I Thought I had My Dream Job…

Everybody has one but few have taken the time to understand their own story.

Personal Ownership Principle #2: Understand Your Story

“Our actions come from our beliefs, even when we don’t know what we believe in…

I define the word ‘story’ as facts weaved together by beliefs/assumptions into a coherent narrative. (I use the words belief and assumption interchangeably) I believe every human being has unconscious beliefs about how the world works. The challenge is learning to recognize when our actions are leading us away from our true desires and doing the work to identify the underlying beliefs/assumptions that led us to taking those actions.”

Pg. 107, Adapt and Overcome by Travis Daigle

This section of the book really expounds upon the events that led me from graduating college with honors as an Electrical Engineering Major to quitting Corporate America burned out, deep in debt, and recovering from a deep depression. I’ll let you read my book to learn more about the specifics of that journey but this is the part of my life that helped me begin to understand that human beings are storytelling creatures. We like things to make sense and have meaning. If there is no meaning readily available, we’ll assume a meaning that fits with how we think about the world overall. I don’t think this is a bad feature of our psychology. It can certainly go bad. For me this meant putting massive amounts of effort into a career path that I didn’t really desire to be in. It’s a story I’ve repeated many times but in order to expound on the principle let’s take a look at the habit change examples that I used in the last post.

Example: I Thought I had My Dream Job…

Every person has a story as defined previously and that story originates from and is molded by three primary sources: Close Relationships (Particularly, when we are children), Culture/Society, and there is self or the unique proclivities of our own personality.

As I explained in the last post, I had one habit that had improved over the course of the pandemic (saving money and spending wisely) and I had another that definitely got worse during the pandemic (overeating sugar).

Goals

Money:

Where it concerns money, for years I have been a fan of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early). This is where people aggressively invest large portions of their income in the stock market and are able to ‘retire’ in their 30’s or 40’s because the interest from their investments meet the cost of their lifestyle which is usually frugal. However, the challenge for me has been a focus on the fact that many of the stories I read are of people who were engineers (usually software engineers). Living in the Northwest, I got it in my head that I couldn’t really do this well unless I had a higher income. I still saved but I work as a security guard and, if I’m honest, I’ve spent lots of time obsessing over a higher income in order to achieve the FIRE goal. That obsessive energy has resulted in lots of low grade anxiety about my future, my romantic prospects, and investing money into business ideas that seemed like they might be lucrative but ultimately turned out to be contradictory with my own lifestyle needs and moral compass.

Food:

Obviously I’m a guy who believes in being healthy and for the last 11 years of my life, being mindful of sugar consumption has been a huge focus in my health. It’s tough because I’m an emotional eater. I learned to seek comfort in food in response to stress, when I was a kid. Interestingly enough, much of the emotional sugar consumption that I’ve done in the last 4-5 years has been a response to the angst I’ve had around money, career, and being able to walk away from a traditional work situation. Mind you, my desire is to spend more time writing and working with people on self improvement. I’m good at this and I’ve been in a hurry to get to a version of life where more of my time is spent helping people improve their lives.

Stories

Money:

Close Relationships (Coworkers)

Back in 2014 I worked at a hospital as an Emergency Room Technician. This involved assisting nurses and Doctors with various procedures as a part of patient care. I was a combat medic in the Army so medicine was familiar to me but what I wasn’t ready for was the amount of materialism and focus on money that was in the environment. My coworkers were regularly talking about the things they just bought or the trips they just took. One conversation that was fairly disheartening for me as a single man at the time, revolved around the idea that some female nurses would never consider dating someone who didn’t have a degree or weren’t using their degree to maximize income level.

Society

In the last 3-5 years one of the growing themes in news media is the wealth gap or the growing difference between what some news outlets call the ‘haves and have not’s’. There’s lots of anxiety and what feels like despair highlighted in these news stories.

Self

Those conversations from the hospital loomed large in my mind well after I had stopped working in a hospital environment. In particular because I was struggling to find romance for so many years. At the time I was working to build a business (I was motivational speaking) and it seemed like I would never be able to build an income from it. Also, I worked as a security guard to make ends meet. From 2012 to 2019 before I met my wife, I probably never made more than $24,000 in a year before taxes. This was living in Tacoma just south of Seattle where the cost of living is certainly higher than most of the Country (I think). I couldn’t help but think that a large reason I remained single for so long after leaving the military was the fact that I didn’t make a lot of money. Add to it all the social angst about wealth gaps and the difficulty of home ownership and there were many times in the last decade where I felt inadequate as a man. This is the impact I have been allowing the narratives around me to have on my own story.

