I read the line “Ease creates. Urgency destroys” a couple of years ago from the book Time to Think by Nancy Kline.
I have since reflected on what it means to my practice as a Coach for Early- and mid-Career Professionals, and this is what I have found out.
Firstly, yes, ease crates. But ease is most difficult to achieve in early- and mid-career career.
In this stage – we grind!
To the next milestone …
To the next interesting idea …
To the next position …
With ambition and peak energy to boot? The world is our oyster!
But, left unchecked, this …
… grinding in continuous urgency …
… unpunctuated by ease …
… can soon bury us under the weight of our own ambition and responsibility!
Yet, although potentially damaging, typical, even necessary, is the sense of urgency during early- and mid-career.
Now what can early- and mid-career professionals do? How can we use both Urgency and Ease, such that they serve our career success but also our holistic thriving?
We can learn to hold dissonance.
To hold two seemingly opposing realities.
To create as many ‘This AND That’ situations as possible, rather than ‘This OR That’.
Urgency AND Ease. NOT necessarily Urgency OR Ease.
With time, we realise that almost always, there is an intersection between two seemingly competing realities. The key is knowing how to create, and thrive at this intersection.
The difficulty and discomfort of this dissonance is a common theme in my coaching practice. After grinding through career without conducting temperature checks, professionals are startled that their engines are overheating to a frustrating stop!
That is why through my coaching, I am continuously exploring and refining my BE MORE Framework for Early and Mid-career Professionals, where I partner with professionals through three key stages:
- Exploring,
- Aligning, and then
- Expanding.
The ‘Expanding’ phase is what encapsulates the BE MORE framework, with my now popular Wheel of Expansion.
As a result, professionals are able take one or several steps, even micro steps forward, from where they are, with what they have, towards what they value.
The goal is one: to gain, or to regain mobility, which is enough because: mobility is generative.
At its core, the BE MORE framework focuses on process, more than outcome. It reminds us that we don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step. Why?
Because:
The capacity, willpower, motivation; whatever we need to climb a whole staircase, is generated in taking the first step.
Be it one, two, or three steps, we work with what we can see from where we stand because often …
… what we need may be just a slightly higher ground.
With higher ground we have more perspective. More confidence. More resilience. Which compounds our capacity to BE MORE at that and at subsequent steps.
In that sense, this is the core questions behind the BE MORE framework: What can we do, where we are, with what we have, to take the first step towards what we value? And how do we learn to repeat that at the subsequent steps?
In other words:
How can we BE MORE in perpetuity?
And that is the thesis on which my coaching practice is founded.
Want to learn to BE MORE? Reach out today: www.linkedin.com/in/kimaroe
Until next time,
BE MORE – Expand. Move.
Coach EK.
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