A Different Truth: Reject the Truths That Are Killing Your Career, and Learn to Make Choices That Are Better for You

By Joanna Denton

In a single day at work, how many stories run through your head? Stories about what life is like, what everyone expects of you, what you are capable of or not capable of. Some of the stories will help you move forward, but others can suck your energy dry and keep you small.

We all tell ourselves stories about how life is meant to be. It&rs

• Language: English
• Publisher: JD Speaking and Strategy Limited
• Release date: Sep 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781641841566

Book preview

A Different Truth

Reject the Truths That Are Killing Your Career, and Learn to Make Choices That Are Better for You

Joanna Denton

Copyright © 2019 Joanna Denton

All rights reserved.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.

ISBNs:

Hardcover 978-1-64184-154-2

Paperback 978-1-64184-155-9

ebook 978-1-64184-156-6

For Peter, whose death reminded me it was time to live.

Contents

Truth

Challenge

1. Thrive

You can be the most successful leader, but if you are exhausted and running yourself into the ground, you will be no good to anyone. The problem is that often we believe we have to choose—our careers or our health. It’s time to breathe a little and get back some headspace, and I will show you how to have both your career and your health.

2. Rewire

Life’s too short for you to stay small. It’s time to step out of your comfort zone and step into your awesomeness. The only problem is, when you dream bigger and step up, those niggling self-doubts and criticisms come thick and fast and tell us we are not good enough. I will share three ways to rewire out of the fear into the possibility and manage your doubts so that they don’t manage you.

3. Community

How many times have you ever felt that you were on your own in this journey through life? There are people around you, but do they really get you? Do they really understand what your life is like? Do they really have any idea? What if that were not the case? Oh, to be celebrated for who you are and not merely tolerated for what you do! To be in a community that is there for you on the tough days and cheers you on the good ones, particularly as you start your journey toward dreaming bigger and stepping up. I will give you some exercises to build a community that encourages and empowers its members.

4. Story

If you have gotten this far in your leadership journey based on technical genius alone and want to reach the next level, you have to tell your story to people outside your immediate community. But often we are brought up to believe that to do so would be far too aggressive and in your face. Here, I will give you three exercises to help you share your story in the wider marketplace without coming across as boastful or aggressive.

5. Connect

You are passionate about your subject. Hell’s teeth, you wouldn’t be doing what you are doing after all these years if that weren’t the case. But it’s easy to forget that mere mortals don’t always understand what you are talking about, and equally easy to think they never will. I will give you three ways to connect with your audience without losing them in the technical weeds.

Choice

Truth

It’s 5 a.m.

5 a.m. on my thirty-fifth birthday and I just got home from work.

For the last couple of months, I have been working on a project with a West Coast client, and for the last couple of hours, I have been finishing some documents to send to them.

But now, everything is done and dusted, and I have come home.

It’s been a particularly long week, and I must admit that 5 a.m. finishes are very unusual. I must also say that it feels like years that I have been working twelve to fourteen-hour days. And you know what? I am tired.

It’s 5 a.m.

I should be sleeping, but instead I’m on the phone with my ex-boyfriend, and I am opening the present my parents have sent me. It’s a framed picture of me and my sister from when I was fifteen years old.

Fifteen years old and my entire life ahead of me.

And at that moment, looking at the photo, I realise it.

The sum of my life is work.

I am a lawyer by training, and by now, I am nearly ten years into my career as tax consultant for an international accounting firm

On the face of it, I am some definition of success; I am the go-to person for my teams, my clients, and my bosses. I am someone who can come up with innovative solutions to very tricky problems, and I am also a role model for other women on my team.

But behind that definition of success is a pretty lonely existence. One of working long hours, nights, weekends, and holidays.

And slowly, my life is starting to fall apart. Always having to be the strong one, never asking for help.

I am just so tired of it all.

In that moment, looking at that picture, I realise that I don’t want my life to be like this anymore. There has got to be more to life than this. And I am right, of course I am. There has to be.

But here’s the problem.

I feel trapped.

Intellectually, I know there has got to be more to life than this, but emotionally, viscerally, in every other way of my being, I also believe that this exhaustion is the price you pay if you want to succeed in corporate life.

Because to work in corporate life, if I want to succeed and excel, means putting the hours in, sacrificing my personal life, and always being in competition. I learned that when I was young, and its been reinforced all through my life.

If I want to succeed in the corporate world, I have to choose work because I sure as hell can’t choose life.

Because if I were to choose life—in other words to rest, take time to breathe, look after myself—I would be committing the cardinal sins of being selfish, lazy, and unprofessional. And worse still, if I were to ask for help, that would mean I was weak.

So, in that moment of realization, I don’t have a choice. This is all there is. Work.

And the very next day, the day after my thirty-fifth birthday I get out of bed and I continue to do what I have always done.

I choose work.

Not to rest. Not to look after myself.

Work.

Because I believe I don’t have a choice.

* * *

In the years that followed my thirty-fifth birthday, I kept on working to the same rhythm because I didn’t know how to do anything else.

I didn’t know how to slow down or breathe or take time for me. I just knew how to work. And so I did, and I kept on working till I burnt myself out.

Not once. But twice.

Until one day in 2014, six years after the photograph incident, when something happened that made me challenge the truth and change my choices.

