vs the YPT, and there are two frameworks at play here that I want to use to help:

• (1) The Pyramid of Results

• (2) Heart Level Change

The Pyramid of Results:

The Pyramid of Results is another version of an “iceberg” type visualization. For our purposes today, what I want to emphasize, is how this pyramid is at play in the personal examples I’ve shared about the YPT.

If I approached the challenges I faced when Sam was born from a work-life balance perspective, it could have been easy to focus on how to adapt my schedule in order to get the desired results that I was looking for. Wake up even earlier, go to bed even later, or give up something else to make time. 

Sadly, much of what compelled me to write this newsletter is the negative effects of stopping there. Depression, anxiety, marital conflict, frustrated parenting, and declined job performance to name a few of the biggies.

When we only focus on our actions (i.e. adapting our schedule) we fail to recognize just how powerful our underlying beliefs are, and the sheer volume of experiences we’ve had to engrain those beliefs. 

Take me for example - from age 8 to age 33 I was working under the same show up early, work late, work at home to get ahead mindset that started with me wanting to beat my neighborhood buddies in the YMCA basketball league. 

No amount of willpower or discipline to adapt your schedule can overcome beliefs that have been formed through 25 years of experience. Especially if you don’t even recognize the heart-level depth of the beliefs that are there. Which brings me to my second framework.

A concept that I’ve pulled from parenting books over the last couple of years is the idea of behavior modification vs heart-level change. Helping a toddler think about others’ feelings is insanely hard. But dare I say, helping a highly successful adult get in touch with their heart might be even harder.

Why? Because successful people have had a significant number of positive experiences and the correlated beliefs about how they became successful run DEEP. 

Since those beliefs run deep, you need to dig even deeper to make sure that you are figuring out what is going on in your heart, because if you want to make a change to your life that will stick, it has to originate from the heart.

Where To Go From Here

So, what should you do next?

My hope is that best case, you had an ah-ha moment putting some definition to a feeling you’ve experienced, or worst case, this sparked some curiosity to think about it more.

If you want to run some diagnostic on your life to determine how the trap is impacting you, here are a few questions I’d encourage you ask yourself:

• How would you feel about yourself if you failed to accomplish your goals?

  • What does this look like if your job/work doesn’t reach the success you desire?

  • What does this look like if your marriage/key relationships don't look the way you pictured them?

  • What does this look like if your kids don’t grow into the goals you have for them?

• What life experiences do I believe have formed my definition of success the most?

• Who in my life do I believe could help me wrestle with this more?

The good news is that step one is to recognize that you are in the trap. Whether you are feeling it acutely right now or whether you can sense it building, knowing that the trap exists is the first step to better.

So my encouragement to you is that if you are wrestling with this content and want to talk about it, then I’d love to hear from you. You can reply to this email and I’d love to set up a time to connect.

Thanks for being a part of the journey with me!

Alex