Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
If you are just finding this episode, welcome. This is part two of a four part series on self leadership. And I’d really encourage you to go back and start with the previous episode. But hey, either way, let me catch you up in about 30 seconds. On the previous episode, I talked about what it feels like when the ground moves underneath you. Now that’s my metaphor for the job market getting strange and hard. Good, skilled, experienced people are getting screened out by technology that they can’t see and can’t control. And I made the case that when the circumstances that you can’t control stop responding to you, the one thing that you can control is how you respond.
Bernie Borges [00:00:48]:
And that’s self leadership. And I left you with three questions that tend to surface when life forces a pause on you whether you ask for it or not. And those questions are what fulfills me right now. What are my values right now at this point in my life? And how aligned is my actual life with those values? Now, I made you a promise in that first episode. I said that this series would not be a pep talk and it would not be some five step hack to beat the algorithm. I said I wanted to do something more useful than that, more meaningful. So I want to hold myself to that today. And I hope that you’ll agree because this is the episode where it starts to get real.
Bernie Borges [00:01:41]:
So at the end of the previous episode, I told you that the next thing that I wanted to talk about is something that I see almost every everyone do without even realizing that they’re doing it. And that is leaning the entire weight of their life on one single support. So let’s get into why that is the real risk underneath all of this. Whether your work got taken from you or you still have it, but something just feels off. I’m Bernie Borges, CEO of Fulfilled at Work Academy, and I’m glad you’re here. Let me start with a picture. Imagine a roof that’s held up by a single column. Just one column right in the middle.
Bernie Borges [00:02:36]:
On a calm day, it looks completely fine. It holds. You’d walk underneath it without a second thought. But you and I both know that the roof is just one bad weather day away from coming down. Because there’s nothing else that’s holding it up. Everything is riding on that one column. For a lot of us, that one column is our work. Now I want to be careful here because this is the part that can sound like a tired cliche.
Bernie Borges [00:03:10]:
And you know it. You know this cliche. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve heard that your whole life. But I’m not talking about a saying on a poster or a cliche. I’m talking about the actual structure of your life and where the weight of it is sitting right now. Here’s what I mean. For a lot of high functioning people, almost everything routes through, through work.
Bernie Borges [00:03:39]:
Your identity routes through it. Your sense of being competent and valuable routes through it. Sometimes even a big chunk of your social life routes through it. Your daily structure, your purpose. The answer that you give when someone says, hey, what do you do? Even a lot of your self worth is connected to your work. And when you think of it in the context of this metaphor, it’s all running through that one column. Your work. So when work takes a hit, it’s not just a setback in one area of your life, it’s a hit to the whole structure and all at once.
Bernie Borges [00:04:24]:
And that’s why losing a job, or even just quietly dreading the one that you have can feel so hard, so out of proportion. It’s not that you’re fragile, it’s that you built a big part of your life, and for some, their entire life on one support. And that one support was carrying everything. So if work is one support, that implies that there are others, right? So what are the others? Let me keep this plain because this isn’t a framework that I just, I want to, I want you to memorize. It’s the honest list of where a life actually stands. There’s your health, both physical and mental. That’s the basic engine of everything. There’s your physical vitality, your body, your energy, your fitness, whatever you want to call it.
Bernie Borges [00:05:20]:
There are your relationships, the actual people, people in your life. And of course there’s your career and your work. So yes, that’s absolutely one of them. And it counts. I’m not here to tell you that work doesn’t matter. And then there’s the big quiet one, your sense of meaning. I’m talking about your legacy. The answer to the question, what impact am I having? Now here’s the thing about these five life pillars.
Bernie Borges [00:05:49]:
They’re load bearing. Every one of them can carry real weight in your life if you let it. And the more of them that are actually carrying weight, the steadier you are when any single one of them gets hit. Now look, that’s not inspiration, that’s real structure. And we can turn to physics for evidence of this. The fewer supports that you’ve built, the more every single thing in your life is riding on the ones holding up your structure. Your life. So when I asked you in the previous episode, how aligned is your life with your values, this is what I was pointing at.
Bernie Borges [00:06:34]:
I wasn’t asking you to feel something. I was asking you to look at your own structure and tell me the truth about where the weight is sitting. Now I’m going to say the uncomfortable part out loud, and I want to say it with love, because I’ve lived this myself. The very thing that made you good at your career is often the exact thing that quietly starved everything else. Think about it. You focused. You poured yourself into work. You were the reliable one, the one who delivered, the one who people could count on.
