Meaning Beyond Success
Case Illustration
All names and identifying details in these case illustrations are fictional. They are composite sketches drawn from clinical and coaching experience, not accounts of real individuals.
Not the same thing.
By age 48, Sissy had been in the Army, lived abroad working for a global management consultancy, and made a success of starting and selling her own business. Now on her third stint helping a startup scale, she knew she had been successful at everything she had tried — but found herself feeling more empty and less passionately engaged than customary. Twice divorced and both kids in college, Sissy wondered what mistakes she had made in terms of her life priorities. She had done her best as parent and businesswoman. She was clearly still a valuable executive. But something was missing.
With no clear problems pertaining to her job performance, Sissy turned to a private coach to explore how she might address her vague ennui. What emerged surprised her. One interest that stirred her passion was helping veterans find their way into gainful employment once they left the Service — something she herself had navigated without difficulty, but which she knew many others found disorienting and hard. And as she sat with that interest, something else came into view: her own deceased father had been an injured Army veteran whose depression and struggle with trauma had put a stamp on her own family’s life — something she had never really talked about with anyone.
She hadn’t connected these things before.
Sissy began finding community venues where she could work with vets. Given her own Army background and her empathy, she had no trouble gaining their trust, and found being with vets and helping them oddly fulfilling. Over time she worked with her company to craft a program to hire and train vets — a source of positive feelings and motivation for everyone involved. The idea of respecting and leveraging disabilities in general, and veterans in particular, was eventually incorporated into the mission and values of the budding organization, becoming an important part of its identity and a source of drawing in and retaining talent.
Sissy came in wondering if “work-life balance” could give answers to her vague emptiness. What she learned was that a life of genuine accomplishment is not the same as a life of genuine meaning — which not everyone in our achievement-oriented world tunes into.
On the Difference Between Accomplishment and Meaning
What coaching brought Sissy was the possibility of a different quality of attention to herself: slower, less goal-directed, attuned more to feeling than to problem-solving. This quality of attention, and the permission to be present to herself, led her to what was already there — an idea about helping veterans that stirred because it was a seed buried deep within her person, her authentic reality. Finding and nourishing that seed brought forth a great tree: a tree of connection to her father, to his and the family’s grief, and to the passion of possibility — the possibility of mourning, of repair, and of giving to others what could not be given to him.
See also: When a Life Change Forces the Question
See also: Past Achievement (Essay)