Our author is Elena Rezanova, a self-realization and career strategy consultant for adult professionals, about squirrels in a wheel, dusty dreams and what to do with the word “impossible”.
It is not customary for stories to start with a happy ending, but …
"…Hello! My job is to help people realize themselves in what they love. I work with successful but tired professionals from all over the world, I myself live in a small country of Monaco, my husband Roman is enthusiastically working in the restaurant business, my daughter Anya goes to a local school - and she is the best in the French language class”…
And now I will take you back to prehistory, a few years ago. When everything had not only begun, the future was still like a mirage on the horizon. And like many of you - we not only did not plan it. We didn't even really know what we wanted.
One wet slushy Moscow day, I was sitting in a large shopping center and waiting for my daughter near the playground. There were several of the same mothers around me with different-sized bags after shopping, and we all sat waiting for the children, buried in our iPhones. My iPhone was dead, and so I just started looking around. Soon I saw how the children started a new game - they began to run and smell flowers - red, yellow, blue, purple. Plastic flowers that grew beautifully on the plastic lawn, along the same plastic fence. My baby also ran up, inhaled the scent and fluttered back like a butterfly. I went over, squatted down and sniffed too. The flowers smelled like regular plastic and a little cleaning agent.
The next day in the morning I went to my responsible work in the beautiful office of Krylatskie Hills, and, sitting at some important meeting in a glass meeting room, for some reason I remembered these plastic flowers. Then it occurred to me that our life is very similar to them. Everything is like people, but not real. Bright but not alive.
And I realized that for many years of a successful career I have lived with the feeling that now a little more - and something real is about to begin. For some reason we were all born. For some reason we have talents, ideas, ambitions to do something cool and not be sprayed with nonsense. But life does not and does not lead to such a turn. Everything is good - work, travel, restaurants, - the stability of a well-oiled wheel and two correct squirrels in it.
And then, several years ago, completely unexpectedly and irrevocably, the autopilot was turned off from me. And I clearly saw - and you can live like this in anticipation of some "one day". One day we will make enough money, and finally, we will do what interests us. I will write books, and my husband will open a small restaurant of French cuisine, because he has been dreaming about it since the age of 16. Someday. Required. We will definitely understand that the time has come.
But on that day, for some reason, it became clear that this moment would not exist, one had to decide and jump out of the wheel. It will not stop by itself to drop us off at a convenient turn.
And the two squirrels thought, made up their minds and eventually jumped, taking with them a couple of suitcases of things from their old life, exchanging all their money for a new education and a year and a half for the "runway". And what would happen then - here the imagination painted only a dense fog.
So, five years ago, former talent manager Lena, former project manager Roma, three-year-old Anya landed at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and there is a great hope that this is not in vain.
If you recognize yourself in our portrait, then the lessons we have learned may also be useful to you, especially because they were comprehended exclusively in practice. Although I considered myself a theoretically prepared person, I read a lot of books about self-realization, but the practice of finding myself turned out to be completely different from books.
I had to learn lessons along the way and draw conclusions from my mistakes. Now these conclusions have been tested extensively, including on the cases of my clients, and there is something to share with those who follow the same path.
And the first "but in fact, that's how it is" - of course, about a dream!
Dream "just away from what is now"
I wanted to become a writer, and the light image of me, writing under a huge plane tree in a street cafe, or under palm trees on the delicate sand, warmed for a long time with its contrast with the office environment.
It is the contrast. Because there was absolutely nothing else in this dream from the point of view of meaning - and I realized this pretty quickly, literally in the very first weeks in Paris. I just had nothing to write except some corporate stories. I had nothing to share. And I didn't want to write garbage. The dream was struck off a two-item list. The second item on the list was “find something away from the topic of human resources”.
You have no idea how often people come to me with dreams "in contrast". These are the images that are always as different as possible from their current reality. These are pictures that can often be found on the covers of books from the category of "how to travel the world and make money on it." A hammock between palms or a cafe, mountains or yachts, a house or restaurant by the sea.
