On Dissolving
‘That’s never going to be me.’
My mother and I were in the sleepwear section of a department store when this thought flashed through my mind. What started as a simple purchase had developed into a much longer transaction as the sales assistant talked my mother into applying for a store credit card. My mother was leaning against the bench, sharing her most personal information in order to acquire a plastic card she probably didn’t need.
The thing is, my mother was self-employed, so this was not a simple process of handing over a payslip. She had to go through a tedious — and, to my mind, somewhat invasive — process of demonstrating her income. As a freshly minted lawyer with a comfortable, regular, law firm salary, I was watching this thinking, ‘There’s no way I would ever be self-employed.’
My mother wasn’t always self-employed. My parents met while studying Architecture in Colombo, Sri Lanka. After immigrating to Australia in the early ‘70s, they completed their studies at RMIT and established careers as architects — my mother in private practice and my father in the public service. Like most Sri Lankan parents, they impressed on me the value of education, career and financial security. Medicine, Law and Architecture were pre-approved paths to success. Art and Music were strongly supported as hobbies but not as careers.
But by the time my mother hit her 40s, she’d had enough. Not only was it tough being a woman in the construction industry, but she had set aside her considerable artistic talents to pursue a career that had been pre-approved by her late father. She went back to college and studied Graphic and Finished Art, working initially as a graphic artist for a newspaper before starting her own art school from our family living room. (More than 35 years later, she’s still teaching.)
Meanwhile, my Dad continued his career in the public service. He worked for Justice, Health and Education as an Architect and Project Manager until he retired.
Growing up, I knew which template I preferred to follow. The thought of being self-employed was unthinkable.
Roughly 15 years after that day in the department store, the unthinkable became my reality. Not because I chose it willingly, but because my career trajectory had led me onto a diving board without me realising it. The truth is, I had been on that diving board for a while. When I left the law firm to move into industry, I took a step onto that diving board. When I left the legal profession to become a coach and facilitator, I took another step. And when I took on a leadership role, I stepped out even further.
One day, I unexpectedly found myself at the end of the diving board. My role had become untenable and it had taken a toll on my mental health.
The temptation to retreat was strong — I literally cannot swim, despite years of trying. But, as the saying goes, I didn’t come this far to only come this far.
So I jumped. I had to.
I resigned from full-time employment and, because I didn’t have the faintest clue what I wanted to do next, I entered the world of self-employment by default. To me, self-employment felt less like an opportunity and more like a rubbish heap I’d consigned myself to while I tried to summon the clarity to come up with a new plan.
In ontological coaching, this is what we call a ‘breakdown’.
The term ‘breakdown’ can be quite loaded in normal usage — but in ontological coaching (borrowing from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger), it is simply an interruption to the anticipated flow of living. I burn the toast — that’s a breakdown. I miss the tram — also a breakdown. I resign from my job without knowing what’s next — a more significant breakdown.
What was breaking down was the ‘transparency’ of my way of being. It’s like I’d been operating on autopilot according to a set of attitudes and behaviours that were so familiar to me that I couldn’t even see them. But then something unexpected happened — in my case, a series of changes to the business and my team — which exposed the underlying attitudes and behaviours so that they were visible to me.
At a deeper level, I discovered that the templates I’d absorbed from my parents, culture (both Sri Lankan and Australian), and society had reached their useful limit sometime between 2014 and 2016. I’d sensed it was happening, and I’d tried to course-correct, but there came a point when the deviation between the life I was living and the person I was becoming became too large for me to bridge.
My old way of being wasn’t cutting it anymore.
The trouble is, breakdowns often feel like failure.
In those initial months, it was difficult not to drown in the conclusion that I had failed. Maybe I wasn’t cut out for leadership, maybe I had reached my Peter Principle, maybe I was being punished for being too ambitious. In my darker moments, these thoughts were like a hand pushing me down under the water. I was gasping for breath every time I came up for air — each podcast, book, or conversation with a mentor providing me with a much-needed gulp of oxygen before I went down again.
But then Life threw me a couple of lifebuoys.
The first was the realisation that I was in a liminal space. The disorientation I was experiencing was normal, so there was no point in fighting it. I stopped kicking and flailing — and started floating instead. It felt almost peaceful. I could breathe again. The second was that something was ending and something new was about to begin. Viewing my experience as a transition, I began to feel slightly hopeful.
Now I was treading water — self-employment had given me the time and space to take stock of my life. I wasn’t sure what was coming next, but my ontological work reassured me that I would be able to handle it. I started to trust Life again.
Diving deeper into the subject of breakdowns, I learned that I’d been living in a particular ‘coherence’ — a package of orientations embedded in my language, emotions and body, which together constituted my ‘way of being’. My old way of being prioritised success, status and security, which precluded self-employment without me even having to consider it. It was also contributing to other unhelpful patterns in my thinking and behaviour. Perfectionism, fear of failure, aversion to risk — all of these were manifestations of the same coherence.
But this coherence had been eroding for some time, through my various career moves and the intensive journey of personal development that I’d been on since my early 20s. What felt like failure was simply feedback that my old coherence was no longer serving the life I wanted to live. To access a new coherence, I would have to give up the old one. If anything, the only real failure would be to cling to my old life.
I’d like to say that once I discovered this, it was smooth swimming from there. But my old coherence was built on decades — perhaps even generations — of conditioning. It wasn’t going to dissolve overnight. And, to be fair, some of it was worth holding onto — for example, the value of education is still paramount for me. For the rest, I turned to psychosomatic practices like Experiential Focusing to help me shift patterns that were deeply embedded in my nervous system (a work in progress).
The next few years brought significant challenges and significant growth. At one point, I felt so completely untethered that I wondered if I might walk away from my career altogether. And, in some respects, that’s exactly what I’ve done.
My new coherence, which is based on freedom, flexibility and fulfilment, is no longer a career but a calling. I’m still doing similar things in similar spaces, but I’m doing them from a fundamentally different way of being. I’m also devoting more sustained attention to the creative pursuits that I had previously treated as ‘just hobbies’, including my own art practice.
Next month marks 10 years since I became self-employed.
The template my father imprinted on me has served me well, up to a point. But (to my surprise) it is my mother’s template, which I so firmly rejected that day in the department store, that is now serving me even better.
More accurately, my mother’s template was the impetus for the dive — the template I’m now working from is my own. And this experience now enables me to help others who have also outgrown their old templates — whether in leadership or life.
Where in your life might you have outgrown an old template?