Have you ever looked at your calendar on a Sunday night and wondered how your week ended up looking like that? Who decided you’d spend your time this way? For many successful people, the honest answer is that nobody did. They’re living on autopilot, and most of the time they don’t even realize it.
Earlier in my career, I didn’t realize it either.
Before I started my coaching business, I ran a program that provided advice, counsel, and training to about 6,000 employees across more than 130 Federal Government agencies. One of my responsibilities was running our semi-annual conference for nearly 1,000 people. One year, the conference was focused on Ethical Leadership, and I had the privilege of serving as the emcee. It was a lot of fun, but that fun turned serious when our keynote speaker, Keith Darcy, took the stage.
Keith spoke about ethics and values, and about how great leaders and organizations are built on them. He explained that something deeper informed our leadership, and caring deeply was essential to ethical leadership. The talk was very inspiring, but somewhere in the middle, I realized it was also confronting. I didn’t feel like I deeply cared about my work, and while I did my best to do my best, I felt disconnected and bored.
I hate to admit it, but I’d been going through the motions for a while.
I settled into a senior leadership role where I felt that I couldn’t go deep on a subject or connect with it in a meaningful way. I had adopted the mindset of a generalist, and I remember wondering whether I could ever care about something enough to stand on a stage and talk about it the way Keith did.
Living on autopilot, one promotion at a time
Nobody sets out to become a generalist. It happens one promotion at a time.
You get good at something, so you’re asked to manage the people who do it. Then you’re asked to manage the managers, and eventually you’re overseeing work you no longer touch. From the outside, it looks like progress, and in many ways it is. But each step also moves you a little further from the work that made you care in the first place.
You’ve probably heard of the Peter principle, the idea that people in a hierarchy tend to get promoted until they reach a role they’re not good at. What I see more often is a subtle cousin of it. People get promoted until they reach a role they’re perfectly good at and no longer care much about.
That’s a hard thing to notice, because nothing is going wrong. The work gets done, the reviews are fine, and the next step up the ladder is right there. Nobody asks whether you still care about what you do, and after a while, you stop asking too. That’s how a lot of capable people end up living on autopilot.
Looking back, that’s exactly what happened to me. I thought I was burned out. In reality, I’d drifted into a role and a mindset I never really chose, and I was doing what others thought I should be doing and playing by someone else’s rules.
Here’s the subtle shift:
Find one place where you can go deep again.
You don’t have to give up your role or walk away from everything you’ve built. Being a generalist is a real skill, and plenty of good leaders need it. The shift is to stop letting breadth crowd out the one or two things you actually care about.
Here’s where I’d start:
- Ask yourself what you’d happily talk about for an hour without notes. That’s usually a clue to what you still care about.
- Find one way to get closer to it this month. Take on a project, teach what you know, or spend an afternoon with the people doing the work.
- Say it out loud to someone you trust.
That last one is what got me moving. The night of that conference, over a drink with my boss and a couple of colleagues, I told them I wanted work that was closer to my values and where I wanted my career to go. Nothing dramatic happened right away. But it started a chain of small decisions that led me to the Georgetown Leadership Coaching program, and about a year later, to starting my own business.
You don’t need to quit your job to stop living on autopilot. You just need to find your way back to something you care about enough to choose it on purpose.
