Why YOu Need To LEAD Your Personal Meaningful Revolution: Season 9 Starter
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Shawn Buttner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast, where we help curious people who feel restless and uninspired in their career and life, find the strategies to build their most joyful, fulfilled, and purposeful lives. I'm your host, Shawn Buttner, and today we're going to start off this season with this very important question, and that is How can I effectively lead my meaningful revolution, right?
My personal one. And I wanted to start out the season with this because it's such important thing that I haven't been really been doing in the podcast. So we just finished 100 episodes and my vision for things going future is to try to have. Each season sent around a kind of bigger question and then through guests and [00:01:00] independent episodes flesh out that question from a different perspective, a different idea, or a different strategy for y'all.
And so that's this season's question. How can I lead my personal meaningful revolution? And. It's a question that's really important to me as the host of this, as a coach in my business, because this is a question that ultimately led to everything changing for me. Now the story is, right out of college, out of grad school, I got a job at a large retailer that you probably know in their information systems department.
doing web development, right? Which is insane because I went to business school for my undergrad. [00:02:00] I went and had a master's in information systems, which is just process flows, essentially for layman terms. And took a couple of courses in Computer coding in college then at the graduate level, had a couple of, just a general interest in computers since I could walk.
And so I had some coding experience, mostly focused on process development and teams, but got this job as a web developer for this retailer. Now, As soon as I jumped in, I was following my passion for technology at that point in my life. Cause I thought I want to do something with computers. I eventually want to start my own business.
I'll go to business school to get skills that can transfer either into tech or when I decided to do my own thing to do my own thing. So that was the thinking behind that. And maybe you've ever had a situation where you were just trying to figure out what you [00:03:00] wanted to do, right? That was me
I start my first job, and, I'm not sure if you've ever experienced the shock of what you thought your life was going to be and then what it actually was. Because at this particular retailer, not only did I feel like I had something to prove, like I was an imposter, because I didn't have a computer science degree in this very technical role that I had taken.
But, I also wasn't prepared for going from I control my schedule, I can control when I, do my projects, to having, very aggressive deadlines, to never feeling like you ever get ahead of your work, and from always feeling like I was just second guessed, right? Because of my experience, because of this new environment.
And so very quickly, I felt overwhelmed and burnt out pretty much the [00:04:00] whole time I was at this job. And so you imagine like the first month, you're like, this is probably how it's supposed to be. And as you go to two or three months, you're like, okay, this is coming soon. As you get to the six month part, that's when I snapped.
And I remember not being able to sleep because I was dreaming about work. I would. Do, a 12 hour day or whatever at, 10 hour day, 12 hour day. Might be on call for this particular job, so might be interrupted at night. I was always thinking about work. I was always worried about work. I would go to sleep and I would dream about going into work to do work to the point where I would actually solve coding problems in my dreams and go to work and then be like, Oh, that's what it is.
Like my subconscious was so dialed in. And I'm not sure if you've ever had that experience where you're so overwhelmed and stressed out [00:05:00] that your subconscious is not letting you rest. Like you're actually continuing to do the work while you sleep. So I felt trapped. I felt this really Whatever I did wasn't going to lead out of this horrible mess or change my life, right? And maybe you've been in a period of your life where you're like, anything I do isn't working. Anything I use and do isn't making things better. And whatever I am doing, right? maybe this isn't even what you want to be doing.
you start second guessing yourself. You start questioning yourself. In that moment for me when I, it's three o'clock in the morning, I remember rolling over and seeing the clock and like my brain's going a thousand times a minute because I can't stop thinking about my job. And I remember consciously like saying out loud in the darkness saying something needs to change.
I am going [00:06:00] to kill myself doing this or I'm going to do something big that'll change. and I'll figure this out and live a happy life or I will die trying. that's how desperate I was. And I feel like a lot of people, when you start your meaningful revolution, you make that decision that something in my life needs to transform or change.
And it's dire, right? It's do or die. It's, I need to figure this out. period. And so when I made that decision, I started researching personal development and other things that were going on about like personal finance. Cause I was having problems with my student loans, which was adding stress onto this intense work environment.
And I started to think again, what do I want for myself? What do I want for my family? the legacy I leave this [00:07:00] world, my future kids when I would have them, because I was single at the time. And ultimately it took me years to get clear on what I wanted to do, how I wanted to help people, and then create the plan to leave, create the plan to change.
But that question of what do I need to do? To get clear on my future. What do I need to do to create that plan? And what do I have to do to enact that change is all things that leaders do, right? You have to understand why you're doing things. You have to be communicating to your teams or yourself in our context, why this is important, why this needs to happen.
And. Then you have to create the plan and execute the plan and make it happen, and that last part on execution can be really tricky and tough, but the aim of this season is to highlight [00:08:00] leadership principles that will help you. lead your change in your life to help you express your purpose or your mission or your big ambitions in a way that'll help you get more progress on them, help you connect with it more, but ultimately help you lead that change that you need for yourself and your community.
So that's why I am really excited for this season So real quick, though, I want to talk about why you need to step into leadership right now to fully realize your personal meaningful revolution. And the number one thing. In your career in life, that is true is that nobody else will, right?
