The Audacity AuditYour results are in

It sounds like

• You want something and you talk yourself out of it in the same breath. You’ve done it so often you don’t notice it happen any more.
• Your reasons are very respectable ones. They sound like a sensible woman being responsible, which is why nobody has ever questioned a single one of them, you included.
• You’ve been calling the same thing unrealistic for two years and you keep thinking about it anyway.

What it feels like

There’s a small tightness in your chest every time you tell yourself you can’t. It’s gone in about a second and you’ve never stopped to wonder what it’s about. Underneath it is something like grief, which sounds dramatic until you notice you’ve been mourning the same want all that time.

Where you learned it

You didn’t come up with those reasons on your own. You learned them off a parent who talked about security a particular way, off a boss who told you what was realistic in a market like this one, off a woman at work who said it about herself, and you filed it away for later. They arrived sounding like facts, so you’ve treated them as facts ever since.

What it’s costing you

You’ve never tested whether you’re right. A reason you inherited and never questioned holds as much power over you as a real one, so you’re running your life on rules you never agreed to.

Those reasons have kept you safe. They’ve kept you stuck as well, and it’s time to put them on trial.

Five moves

1. Put the argument on trial. Take every reason you’ve built for staying put and ask one question of it: have I checked this, or did I inherit it? Your best arguments have never been tested, because they’re often too convincing to question.
2. Run an experiment. Pick the smallest version of the thing you want and do it before your brain has built the case against it. One email will do. Evidence beats argument, and you get evidence by creating it.
3. Ask whose voice it’s in. Your mother’s? A boss from eleven years ago? The woman at work who said it about herself? A reason that belongs to someone else doesn’t get a vote on your future.
4. The 48-hour rule. When you catch yourself building a case against something you want, the case waits 48 hours before you act on it. See if it’s as convincing on Thursday as it was on Tuesday. Mostly it won’t be.
5. Hold it to your own standard. Write down your best argument for not moving. Would you accept reasoning that thin from someone on your team? Then you know what to do with it.

It sounds like

• You know what you’re worth on paper. Saying that salary out loud to another person, without shrinking it, is a different thing entirely.
• A rating, a nod in the right meeting, your name said out loud in front of the leadership team, and you feel unstoppable for a fortnight.
• When the recognition doesn’t come, you’re stuck between resenting them for not giving it and resenting yourself for needing it. So you go looking for what it says about you, when it says far more about them.

What it feels like

Lifted for a fortnight, then flat for a month, and none of it tracks what you’re doing. Somebody else decides your value and your mood along with it. It’s lonely too, because who could you tell that one sentence in a review changed your whole week? You can hear how mad it would sound from a grown woman with a career like yours behind her.

Where you learned it

It started young, when you learned that what other people think of you is what counts, because thinking well of yourself makes you arrogant and heaven forbid you know your own value. Then you went to work somewhere that hands out worth in cycles. Ratings, meetings, whether your boss happened to be paying attention that week. Do that for long enough and you end up carrying their score around with you, and the weeks you get nothing back are the heaviest of the lot.

What it’s costing you

You can’t work out what you want next while the people you’d be leaving are the ones setting your value. Every option gets measured with their ruler, so every option comes back smaller than it is. And it suits them to have you stay put with a low bar for what you’re worth, because then you accept the little they hand you.

You’re not indecisive. You’re choosing your future with a bar somebody else set, and a low bar now buys you a small future later.

Five moves

1. Keep your own record. Start a private document today: every result with a figure on it, every piece of feedback that meant something, every time your work moved something. Nobody else sees it. It’s where you look when the recognition doesn’t come, so you’re not looking at their face.
2. Say the full salary before you say the smaller one. Out loud, on your own, the whole figure, as many times as it takes to hear yourself say it without flinching. Then say it to them.
3. Check whose measures you’re using. Write down the five things that tell you you’ve had a good week. Where did each one come from? Count the ones you chose. Then count the ones handed to you by a system that does well out of your bar staying low.
4. Decide now what you do in a flat week. Maybe you open your record. Maybe you ask the one person whose judgement you rate. With a plan, the quiet weeks stop setting your value.
5. Set one bar this week that’s nobody’s business but yours. One decision or one ask, on your own terms. It won’t be perfect. You’re finding out what happens when you decide for yourself.

