Are You Singing Karaoke On Your Own Biggest Hits?

Interpreting positive psychologist Barb Fredrickson: all positive emotion is the result of progress towards a goal.

The number one challenge for high-performing Entrepreneur Owner-Managers (EOMs) today is complexity. We inadvertently attracted and gathered necessary complexity as we became high achievers. We then matured successfully through our personal and professional lives where creative destruction was tirelessly at work. Traveling successfully from where we started to where we are today, old forms and paradigms destroyed and new forms being created, means we have been gathering the heavy baggage…the f r i c t i o n that comes from already having learned how to succeed in those old forms...which now, no longer exist.

But the talent, skill, energy, action—hell, the mindset—that allowed us to be successful in those old forms has now turned into a tangled plaque of behaviors, approaches—a mindset—that, while it may have worked for us well at some point, now, is no longer effective. Naturally, our old goals have become less meaningful now—we have achieved them. And yet we carry the complexity of those tangled plaques. It’s odd that some of us get on a road we cannot leave; how our synapses get into a groove or channel they are accustomed to firing, making our typical ruminations deeper and longer lasting than necessary. As if we have dug our own trenches, which we cannot find the way out of.

Is it professional boredom? Are we merely seeking novelty? If you are the entrepreneur singer-songwriter Sting and you get bored, I guess you can give up being a singer-songwriter and decide to be a Burger King Franchisee. That will give you novelty.

Instead, we can seek that freshness, that “beginners mind” in nuance instead of novelty—breaking the complexity challenge in a different way.  If you’re Sting, that approach takes you to middle eastern music (“Desert Rose”) collaborating with musicians like Cheb Mami who you never worked with before.  You might even evolve to traditionally sacred music where Sting adapted the first quatrain of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence for the first four sung lines of "Send Your Love” on the album Sacred Love. And still seeking variability and nuance, Sting wrote and scored the Broadway musical The Last Ship, which was initially inspired by his 1991 album The Soul Cages and his own childhood experiences, particularly his relationship with his father who had been an engineer in a family of shipwrights. New goals + new progress towards them = positive emotions.

How about you and me? How do we avoid becoming so brittle we are merely performing karaoke on our previous old hits over and over?

We all long for more positive emotion in our lives. If we have the guts to proactively discard the complexity we’ve dragged along with us from way back when it served us well—then we will break through to identify simple new goals we can strive for.