You have to be leading your career, and we said this a lot at that first job, where you can't expect opportunities to just pop up and land in your lap. You have to be actively, and be very clear on what you're going [00:09:00] after, and taking steps to move that forward. And, if you're not going to do it yourself, One, it's going to be harder for people to help you, right?
Cause they, you don't know what you want. They don't know how to help you. But two, it's not anyone else's responsibility. And I know that seems a lot more challenging than this. I've been on this podcast, this question really does fire me up because it did lead to so much change for me from switching a job that was overwhelming.
And, not suited for me to building experience that helped me get,start a business, help me, join another large organization that was way cooler. just on the stuff that we were working on, right? It was, equally cool organizations. But, It's life changing when you start to lead and you can believe that your actions and the things that you're doing can create change in your life.
[00:10:00] It's highly impactful when you can realize that and that the only person that's stopping you from taking that leadership role oftentimes is you.It's undoing stories and, creating the mindset that you can figure things out that. You're worthy. Maybe, there's so many different mindset things I can get in the way of this and we'll talk about it this season on The Meaningful Revolution, but nobody else will lead your career or life.
And that's a really powerful thing. to really internalize if you can. the second reason why you need to fully lead your meaningful revolution is that your people are waiting for you. The thing that you are passionate about, that mission, that big ambition, there are other people out there striving for that too, and they need you.
They need you to show up with your expertise on trains, on your expertise and [00:11:00] The fact that you nerd out about AI or guitar or building high performance teams in an organization or, taking a company from early stage, investors to a mature company or whatever that thing is for you. And it could be, anything, right?
This meaningful revolution isn't just career focused. It could be getting into the best shape in your life. It could be figuring out how to be the best parent you can be for your kids. And your kids are waiting for you. Your peers are waiting for you. The world is waiting for you to make the decision to contribute, to add positivity and positively to the world.
And it's your time now, right? The thing that will prevent you from actually starting or making progress on your meaningful revolution, or your personal meaningful revolution, [00:12:00] is delay. It's thinking that somebody else will do it. It's thinking that, oh, you don't have the time to do it. we have a limited time on this planet, folks.
And, don't get too excited. Don't be wasting that time. Get to it. Get to it now. I'm cheering you on and encouraging you, of course, but there is this sense that we only have so much time to get things done. And that's The truth. So get to it, folks. Okay, the third reason why you need to step into leadership to fully realize your meaningful revolution is when you get that clarity of where you want to go and how you want to contribute and the legacy you want to leave or the impact you want to have with people and you're very clear about it and you're actively taking steps towards it, you're going to attract it.
similar people with a similar mission. And the power of that [00:13:00] is when you're feeling down, you'll have other people that will inspire you, right? you'll have other people that can help you along the way and speed up your progress to getting to a point where you can meaningfully impact people.and that's something that I personally have neglected a lot in my life is communicating and talking and getting people involved in the revolution, right?
And helping people live fantastic lives that they love because it's meaningful to them and it's helping them in a way that challenges them to grow, but also is just fulfilling down in the gut, There's a lot of power in finding your community and finding that inspiration and that strength from other people that are on the path.
And so that's what I want for each and every one of you. [00:14:00] and the fourth thing, while you need to step into your leadership to fully realize your personal meaningful revolution is that your impact is your community, right? We can get so much more done collectively as a group. Then we can individually, which is why all of the biggest companies in the world are companies filled with groups of people and not one person who made a million dollars selling cat food online or whatever it is, So it takes businesses organizing large groups of people or getting large groups of people around a cause or a movement to get change.whether, again, that could be a civil rights type thing where people are coming together to make change in society. It could be getting all of the top researchers in cancer to help better facilitate that cure.
whatever that is, coming together with people, [00:15:00] being influenced by other people and influencing other people because it's a co creation, a co influencing process. When it comes to community, that's really positive for everyone that we can have a greater impact, a greater thump out in the world than we could by ourselves.
that's why this season I feel is important and why I'm really excited about it to explore these topics with our guests, to throw ideas of what I've learned about leadership, from business school to now reading tons of books, having some experience leading projects on teams and whatnot.
yeah, I just am really excited about it and I hope you are too.
Before we get into a couple of the more specific questions, I'm hoping individual episodes will address this next season and the coming episodes. [00:16:00] I,you might be worrying about how, what would happen, or
as we're going forth into the next season, you might. Worry about missing an amazing episode of The Meaningful Revolution especially since it's about leadership. So what if you got a weekly newsletter that shared the episode of the week about leadership, some secret extra content, and more, set directly to your inbox?
you can. You can join The Meaningful Revolution newsletter for free, And never miss an episode of the podcast. When you sign up, you'll be able to select from a curated playlist with some of my favorite topics we've done up into this point. So AI or creators or personal development. I'll be adding leadership after this season.
So we'll continue to add to that curated list. And if you're on the newsletter already, you'll you're getting the updated Episodes every week. So you're not [00:17:00] missing out. So don't miss out. Go to meaningfulrevolution. com, which is in the show notes below to sign up again for free, get your curated playlist of episodes.
You can listen to right now and really just nerd out together on a particular topic that you're passionate about. Like I said, this season's going to be leadership and I look forward to nerding out. With you there.
With that said, that concludes this episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. Again, I am Shawn Buttner and go out there and live purposefully because we need you out there doing that. Okay? That said, we'll see you in the next episode. Take care.
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