Food:

Close Relationships

One of the downsides of being someone who is very into fitness and staying healthy is that people who are not into fitness tend to think I am perfect with my eating habits. Oddly, I’ve found that people close to me (friends/family) sometimes assume that I’m judging their habits and in response they goad me into joining in on having a cookie or a pastry. They say things like, “Come on Travis, it’s just one!” I’ve probably heard that phrase hundreds of times.

I’m not judging them. I don’t spend much time thinking about how other people are eating because I need my energy to focus on keeping myself on track. I also feel pressure to be perfect because I’m ‘the fitness guy’. All of these factors together often cause me to hide my real relationship to sugar, which I am ashamed of. It’s really hard for me to eat just one cookie or one donut. Many times abstaining all together keeps me from overeating in the process of indulging. I’ll expound on this a little more later.

Society/Culture

My journey of health and in particular diet, led me to do a lot of reading on alternative diets to the prevalence of processed foods often found in the modern world. Paleo diets, real food diets, keto, vegetarian, vegan… They’ve all got positive aspects and I’ve learned a lot about how my body responds over the years. I say this to point out that I don’t really think broader culture or society impacts how I think about food because I’ve experimented with so many alternative styles of eating in the last 10 years. I would definitely call this a good thing.

Self

I’m an emotional eater and food was the way I self medicated when I was a kid and I was dealing with stress. It’s a pattern that is deeply rooted in my psychology and I have been working to alter and eliminate it for a long time. Binging on sugar has taken many forms over the years: Processed junk food from the store or homemade cookies with all the love that comes from a family member’s secret recipe. If it had sugar, I was eating way too much of it. As an adult, I’ve realized that the tendency to overeat sugar is often there without the stress as an instigator. In social settings I try to avoid the one home baked cookie with organic ingredients because later on when the party’s over I’m going to go to the store and get a package of Oreos and I’m going to finish that package. That’s if I don’t embarrass myself by eating way too many of those cookies at that social gathering. Then I’m going to feel like crap mentally, emotionally, and physically. I’m also going to be ashamed of myself because I still struggle with a bad habit I developed as a little kid dealing with chronic stress and I’m supposed to be ‘the fitness guy’ not ‘the binge eater guy’. I’m going to hide it and not seek accountability and help from my friends which only helps perpetuate the cycle. Fortunately I know how much better I feel on a real food diet with little to no sugar because I have done it before for extended periods of time. So I keep working to kick the habit.

How Stories Collide

In 2018, 6 years after having left the military, I got a job working for the local Public School System in Tacoma, WA. I was an internship coordinator for high school students. It was my job to work with students to understand their interests and pair them with employment opportunities throughout the city for which they would receive class credit toward graduation. When a friend suggested I apply for the job I had been motivational speaking for about 3 years at that point. I had probably spoken a 100 times at that point. I had given small group workshops and coached several people 1-on-1. I wasn’t some massive success and I hadn’t gotten paid for 95% of the work I did but I had experience helping people with creating a vision and working towards it. Add in the rollercoaster I had been through when I graduated high school, went to college majoring in engineering, and then ended up quitting engineering due to massive depression, I felt I had all the real world experience to offer to young people in this role. It seemed like a dream job for me. I was DEAD WRONG!

Without going into all the details just know that public education is filled with bureaucracy and a lot of bullshit. Teachers are asked to do ridiculous things often with few resources. Within 3 months of starting the job, I felt like I was being asked to compromise my moral compass. Daily arguing with coworkers and administrative staff led me to choose quitting the job. When people found out I left, they always assumed the teenagers were driving me crazy. Quite the opposite, it was the other adults who made me want to fight them sometimes. The kids could be annoying but their kids. I expect someone whose brain is still forming to be immature from time to time. Interestingly enough, difficulty with adults in personal training and life coaching is a big reason I don’t do either anymore (I’m probably lying about this). A huge commonality across all of these experiences is grown people working furiously to justify their own hypocrisy. They’ve got a story that they believe must be true or, if it’s not, it’s the end of the world.

As I said before, in the 6 years before taking this job I had made at most $24,000 in a year. That was only for the one year where I worked in the Emergency Room I mentioned before. The other years where I was personal training or speaking I made more like $6,000 to $10,000 a year. I survived by using money I had saved up while in the military. The school job was paying me a salary of $50,000 a year and that included summers off. In the 3 months I worked for them, I felt like I was a millionaire. As frugal as I was and still am, that kind of money for 5-10 years would have been life changing for me. But, I had to walk away for my own conscience. The positive aspects were so amazing: I was coaching kids 1-on-1, I was teaching kids, I was still working on my speaking business, and I was building relationships with businesses around the city. And, I was making 50 grand a year. But I won’t compromise my morals for a dream job. When this situation didn’t work out, depression and anxiety set in:

“Am I ever going to be able to make enough money to support a Family?”

