Rocky Montage in real time…

I blame every movie with an uplifting Rocky Montage, featuring people working towards their goals and making progress in a matter of a few minutes combined with spirited and uplifting music. A YouTube creator I really enjoy watching (Beatrice Caruso*) mentioned the following statement in the context of documenting the process of losing weight and self-improvement and it resonated with me: “what you’re witnessing is a Rocky Montage in real time, so it’s not exciting…”.

Six months ago, I quit my corporate job. It might seem like odd timing, since we are still in a global pandemic. After eight years of working for a big corporation though, it was time for me to get out of the treadmill and take a break. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with my corporate career. I collaborated with wonderful people from across the globe, my manager was always supportive and a truly kind person. Working hours were sometimes awfully long but the job also came with a lot of flexibility, especially since we were working from home since spring 2020.

Still, I felt an increasingly strong urge to get out of the corporate environment, at least for a while. I wanted to recharge and reflect on what I want to do with my career going forward.

My last day at work was in mid-June and I was extremely excited to take the full summer off. I promised myself, that I will only implement a more structured daily schedule and focus on searching for a new job starting in September.

The summer was wonderful, and September came and went. We are now well into November and progress in finding my new career path is not existent. I updated my CV and translated it from English to German for the applications I will eventually write. Or will I?

I started searching through job adds, researching companies I could see myself working for and still everything feels like looking at a restaurant’s menu and nothing sounds particularly good. It all sounds ok but nothing truly appetizing.

The stress to unwind

There are many aspects of my life I am incredibly happy with, and I am truly fortunate to even have the luxury to dwell in this existential dread. When I quit my corporate job, I did not expect to simply have this epiphany and suddenly see a clear path ahead of me. I may have hoped for one though.

I was successful with my first goal, and I got rid of the stress coming from a corporate career and recharged. However, the second part of this venture has not been tackled successfully yet. I have not figured out, what I want to do going forward. Ironically, this is now starting to stress me out, since I’m already a few months into this experiment and it feels like I have little to show for. I’m not even opposed to another corporate career if I find something I am excited to work on.

Daily schedule of doom

On my quest to finally make progress, I had to start somewhere. Social media can be a great source of inspiration. It is also a deep swamp of absurdity and I very much overconsumed both ends of the spectrum over the past few months. As a female millennial the algorithms frequently bless my feed with a lot of glamourous self-care, self-improvement, and productivity content.

If you happened to read my post from two years ago “A solution to the New Year’s resolution predicament – …” you already know that I do struggle with setting specific goals. If I happen to set a goal anyways, chances are that I will not follow any structured plan to reach that goal. This does not mean, I have never achieved anything in my life, but usually there were certain outside pressures or deadlines involved.

Considering this, I’m not sure why I thought creating a daily schedule for myself would be the best first step to make progress. I guess after seeing hundreds of “productivity hacks” on Instagram and watching one to many “daily routine for productivity” video on YouTube, I started to believe this must be the way to achieve greatness. So, I created it, the perfect daily schedule including time blocks for all the things you want (according to the internet):

• Meditation & stretching
• Reading, learning and coffee
• Work
• Household chores
• Project time
• Time for working out
• Free time

Spoiler alert, I stuck to this schedule for exactly one day. Does this mean I have already failed? It made me feel bad for a moment, that I had no desire to stick to the perfect daily schedule I created to better myself. So on to the next thing a guess… what this space for my next post about the Happiness Journal I bought 6 months ago and have not used once since then…

Finding purpose while procrastinating

Where do I go from here? Finding purpose while procrastinating is not easy. It can be stressful and there is no short cut. Watching the Rocky Montage in real time would be very boring and it would be exceedingly difficult to see any progress whatsoever. And this is where I am. In the middle of my own Rocky Montage, trying to become a better version of myself and to find something I am more enthusiastic about than my previous corporate career. But it is in real time and therefore a bit boring and difficult to see any progress.

*Inspired by Beatrice Caruso