I do not urge you to immediately delete this and question it. Just check it out in practice as soon as possible, it's not such an expensive experiment - going for a mirage can cost you much more. For example, spend your next vacation the way you would like to live in that dream. And you will understand - it has a chance to become real, what you want, or is it just a desire to escape into a beautiful picture - away from …
In the first months of freedom, I tested several more beautiful "dreams" - for example, to be a travel photographer. But in the end I realized that a photographer, traveler or writer is great, but for a hobby. It lacks a sense of meaning and result to be in charge.
As a result, in a roundabout way, I again entered the field of human resources and talent development. Only through another door - and there I found my place.
This is a common in my practice syndrome of the first stage of searching for oneself - to seek further from the place where I was. Because if we are fed up, we do not understand what exactly. We may get one aspect of the work, but not the topic itself. But we cross everything together. And if you look at the same topic from the other side, then everything can work out.
And here's the conclusion number one - do not rush to give up your current sphere, because you can find yourself very close to the place where you lost.
What about the impossible?
Unlike me, my husband knew who he wanted to become. After all, from the age of 16 he dreamed of becoming a chef. But he went to study at the law school, and work, most likely, in a large corporation. Over time, these two universes became completely parallel. In one, a real one, he put on a suit and went to the office, worked hard, was good at it. In the second universe, in dreams, he, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu, stood in the restaurant kitchen wearing a chef's hat and laid a leg of lamb on a robust puree. The probability of crossing two parallels was zero. The tag "impossible" is firmly entrenched in the restaurant dream. And often the accompanying addition: "maybe in another life."
And if you try in this one, then -… and here there was always a whole series of reasonable, efficient, detailed reasons why it still would not lead to anything. After all, if it were so easy, everyone would take and begin to make their dreams come true. And in general, you need to think more realistic.
But, apparently, my vocation to help people realize their vocation somehow turned on then, and I decided to take a small step.
If you have a dream tagged "impossible", and you recognize yourself in this picture, then my little step can lead you to an interesting effect.
I often observe this effect in the cases of my clients. There is a reality, stable and often good, and there is some kind of mythical image, beautiful and more like a mirage. If it remains a mirage, even if it is beautiful, we do not take steps towards it. Because he is not reality. And we are reasonable people. Especially when we are already doing well. From the real to the impossible, an intelligent person does not take steps, why should he burn his strength in vain?
And here - attention - quite intuitively I then made the most correct step. I persuaded Roma to spend the next vacation in Paris, and without his knowledge I arranged with Le Cordon Bleu about his visit to them. In Paris, we somehow "unexpectedly" found ourselves in the 15th arrondissement, near a building with blue ribbons on the facade, and all that remained was to open the door and enter. And only when my husband walked through all the floors, looked into the kitchen classrooms and met the chefs, when he breathed in steam from soups and sauces, only then his “impossible” was reformulated into “super-difficult”, “very difficult to implement”. But more is NOT impossible. And the unrealizable dream became what? Correctly. Great Purpose.
I then unconsciously did what I now recommend that you do absolutely consciously. Recalibrate your "impossible" to something real. Find a way to touch him.
And I want to end with a very correct story about the nature of the impossible and our relationship to it. This story is about the famous mathematician George Danzig. Once, at the dawn of his career, an interesting and very important case for us (and for mathematics) happened to him. Danzig was late for the class of his mentor, the famous mathematician Neumann, and came to the empty class. All he had to do was rewrite the homework from the blackboard and go home to solve. The task turned out to be very difficult, and Danzig fiddled a lot. In the end, he still decided and passed the decision to Neumann. Opening the notebook, Neumann was shocked by what he saw.
“It turned out that the formulas written on the chalkboard that day, which I took for homework and later solved, were examples of known unsolvable statistical problems. Neumann had to repeat everything from start to finish several times, so that I realized that the problems I solved were not just 'another task'”? - said Danzig in an interview published in 1986 in the "Student Mathematical Journal", USA.
What is the main thing in this story for you and me?
Everything worked out because he did not know that it was impossible to solve them. He didn't have that word in his head. The rest did not decide - after all, they did not take it.
But you and I often behave as if this word, like a label, hangs on everything we want. And therefore we do not take even the smallest step. But he alone can be the beginning of a great wonderful story. And most interestingly, many of us already know what it can be about.
About the expert:
Elena Rezanova
Photo: Getty Images
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