It sounds like

• Fine, busy, you know how it is. You’ve said it so many times it’s out of your mouth before you’ve checked whether it’s true, and it’s easier than saying you have no idea.
• There’s no single unbearable thing you could point at in an exit interview, and some part of you takes that as a reason to keep putting up with it, as though you need something more dramatic before you’re allowed to leave.
• You’ve caught yourself thinking that plenty of people would take this job, that you’re lucky to have it, and using that to shut the whole conversation down.

What it feels like

Numb, mostly. Flat. You’re not sad, which is what makes it so hard to justify doing anything about. Sunday evenings sink when you start thinking about Monday, and it’s turning up in things that have nothing to do with work. You’re not that excited about the holiday either.

Where you learned it

You learned early what happens to a woman with a good job who wants more of anything. She’s greedy if she asks and ungrateful if she’s unhappy, so the only acceptable answer is fine. That’s the one you give, in the meeting, at dinner, and on your own in the car when you tell yourself it’s not that bad.

What it’s costing you

There’s no crisis on its way to make this decision for you. Fine could run another five years without anything dramatic happening at all, and you already know exactly what those five years look like. Audacity decides on a Tuesday when everything is technically okay.

Fine isn’t a high enough bar for your life.

Five moves

1. Write down the bar you’ve been living by. Start a sentence with “fine means” and finish it honestly. Then do the same with “enough would mean”. Look at the distance between the two.
2. Drop the crisis requirement. When you catch yourself thinking “it’s not bad enough to do anything about”, answer it: wanting something different is reason enough.
3. The Sunday test. For the next four Sundays, write one sentence about how the evening feels. One honest sentence, no analysis. By the end of the month you’ll have four of them, and they’re harder to argue with than “nothing’s wrong enough”.
4. Find the thing you keep almost saying. When someone asks how work’s going, there’s a sentence you start and then steer away from. Write it down somewhere private. That one gets said out loud before anything else moves.
5. Price up fine. Write down what five more years of it looks like: the job title, the salary, the Sunday evenings, the conversations you’re still not having. Fine feels safe until it’s specific. Then decide whether it’s still your bar.

It sounds like

• You’ve had the therapy, or the coach, or you’ve spent enough time around therapy-speak that your pattern is “really obvious”.
• You can explain that pattern perfectly, and you’re still looking for a way to force yourself out of it as fast as possible, if you could only make yourself do it differently, when what put it there hasn’t been touched.
• And you’re in roughly the same place, having roughly the same conversation, two years on.

What it feels like

Frustration, turned inward, which is the one direction it does no good. It sits in your jaw and wakes you at three in the morning to go over the ground you covered last week. Seeing the pattern this clearly and still being in it, you’ve started using it as evidence against yourself: not smart enough, not disciplined enough to beat it into submission. Which is the last thing it needs.

Where you learned it

Maybe you’re the eldest daughter who grew up looking after everyone else. Maybe you’re a millennial woman who grew up in a world of therapy-speak and attachment styles, so it became a second language you can get by in without being fluent. Understanding things has helped you at work, too. Work out what’s happening, say it in the room, get the credit for it. In your own life it doesn’t move you an inch, because understanding feels so much like progress that another six months go by and nothing else gets asked of it.

What it’s costing you

Understanding it has become the thing you do in place of moving. Every round adds another layer of blame (you can see it so clearly, so what’s wrong with you that it hasn’t shifted?) and none of it goes near what put the pattern there in the first place. You’ve been running a very thorough investigation into yourself, when the culprit was never in the room.

Knowing the reason and doing something to change it are two different jobs. You’ve done the first one to death.

Five moves

1. Swap the explanation for one action. Next time you catch yourself narrating your own psychology, stop mid-sentence and send the email you’ve been putting off. One small thing in the direction you want.
2. Two weeks off self-analysis. Each time you start explaining why you do what you do, ask what the smallest available move is and make it. The insight isn’t going anywhere. You’re finding out what happens when it stops being a reason to wait.
3. Ask what the pattern protects you from. You can describe it perfectly. The answer you want here is the one that makes you want to change the subject. That’s what needs deprogramming.
4. Track what you did. For the next month, your notes record actions only. What you understood doesn’t go in. See what changes.
5. Put a date on one thing. Pick something you’ve been analysing and set the day by which it’s done. Tell someone. The analysis closes on that date whether or not you feel ready, because feeling ready has never been what moved you.

