Dan Nicholson is the CEO of Nth Degree CPAs and an author helping purpose-driven entrepreneurs achieve financial certainty.
“The Great Resignation.” “The Great Awakening.” “Quiet quitting.” “Lazy girl jobs.”
We’ve seen a lot of these terms over the past few years. Once thought of as trends or phases, new data from Qualtrics suggests they’re more than just buzzwords—they’re a reflection of the continued decline in employee satisfaction and growing burnout in the post-pandemic workplace.
The Qualtrics data was aggregated from thousands of 2022 employee engagement surveys. More specifically, they found that “The share of employees planning to stay with their current company for three or more years fell to 68%, five percentage points lower than in 2020.”
New Business Frameworks: Creating Certainty
I’d wager most of us have come close to, if not reached, burnout at some point in our careers. Many of the traditional business frameworks have told us that we should “burn the boats,” so to speak, and work tirelessly to reach our goals.
That mindset especially takes over at times like now, when a recession is looming, mass layoffs dominate headlines, and there’s a general sense of economic uncertainty. It’s easy to default to doing more at work to try to protect our job and create some certainty.
Certainty is what we are in pursuit of, after all. We all seek the certainty that we will realize our unique definition of winning at life without compromising to be someone else.
I’ve spent my career working with thousands of entrepreneurs and business owners who are all trying to create certainty in their lives. One thing I’ve learned is every action we take needs to get us closer to what matters to us individually. I treat this idea—something I refer to as “closer over more”—as a commandment of sorts.
Closer Over More: A Guide
I’ve written about the concept of “closer over more” before because it guides the way I think and operate both professionally and personally. The Qualtrics data got me thinking about how timely and relevant the concept really is.
Instead of focusing on more, I believe that we need to get clear on what we want. Not what someone else wants because, as entrepreneurs, leaders—heck, as humans—we are here to play our own game, not someone else’s. It also takes some soul-searching to truly figure out our game.
A few years back, I felt stuck. My accounting firm was growing, but personally, I felt like I kept losing momentum. I turned to my mentor, who told me to start with repetition. But the repetition of what? This is where I learned the essence of playing my game.
A good coach builds a game plan to set up their star athletes to succeed. In your business and personal life, you’re the coach and the star. Building a game plan that’s not aligned to maximize your strengths and minimize your weaknesses is just another way to beat yourself—and a surefire path to burnout.
Who are you? What’s your style of business? What kind of game plan will allow you to show up at your best? Some personal prodding is required to figure out how to align your pursuits with your unique character.
Using Sports To Understand How You Operate Your Business
We need a process to determine what our individual history of decision making, successes and failures tells us about ourselves. I encourage my clients and students to start with a few questions about the sport (or hobby) they loved growing up:
1. What was your favorite sport or hobby growing up? This doesn’t have to be the sport or hobby you played the most. It does have to be the one you felt the most aligned with as a kid. In other words, make it the sport or hobby you felt the most passion toward.
2. What about this sport or hobby did you enjoy? What did it look like? Were you part of a team or on your own? What were the sounds, textures and specific details about it that you loved so much?
3. What was your style of play? Perhaps you were a star player or more of a team player. Maybe you were incredibly fast and strong or showcased a particular skill or talent.
Bridging The Gap Between Personal Passion And Professional Practice
It’s then time to consider how your answers relate to how you operate in your business.
1. How do your answers to the questions above compare/align with the way you operate your business?
2. Do you operate in congruence with the way you played your favorite sport or hobby? If yes, how so? If not, why?
3. Do the things that give you the highest level of enjoyment in your business align with your favorite sport or hobby? If yes, how so? If not, why?
4. How can you operate more in congruence with the way you played your favorite sport or hobby?
5. Why would you be resistant to operating more in congruence? In other words, what are the downside risks?
This exercise works because, as a kid, you largely got to figure out the sport or hobby you liked best and how you showed up and played. To some degree, then, the activity you chose (and how you participated) was the freest expression of who you are.
As we progress through formal schooling, we tend to conform to a whole host of social norms and often lose some of the things we really enjoyed in that favorite sport or hobby. We carry on as we get jobs, settle into adult life and move up the ladder. And when that ladder points away from our game for too long, we burn out.
Again, we all seek the certainty that we’ll realize our unique definition of winning at life without compromising to be someone else. To get closer to that win, we need a destination. We need to know what we want to get closer to. Otherwise, I find that you run the risk of pursuing “more” and getting farther away from what matters.
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