N.K. Murray

Too often, we as humans, bypass simple measures of checks and balances in our lives in order to facilitate the best outcome, often to the detriment of that which brought us to that outcome. As a leader, I’m asked on a daily basis to hold my people not only accountable to the their actions, but at some level, be responsible for the overall outcome which was then derived from those actions. It’s a difficult task on the best of days – balancing the best and worst of human emotion with a bottom-line result of the business.

What I have realized as of late, and have been gaining a greater realization of these last few years, is the utter cost of that endgame. I have pushed forward, come hell or high water, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead, with a ‘defined’ goal in mind, only to find out recently that the brass ring that I’ve been seeking my entire career is nothing more than white metal coated in cheap paint. For those of us who have tied their self-worth to their career for reasons which are their own, there seems to have been a comeuppance as of late, one that has shoved a mirror in front of our faces and shown us what we look like without all of our carefully cultivated faces on.

Unfortunately, this unease/discomfort/dissatisfaction has been eking into my cognizance – or perhaps, vice versa. I’ve taken some time lately for self-reflection – more time than I have previously. Taken some time to evaluate that which makes me happy. I’ve come to the realization that I’ve filled my persona with things that portend to make me happy for short periods of time until the adrenalin wears off, and the sinking awareness of the situation I’ve now encumbered myself with has hit me. I have touted that I don’t care what other people think, when in reality, I care that I have done more or better than those who’ve doubted me. I have this HORRIBLE habit of hearing that I can’t or won’t or shouldn’t do something, only to do it and hurt myself in the process. I have an extraordinarily bad habit of going HARD at something because I’m expecting it to make me feel better, or expecting it to fulfill me. It then hits me – and I’m inherently disappointed once it’s done, and I’m left empty thereafter. I’ve done a couple Empire State Rides, hoping to gain more from it than it got from me, and was left feeling bereft when I got back and there wasn’t anything left. I’ve ridden my bike to feel something more than sadness, anger and pain, and wound up feeling only sadness, anger and pain when I couldn’t devote the time I needed to be excellent at it. Being an overachiever with an inferiority complex as a tenet of my identity as a person, it’s a struggle to walk through life like a bantam cock constantly looking for the next opponent.

It’s exhausting.

It’s exhausting to feel as though you’re suffering from imposter syndrome in your personal and professional lives, needing to put on this face constantly to show people that you’re doing AMAZING. That everything is fine. Because ultimately, what people care about is that you’re doing fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but the bar to prove that is so incredibly low – a simple statement of veracity, a simple off-putting ‘don’t worry about me!’ is in most cases more than sufficient to allay concerns of even the most ardent of loved ones.

I have spent the last several years and more feeling as though I have kept on my mask and put forth this impression of this person that I don’t really feel inside. Call it clown’s makeup if you will – I have begun to hate the person I’ve become when I do the things that I do outside my small circle, and in full transparency, even within it for ease.

Here’s what I have learned recently – all of this pretense, all of this subterfuge?

It’s all bullshit.

Utter, inexplicable bullshit.

A friend told me years ago that everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face. How many of you have been punched in the face? I’m not talking about slaps. I’m not talking those whiffs that we all get. I’m talking bare-fisted, cold-cocked in the motherfucking face.

How many have had their psyche, that which that made them THEM, blown up because it wasn’t enough?

I’ll tell you – having been through the deaths of too many loved ones, the illnesses of too many loved ones, the cold realizations that come from facing your own inadequacies, insufficiencies, deterioration of yourself, and having your failures shoved in your face, that it’s a harsh reality check that comes when the foundation that you built your world on, the very things that you never questioned because they were SO YOU, are now, not good enough.

How many of those earthquakes have demolished every single semblance of what you were, individually, as a person, and caused you to look in the mirror and go ‘what the fuck?’

What the FUCK?

Why?

Why me?

Why does (insert deity here) hate me?

