Bernie Borges [00:00:00]:
If you are just finding this episode, welcome. This is part three of a four part series on self leadership. And I’d really encourage you to go back and listen to or watch the two previous episodes. But hey, no worries. Let me catch you up in about 30 seconds, give or take. In the first episode, I talked about what it feels like when the ground moves underneath you. Talking about 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.
Bernie Borges [00:00:39]:
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. And that’s self leadership. In the second episode, I asked you to look at the actual structure of your life. Now, I used the picture of a roof, a metaphor of a roof that’s being held up by a single column. And for a lot of us, that one column is our work. And I made the case that a life balanced on one support isn’t strong, it’s just upright until the day that it isn’t. And I told you that 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. Now, at the end of that last episode, I made you a promise.
Bernie Borges [00:01:38]:
I said that this one would surprise you. Because you might be assuming everything I’ve said so far only applies to people whose careers are are in trouble. But it doesn’t. Some of the emptiest people that I’ve ever coached are people whose careers are going great, at least on the outside. People who climbed all the way to the top of that one support they built. They looked around and quietly thought, wait, is this it? That conversation is today. And maybe that was more than 30 seconds. But now, now you’re caught up.
Bernie Borges [00:02:24]:
Hey, I’m Bernie Borges, CEO of Fulfilled at Work Academy, and I’m glad you’re here. Let me start with a different scenario than the one that I opened the first episode with. You got the thing, the promotion, the title that you’d been circling for years. Maybe a number in the bank that you once told yourself quietly would be the number that meant you’d finally made it. The recognition, the bigger role. Whatever your version of arriving was, you arrived. And here’s the strange part. The day that it actually happened, you felt almost nothing.
Bernie Borges [00:03:08]:
Okay, maybe a little flicker, maybe you went out for a nice dinner. And then by the next morning, or maybe Monday morning, you were already thinking about the next target. You waited your whole Life for the arrival. And the arrival never really came. Now, I know that there are people listening to this right now who are in the middle of a hard job search right now. And I can almost hear what you’re thinking. Be nice to have that problem, Bernie. And I hear you.
Bernie Borges [00:03:43]:
So stay with me for the next 10 minutes or so, because I’m about to show you that this is the same problem you’re facing. It’s just wearing a much nicer suit. This experience is so common that it has a label. And I want to be clear, that label didn’t come from me. No. A Harvard psychologist named Tal Ben Shahar coined the term the Arrival fallacy. And the arrival fallacy is the belief mostly that we never say out loud, that once we arrive, once we hit the goal, that title, that milestone, then we’ll finally feel happy, settled, complete. And then we arrive and the feeling just doesn’t show up.
Bernie Borges [00:04:39]:
Or maybe it shows up for about a weekend and then it’s gone. And we’re a little confused and even a little ashamed that it’s gone. Now, I want you to hear this carefully. It isn’t that you’re ungrateful. It isn’t that something is broken in you. It’s that you believed a story that almost every one of us was sold somewhere along the way. The story that fulfillment lives at the destination. And it doesn’t.
Bernie Borges [00:05:15]:
It never did. So what’s the natural response? When you get to the top, you feel empty. For a high achiever, it’s automatic. Well, maybe that goal just wasn’t big enough. So you set a bigger goal. A bigger title, a bigger number, a bigger win. And here’s the trap. The bigger goal does the exact same thing.
Bernie Borges [00:05:44]:
A brief spike, then. Then right back to where you started. Then the restless hunt for the next goal. Psychologists have a name for this. They call it the hedonic treadmill. You run and you run, and the scenery never changes because the problem was never the size of the goal. So let me say the thing that high achievers genuinely struggle to hear. You can’t out achieve this feeling.
Bernie Borges [00:06:18]:
And allow me to repeat that, because it matters, you cannot out achieve this feeling. Achieving is the one tool that you trust the most, the one that’s never let you down. And it’s the one tool that doesn’t work here. Now, here’s where it all ties back together. And this is the part that I really want you to get. Remember the roof that was held up by one column? Right. The person that I talked about in the first Two episodes. The one who lost her job had their column knocked out from underneath them.