Bernie Borges [00:07:15]:
And that focus built something real. I’m not going to take that away from you. But focus has a cost. And the cost is almost always the other supports. The workouts that slowly stopped, the friendships that went quiet because you were slammed. The thing that you used to love doing that you honestly can’t remember the last time that you did it. You didn’t decide to let those go. They just got crowded out one busy week at a time until your whole life was standing on one column, and you never noticed that it even happened.
Bernie Borges [00:07:54]:
Now, I believe that there are two very different people listening to me say this right now. One of you lost your job, and you are feeling in real time just how much was resting on it. The other one of you still has the job. On paper, everything looks fine. In fact, from the outside, you look fine. But inside, something feels off, and you can’t quite explain it. If someone asks you, you know, there’s a term going around for that second one. I’ve said it before.
Bernie Borges [00:08:28]:
It’s the idea of looking completely functional on the outside while you’re quietly cracking on the inside. It’s known as job hugging. It’s also known as quiet quitting. But here’s what I want both of you to hear. You’re a lot closer to the same thing than you think. You both built your life on one support. One of you had it knocked out from underneath you. The other one is still standing on it.
Bernie Borges [00:08:57]:
But it may be the only thing you’re standing on. And some part of you already knows that. Okay, this is the moment where I’ve got to make good on my promise to you. Because the easy, cheap version of this message is right here. Here it is. Here’s the cheap version. Go pick up a hobby. Call an old friend.
Bernie Borges [00:09:19]:
Go to the gym. You’ll feel better. That’s the pep talk version. But you deserve better than a pep talk. So here’s the real version. Building the other supports under your life is not a feel good thing that you get to do after your career situation is finally resolved. It’s not a reward for later. It’s the thing that steadies you right now, today, in the middle of the messy instability, while the market out there does whatever it’s going to do.
Bernie Borges [00:09:54]:
And here’s the part that actually matters for someone who feels powerless right now, the job market is not in your control. You know that. We’ve covered that hard on the last episode. You can’t make them call you back. But which supports do you build under your own life that’s completely in your control today, without anyone’s permission and without a single callback. That’s not motivation, that’s leverage. When you can’t move the thing that’s crushing you, you build more things to hold you up. That’s a real move.
Bernie Borges [00:10:34]:
That is self leadership applied to the actual structure of your life. And that’s what I really mean when I use the word fulfillment. I know I’ve heard from a lot of people that that word fulfillment can sound soft, even fuzzy, like something you’d go find in a retreat or something like that. But it’s not. Fulfillment is just whether the weight of your life is spread across enough of the right supports, the ones that match what you actually value. That’s it. And unlike the job market, it’s something you can look at honestly, you can measure it, and you can start to change today. So I’m going to leave you with this.
Bernie Borges [00:11:21]:
A life that’s balanced on one support isn’t strong. It’s just upright. Upright until the day that it isn’t. And the real work in front of you isn’t sitting around waiting for that one support to feel secure again because you can’t control the timing of that. The real work is building enough supports under yourself that no single bad day can ever take the whole thing down again. So let me repeat, this is self leadership and it’s real. And it may be just what you need. Next time on episode three of four of this series, I want to talk about the part of this that surprises people the most.
Bernie Borges [00:12:10]:
Because you might be assuming everything I said today only applies to people whose careers are in trouble. And it doesn’t. Some of the emptiest people that I’ve ever met are people whose careers are going great, at least on the outside. These are people who climbed all the way to the top of that one support they built. They looked around and said, wait, is this it. That conversation is next. And like I promised you in the previous episode, at the end of this four part series I’m going to hand you a free tool, the I built. It’s called the 90 Day Self Leadership Blueprint and it takes everything we’re working through together and turns it into an actual plan that you can follow.
Bernie Borges [00:12:59]:
I’ll give you exactly where to get it in the final episode, so for now just stay with me. We’re building towards something real here. If this landed for you, the best thing you can do is share it with someone you know who needs to hear it. You can connect with me on the socials or subscribe to my weekly newsletter where I unpack this stuff and share each episode as it comes out every week. The link is in the show notes. I’m Bernie Borges, your fulfillment architect. I’m glad you’re here and I’ll catch you on the next episode.