It sounds like

• The busiest weeks are the hardest weeks, and you’re grateful for them, because there’s no space in them to ask yourself the question or hear your own answer.
• You booked the leave, spent it clearing the backlog, and told yourself that counted as a rest. Besides, you’re not one of those people who can stand still, and your productivity is a badge of honour.
• Somebody suggests a proper break and something in you goes tight, because you know what comes up in the quiet. Even when you’ve stopped moving you’re not resting. There’s Instagram, the phone call with the friend who needs you, another list. There’s always some noise to hand.

What it feels like

Tired, and it’s the kind sleep doesn’t touch. Your body has been waving at you about this for a while: your shoulders, the ceiling at four in the morning, the aches that only turn up on the first day of any break. Stopping feels unsafe, so you keep going, and the busyness keeps the whole question at a comfortable distance.

Where you learned it

Years of being rewarded for output will teach anybody that the effort is the point. Then there’s the version you got as a woman on top of that, where rest is what you earn after everyone else is taken care of, if there’s any left, and a woman who stops is a woman who’s let something slip. Nobody has ever had to enforce that rule on you. You do it yourself, on a Saturday, and you learned it early.

What it’s costing you

Audacity needs space, and you’ve stopped making any without ever deciding to, so another two years go by in a blur of delivery. Nothing gets decided at that speed. That’s the point of the speed.

And if this has gone past tired, if it’s the kind a fortnight off and a full night’s sleep don’t touch, that’s a conversation with your GP before it’s a conversation about your career. The career question keeps. It’ll still be there, and you’ll answer it better.

You’re not a workaholic. You’ve been using the work to keep something else at bay.

Five moves

1. One empty hour this week. No podcast on the walk, no phone by the bath. An hour where you deliver nothing to anyone, yourself included. Pay attention to what turns up when it’s quiet.
2. Go through your yes pile. Take everything you said yes to in the last month. Did you choose it, or did it land on you because you’re where things land? Change nothing yet. Look first.
3. Stop counting busy as progress. At the end of each day this week, skip the list of what you delivered and write one sentence on what moved towards what you want. If there’s nothing to write, that tells you something.
4. Write down the question. There’s one you haven’t been asking yourself, and you know what it is. You don’t have to answer it yet. On paper, it stops running things from underneath.
5. The hour goes in the diary first. For the next month, one protected hour a week is booked before anything else, with no deliverable attached. That hour is where your audacity gets a look in.

It sounds like

• Asked what’s next, you answer with what you’re done with, and then you change the subject, because “not this” isn’t an answer and you know it.
• You’ve read a job spec twice, decided against it, and couldn’t say what you were holding out for. Only that it isn’t more of the same.
• You feel cut off from what you want, and you’ve decided there’s something wrong with you for only knowing what you don’t want, and knowing nothing about what you do.

What it feels like

Foggy about the future, restless with nothing obvious to be restless about. Working out what you want feels enormous, and you’ve put so much weight on getting the choice right that you can’t move at all.

Where you learned it

Nobody has asked you what you want since you were about twenty-two, and back then the answer was supposed to be a job title. Everything since has been a choice between things other people put on the table, so you got very good at the only move that was ever available to you, which was ruling things out.

What it’s costing you

You can’t plan towards “not this”, you can’t decide anything with it, and you can’t leave on it either. It’s half a decision, and an important half, but it doesn’t give you a direction. That’s why you’re still where you are.

A woman with no idea what she wants couldn’t be that specific about what she doesn’t. That’s half the work already done.

Five moves

1. Turn each “not this” into a “so what, then”. Go down your ruled-out list and finish the sentence for each: “not this, so I need something with...”
2. Say the want without the disclaimer. There’s something you want that you’ve never said in a full sentence without adding “but obviously” or “I know that’s not realistic”. Say the sentence. Stop before the but.
3. Stop treating “I don’t know what I want” as a fact. It’s a feeling, and it usually comes with a belief that wanting the wrong thing is worse than wanting nothing. Ask what you’d want if you were allowed to want anything. The answer tends to arrive fast.
4. Read your list as a spec. Everything you’ve ruled out describes what you’re holding out for. Write that description, built only from the no’s.
5. Give the want a cheap test. Take the smallest version of what you might want and get near it without committing: a conversation, an event, an hour with someone already doing it. You’re not deciding anything. You’re getting more to go on than a list of no’s.