Most of my career progress came from psychotherapy
In the past 4 years, I spent over 20,000 EUR on psychotherapy, coaching, and personal development in general. This has transformed my life in major ways, and allowed me to get unstuck and <start cliche> find myself <end cliche>. This has contributed to my professional growth in a major way, although it was not the initial reason, why I went into therapy.
Figuring out my mission, career path, and life path is hard. It is very human to get stuck, and that I did too. For the sake of argument, I love the analogy of being a captain on a ship and trying to find that island of treasures. When you are a captain, there are a few things that can get you stuck:
Not knowing well enough, where you are going
Changing your destination all the time, giving up too soon, sailing without a clear destination
Not having the tools and the information for navigation
No map and no one to help navigating, no compass
Not having enough resources to get to your destination
No fuel, no crew, no ship
Believing any of the above is true, while in reality it isn’t
Untested assumptions, blind faith, naivety
In my case, both 1 and 4 were true for a long time, probably a decade from 19 to 29 years old. After a decade, I also got to know that I was very constrained in 2 and 3. What was wrong?
Motivation and getting stuck
At the beginning, I had huge motivation to start a billion dollar tech startup to 1) show everyone that I am awesome, so that people would love and respect me, 2) compensate for the poverty I experienced in childhood and make sure I never suffer from having nothing to eat, nowhere to live or having to tolerate abusive people in my life.
This motivation resulted in one good thing and one bad thing. The good thing was that I believed my mother when she said education is important and went all in to get a master’s degree from Aarhus University, which proved to be one of the best decisions I made in my life. The bad thing was that my motivation to start a tech startup never lasted: I would start doing something, encounter reality, drop it, and look for something else. Nothing that I would do was “it”. Making people love me and acting out of fear was not very motivating either.
The Social Network Movie (source)
When I was in my early twenties, I was motivated by movies like The Social Network, Pirates of Silicon Valley and similar.
I compared myself to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.
I was legit pissed that I was not yet a billionaire at that age.
My first job out of university at 25 was a Sales Director at an Estonian company selling car parts online. 2 years before that I started a subsidiary of that company in Denmark and tried making it work. It was a cool experience and definitely fed my ego in terms of how cool I thought I was. The Danish subsidiary never really took off, due to a small Estonian company not being very competitive with much larger businesses and me not realizing the capital constraints and the state of the competition due to inexperience.
In my free time, I would always try launching something cool with my friends and colleagues: a business blog in Russian language, an anonymous online chat that I never finished, a freelance web development agency, an Amazon FBA / FBM business, a crypto trading bot, a real estate marketplace, an innovative loyalty program, and likely a few more things that I already forgot about.
When after many attempts, I had nothing to show for it, I understood that something was off. I could never stick with one thing and do it till the end, but why?
Getting unstuck
The answer came years later. After I spent 3 years and over 20,000 EUR on multiple types of psychotherapy (somatic experiencing, EMDR, hypnotherapy, guided imagery, metacognitive therapy), went on a week-long silent retreat, did Wim Hof method and holotropic breathwork for extended periods of time.
What was the answer? The answer was that nothing that I would do, would give me a feeling of having a purpose in my life that would make my fear of death go away. That fear of death was something that I got (along with serious clinical C-PTSD a.k.a. Complex PTSD and a reason to go to therapy) from an accident that happened to me when I was 8 years old. WW2 helicopter ammunition unknowingly to anyone ended up in a bonfire, and I was hit by shrapnel as a result of the explosion. I have 5 pieces in my body to this day, and I was lucky to not die from the accident. I after 2 weeks in hospital and a few months after that I was physically healthy again.
Overcoming the traumatic past was by far the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Nothing, absolutely nothing comes even close to how hard it was. There were multiple occasions, where I doubted I would ever be able to lead a normal life again. I feel thankful for having the possibility and the resources to overcome that and for the unconditional love and support I got from my friends and family. I am endlessly grateful to all the therapists, who helped me find my way through it.
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition caused by very stressful, frightening or distressing events.
Someone with PTSD often relives the traumatic event through nightmares and flashbacks, and may experience feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt. These symptoms are often severe and persistent enough to have a significant impact on the person's day-to-day life.
Complex PTSD can cause similar symptoms to PTSD and may not develop until years after the event (source).
Brain changes from CPTSD can be permanent, and for many people, it is a lifelong condition (source).
People, who successfully overcome traumatic events, sometimes experience what is known as post-traumatic growth. It results in increased resilience, appreciation of life, personal strength, and more. After one has conquered one’s own Everest, what can possibly shake one’s foundation in life or cause stress?
So how overcoming CPTSD helped me with my career? I realized that I had a hole in my soul that I could not fill with anything, and obviously I could not fill it with career success. Now that the hole was patched up, I needed to go forward, and figure out, what was my real motivation?
An example of a wheel of life - a common coaching tool
I tried career coaching multiple times, and one of the exercises I would do repeatedly would be figuring out my values, and how to express these values in my career. For example, one of them is independence: I always liked leading a team.
Did it help? Not really.
The values exercise or the wheel of life did not help.. why? Because I learned in my childhood that being a nice guy and making my mom proud was the baseline for my survival (me being bad = mom unhappy = I will be abandoned). So even though, intellectually I thought I knew what I needed and what I wanted, the subconscious belief that I had would make it impossible to connect the intellectual and the emotional.
The outcome
Fast forward a year or two, and I am at a spot, where I am much more psychologically independent, and no longer a nice guy. And you know what? My mind and my emotions are at a much more coherent state, so there is no question of “what do I do” or feeling lost or stuck. I know precisely what I feel I that I need, and I am able to follow it intellectually.
I was able to step up at work and take on a bigger leadership responsibility at a growing scale-up. It is a very dynamic job that tests one’s stress resilience every week: when there is a critical issue with big client involving big money, and you are the one pulling people together to resolve it, you gotta have it together. My stress tolerance went from 2/10 to probably 8/10, and at the same time my performance has increased, because I am more calm and more focused.
No internal conflicts = smooth path forward.
No conflicting destinations = predictable sailing.
Of course, I am not a guru and I will not claim that I am enlightened. But I have walked my path, I did not give up, and I continue showing up every day.
For those of you, who still feel lost, think: what is your blind spot? What is it that you are not seeing, and what can you do to see clearly again?