By early 2014, I felt like I was constantly walking through molasses in a world where all the joy and colour had been sucked dry. I woke every morning filled with fear and dread—fear about going to a job that I no longer enjoyed and dread that others would see through this façade of success to see what I saw—that I was an imposter, bad at my job, and good for nothing.

It was burnout number two, and I was super-glued to the sofa.

Didn’t want to wash, to eat, to go out.

And I sure as hell didn’t want to tell anyone.

But on 6 March 2014, I had my life-changing wake-up call.

Not some gentle nudge from the universe like that twenty-year-old photo, or the panic attacks, or the OCD behaviours, or the trips to the emergency room with chest pains that I had had since my thirty-fifth birthday. No, it was a real, in-your-face wallop that I had no choice but to listen to.

That was the day of the funeral of a colleague, Peter.

At the age of sixty-seven, Peter had died suddenly, and I just had to be at the funeral. He was a gentleman, and a gentle man, and I needed to be there even if it meant leaving the apartment for the first time in weeks.

During the ceremony, I realised something. Peter hadn’t just died of a heart attack. He had committed suicide.

He had spent the Saturday and Sunday with friends, laughing and joking. And the Monday morning he got up, he went to the red bridge in Luxembourg, and he jumped.

What stood out in particular during the service were the words of his friends.

We would have been there in a moment, they said. Why didn’t he just tell us?

Their sadness is clear—and also their confusion. They had spent time with him less than forty-eight hours before. But it was nobody’s fault. Peter didn’t want them to see what he was living. And so, he had not said a word.

As I got into the car that afternoon to come home, the tears came, and my heart broke.

At the age of sixty-seven, Peter believed that he didn’t have a choice. He was living his own kind of hell, but he believed he couldn’t tell anyone or reach out for help.

So, he did the only thing he could. He jumped.

As I sat in my car, I realised that there was something in his story that hit home and acted as a mirror for my own life. And for what my future might be if I continued to believe I had to do it all alone and not ask for help.

And I realised it didn’t want that future.

And there was something in his story that gave me courage. Courage to make a different choice. Not to go home to an empty apartment and an empty sofa, but to pick up the phone, ask for help, and trust that someone would be there.

And so I did.

* * *

Over the last five years, I have picked myself up and taken back the power of my own choices. I have started to recognise and reject the stories that were ruling my life, and the truths that were killing my career. And I have started to make different choices.

But it took a lot of work.

At first, I needed to sleep, rest, and take some distance. I needed to find my friends again remember that I wasn’t alone—and I needed to find a good therapist!

I started to see the stories I was telling myself about how life was meant to be. And I started to challenge those stories and ask myself if they were helping or hindering me.

When I was able to see those stories and start to unpack them, I was at last able to give myself permission to find a different truth about how life could be.

And in turn, that allowed me space to think long and hard about what it was I wanted or didn’t want in my life. After sixteen years as a tax consultant, I finally decided that there was more to life than tax returns, and it was time to do something different.

Over the last five years, I have also realised that I am not alone in this adventure. I have spoken to other people about their experiences coming through a burnout to the other side.

What is clear from everyone is that they have all won a battle. They have all had to do the same work to unpack and examine their stories and start to deal with the shadows.

And they all have a day when they decided to choose themselves and their own well-being and to let go of the stories.

For one, it was a motorbike accident, or a colleague who dropped down dead at work. For another, it was the day she realised that she was so tired she couldn’t remember how to make spaghetti Bolognese for her kids.

But whatever the trigger, one day there was a choice. And they made it.

* * *

And it is doing this work for myself, speaking to others who have also done it, and realising just how long we all took to learn these lessons that have inspired me to write this book.

Why should you have to wait until your world is falling apart to start to make different choices?

What if you could understand that you too have certain truths that you live by? What if you could allow yourself to challenge and change those truths? And allow that knowledge to help you make better choices?

And make them before it is too late.

That is my wish for you.

Challenge

Let’s talk about choices. The ones we make and the ones we don’t make.

We make choices every day: big ones and small ones. And the choices we make define who we are and who we become.

Of course, we hope that all the choices we make are made freely. But often we are faced with situations where we tell ourselves we don’t have a choice. There is no realistic option but a single course of action.

We believe that to be an absolute truth, but it is here that I have come to understand that this is just a story we tell ourselves.

Before going on, though, let me just make it clear what I am not talking about.

I am not talking about the low-income parents who have no choice but to work three jobs on minimum wage just to be able to put food on the table or someone in a burning building who has no choice but to get out of there.

What I am talking about is when you don’t stand up to the bully because the bully is the boss, and you believe you don’t have a choice. Or when you believe that you have to carry the load of all the work on your shoulders because you think no one else could do it as well as you and so you don’t have a choice. Or when you stay in a shitty job that sucks away your soul and keeps you from your family because you believe you don’t have a choice because you have to pay the mortgage for the big car, the big house, and the big holidays.

It’s in those situations where I have come to learn that it’s just a story. A story we tell ourselves. About how we don’t have a choice.

And you know what. That’s okay. That’s human. Telling ourselves this kind of story is part of being human.

Because, of course, the story comes from somewhere. It comes from the rules that we have about how we need to live our lives. Rules that become the truth.

They are rules that we learned as kids from our parents and our teachers, and they are rules that are reinforced through our own life experience.

Often, those rules propel us forward. They keep us safe and lead us toward the best form of ourselves.

But many don’t. They lead us instead into pain and regret.

Maybe it’s the rule that to serve