Why is life so unfair?

What did I do to deserve this?

(spoiler alert – none of the above matters)

That’s right – none of this matters.

You can’t blame 100% of what happens to you as a human on someone else. You cannot sit there and say that there is absolutely nothing you could have done differently at some point to change an outcome you didn’t like, even by 1%.

I know this, because I play the risk mitigation game as a career. I know this, because I have spent decades feeling guilty at the outcome of what happened, rather than the circumstances that got me to that point.

READ THAT AGAIN – I spent more time feeling guilty for the outcome of things at the end, when I should have regretted the things that got me to that point.

I preach, on a LITERAL daily basis about accountability. I talk to my team about how important it is to take action on that which they have control of and take pride in what they do for the greater good – the overall outcome. I have spent the last 16 years of my life preaching and sometimes screaming about compliance and risk management and mitigation of risk and have spent a considerable amount of my energy ensuring that the duckies were all in a row.

And I haven’t taken those words to heart – I haven’t walked that walk in my own life.

I can say that now – I am good boss. My people are incredible. But I feel a fraud personally because I had promised them that I was doing what I was asking them to do, and I lied.

It is inherently easy to place blame on everything but ourselves for where we are at in our lives. It’s almost inbred within us to do so. What’s intrinsically more difficult is to conduct a postmortem of a situation and try to figure out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and maybe if we are lucky, how to prevent it from happening again.

Here is what I have learned these last couple of years of getting punched in the proverbial face – some of which were outwardly apparent and some not so much:

• Humans are fallible. We are by virtue of our nature, human. We make mistakes. We aren’t perfect. We will never be perfect.
• Truth is a social construct – there are 3 sides to every story – yours, mine, and the truth. How many times have we contemplated that truth isn’t black and white?
• You can be changed by what happened to you, but refuse to be reduced by it – this is a derivative of a Maya Angelou quote. Proverbially thinking – getting punched in the face doesn’t always have to translate to brain damage.
• Winston Churchill said that if you’re going through hell, keep going. As much as we believe that the hell we are going through is the only thing that we know, will know – there is another side. Maybe that other side is little less hot, with fewer devils stabbing you with pitchforks, but the only way to get through it is to keep fucking going.

It’s all very easy to say. It’s less easy to do. I shared with someone recently that I have hated the person that I am when I travel to work – this face that I have to put on that’s not really me. This. . . bravado, this exuberance. I have lost the part of me that was brave, that was exuberant or eager or excited. The resentment I feel when I have to fake it until I make it to get somewhere in this life has suffocated me as of late. I have also hated the person I’ve become personally – this person who feels utterly compelled to DO MORE, BE MORE, and who’s utterly emotionally exhausted from pretending this makes me feel better, when it doesn’t do more than drain me.

It’s time to pay the piper.

There’s no more leeway in my rope for me to tell people that what I’ve been doing is what I should be doing, what I could be doing, what I want to be doing. I’ve spent more time than I care to admit in these sleepless nights flogging myself for the things that I now, cannot change. Change has to come from within – as I tell my team ad nauseam, without change there would be no butterflies, and frankly, I have a lot of folks who aren’t here anymore who always thought of me as a butterfly.

It all comes down to accountability. It is said that if you don’t change direction, you’ll wind up where you were heading. Where I was heading doesn’t serve me any longer, so I have to change my course – I have to change my sight-lines, and head in the direction I want to go. I have to change if I want to find the things in this life that make me happy. I know what those things are – and I have spent an immeasurable number of hours chasing what I thought would get me those things. I have preached Occam’s razor – the simplest explanation is most often the most accurate. I need to practice what I preach now. I need to dial my life back to the basics, and find the joy.

Ultimately – it doesn’t matter who says what, who does what, who feels what about your situation. It’s YOURS. Own it. Breathe it. Live it. And fuck what anyone else thinks.

As my friend Brian says – you do you, Boo.

So I will.