“Is any woman ever going to want to be with me romantically? I barely make enough money to support myself and I don’t have anything resembling what society would cal a respectable career.”

“Will I ever be able to retire?”

“Work situations never seem to work out for me in the long run? Is something wrong with me? Is something off in my brain chemistry?”

I had these thoughts for a couple of years after leaving that job. Eventually I started working as a security guard at a hospital and my shifts were usually in the evening from 2pm to 10pm. I’m naturally a morning person but this was the shift that was available. Working in the evening accelerated my sugar cravings and when you add all the doubts in my mind about my future, there were many shifts where I left work and went straight to the store for some cookies. I was self medicating big time. Just before my wife and I started dating I had started MMA training and that was helping me come out of the fog of depression but I had gotten used to eating a lot of sugar and now I was also burning a ton of calories which made it easier to eat the sugar.

Before I go any further, notice how my eating habits, financial worries, work life, and romantic life are all connected together and spilling into each other. I find that this is one of the hardest things for people to see in their own lives which makes it difficult to predict how a change in one area affects other areas. Every specific goal we set happens in context with the rest of our lives.

One of the things I’ve really struggled with since I was 24 years old and made the decision to walk away from engineering is letting go of the old ‘American Dream’ success narrative that had formed in my head when I was a small child. The idea that what makes me valuable as a person is a high relative income in a science based career field doing work that has lots of prestige attached to it, is a story that has caused me lots of frustration and sadness at different times in my life over the last 17 years. Add to that the struggle to find peace with being a single man for so many years (14 years before meeting my wife). The emotional burden I carried was extremely heavy at times. But, it all came from rigid expectations (assumptions from stories) about what my life was supposed to be and the difficulty in accepting the reality that my life is. In recent years, a wholehearted acceptance of my singleness (before I met my wife), an acceptance of the fact that I love martial arts and want to compete even though I’m older, an acceptance that I love general fitness and could literally spend all day moving/stretching/exercising, an acceptance that I love the writing process, and an acceptance that a simple security job pays my bills while I do those things… The story of career and success that I had when I was a younger man in college looks nothing like what my life is today and when I ignore that story and allow myself to be who I am and enjoy where I am, my sense of freedom and joy increase immensely. When I was growing up nobody would have told me or my family that I would not only be content but at times downright giddy about being a security guard. It’s taken some time to embrace it but it’s the honest self expression in other parts of my life that being a security guard allows, that brings me so much joy.

Over the last three years as I’ve learned to embrace who I am and embrace my reality, I’ve realized that my anxiety about my financial future has been totally misplaced. Compared to most Americans I would say I’m a fairly frugal dude. If I wasn’t married, literally the only furniture I would have would be my pull up bar, some free weights, and my mattress. Not because I’m cheap. I have $100 boxing gloves. My pullup bar cost $300, 11 years ago when I bought it, and my MMA Gym membership costs $129/month. These are the things I really care about so I spend money on them. It just so happens that things like houses, cars, furniture, clothes, and fancy vacations are not things that I care about. That being said, with the help of strict budget rules I created for myself several years ago, I’ve saved more money for retirement in the last 4 years than I had the previous decade and all on a part time security guard wage. Also, recently, because I have learned to embrace my situation at a deep level, the urge to eat emotionally has significantly decreased and my sugar consumption is way down. I’m still vulnerable to the habit of overeating sugar but it’s not coming from the need to soothe hard emotions.

Letting go of faulty stories and focusing on the facts of who I am and what truly matters to me in the world has shifted my mental/emotional experience of what is basically the same reality. As I’ve said before, sometimes we need a practical shift and sometimes we need a perspective shift. This is why understanding our story and how it’s impacting our actions is so important. I could have started working as a part time security guard when I first left the military and there’s no telling how that would have changed things for me. I don’t regret the decisions I made then but I’m definitely taking a better understanding of myself into my future as I recognize where faulty beliefs around success have caused me so much pain because of the expectations they created.

Reflection

Remember, in the last post I asked you to think about two habits that changed during the pandemic (1 in a positive way / 1 in a negative way). Above I shared the stories I was carrying around money and food that led to shifts in habits. I also shared the goals I had in each area. Now it’s your turn to think through the goals, stories, and events that exist around the habit that improved and the habit that declined that you listed from the last post.

As always, these exercises are suggestions to help you further understand the principles of ownership from my book. Clarity comes if you put in the time to sit and do the writing to fully and truthfully answer the questions.