Bernie Borges [00:06:55]:
The person that we’re talking about today did something that looks completely different, but it isn’t. They took that one column, their career, and they built it sky high, taller than almost anyone around them. Genuinely impressive from a distance, but it’s still just one column. They poured everything into height and they never built width or depth. So now they’re standing at the very top of a single support, higher than they’ve ever dreamed. And they look around and they realize there’s almost nothing else up there with them. The health that they neglected, the relationships that went quiet years ago while they were climbing. There’s just no real sense of meaning beyond the next quarter and the next goal, the next thing, whatever that is that is.
Bernie Borges [00:07:57]:
Why is this it? It’s hardest at the top. It’s not a different problem from the one this whole series is about. It’s actually the very same structural problem. One person’s single support got taken away. The other person built theirs all the way to the sky and discovered that height was never the thing that really makes a life stable. Breadth and depth is. They just arrived at the same place, but in a nicer car. People that are stuck in this spot tend to get some pretty useless advice.
Bernie Borges [00:08:37]:
Just be grateful. Look at everything you have and listen. Gratitude’s a good thing. I’m not against gratitude, but gratitude aimed at this particular feeling is like telling someone that’s balancing on one leg to be grateful that they have a leg. It misses the point entirely. The issue is never that you don’t appreciate what you built. The issue is that you built almost all of it on one pillar. And a life can’t stand on one pillar, no matter how high you stack it.
Bernie Borges [00:09:16]:
This is the same word that I gave you last week, alignment. Whether the weight of your life is actually spread across the things that you say that you value. And that’s where those three questions come back, the ones that I keep returning to over and over again. What fulfills me right now? What are my values right now? And how aligned is my actual life with those values? And here’s the good news that’s buried inside all of this. Alignment is something that you can actually look at. You can actually diagnose it. Just be happier is useless advice because you can’t act on that. But where is the weight of my life most prevalent right now? And is that where I actually want it? That that’s a question that you can answer and answer honestly, and then you can do something about it.
Bernie Borges [00:10:17]:
So here’s the thing that surprised me the most when I started doing this work with people. The person that’s knocked off the ladder and the person stuck at the empty top of it need the exact same next move. It’s actually identical. Before either one of you decides what to do next, before you fire off that next application or chase the next title or blow the whole thing up and start over, you stop and you take an honest inventory of where your life and where your values actually are right now. Not where you wish they were, where they actually are today. Because if you skip that step, the knockdown person just rebuilds the same single column and the empty person just goes chasing a taller one. It’s the same trap, just a fresh coat of paint. So let me leave you with this.
Bernie Borges [00:11:16]:
Today, empty at the top and knocked off the ladder are a lot closer than they look. Both of them are a life that quietly drifted away from what actually matters. One drifted through loss and one drifted through winning. But the drift is the same. And so is the way back on the next episode. It’s the last one in this series, and it’s the one that this whole thing has been building toward because everything I’ve laid out, the ground moving, the single support, the empty summit at all, points to one honest question. Okay, Bernie, so what do I actually do about it? Episode 4 in this series is where we answer that. We take this honest inventory and we turn it into a real concrete plan.
Bernie Borges [00:12:15]:
And that’s where I’m finally going to hand you the free tool that I’ve been promising you since episode one. It’s called the 90 Day Self Leadership Blueprint. And I’ll tell you exactly where to get it. So please, I don’t want you to miss that last episode. This is where it stops being a conversation and starts being a plan. If this landed for you, the best thing that you can do is share it with someone that you know who needs to hear it. Maybe that’s a friend who’s struggling to find work, or maybe it’s someone who seems to have everything and they can’t figure out why it’s not enough. Hey, 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.
Bernie Borges [00:13:07]:
The link is in the show notes. I’m Bernie Borges, your fulfillment architecture. I’m glad you’re here and I’ll catch you on the next episode.
