Navigating This Lackluster Lull
Most mornings, I wake up and walk two miles with my dog. I've been doing this for about a year now, and it has done more for my work-life balance than most of the professional development I've sat through. There is something about moving your body before the day asks anything of you that makes the rest of it more bearable. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that lately, my workdays feel lackluster.
It's likely connected to everything going on in society that we push to the background of our lives, which can be draining. It pokes at us a bit each day, making even the things that used to feel meaningful in our lives feel a little muted and hollow. Walking my dog disrupts that feeling at the start of my day, but it’s just the start of a much larger shift in my day-to-day.
There's a particular kind of discomfort and pause that comes with the gut feeling that something just isn't right. You're doing the work. You're showing up. But something about work these days feels misaligned, and you don't know what to do with that feeling.
You are not alone. Many people are feeling stuck in a routine, going through the motions at work while trying to drown out the noise in our society. Moments like this inspire me to create counterspaces for shared processing and community building. Counterspaces are safe spaces that foster personal growth for people with shared lived experiences or shared identities.
This May, I'm opening a small-group coaching experience, The Port Liz Collective, to provide a structured space for people to figure out who they are becoming and how to navigate their future, given the state of the world, which I recently heard former First Lady Michelle Obama and Hasan Minhaj refer to as our Janky Era.
Using the FLOW Framework, a model I developed specifically for this moment, we'll move through the questions that focus on navigating the current reality to disrupt the lull with intention:
Who am I?
Where am I going?
What do I actually want?
How can I get there?
These questions aren’t rhetorical. We will work through them together. We'll also audit your strengths, explore your values, and build a roadmap that accounts for the reality you're actually navigating, not the one that existed before.
Sessions run bi-weekly from May through July in a small cohort of no more than six people. You'll have space to be honest, to grow alongside others who get it, and to leave each session with one clear action that moves you forward.
If you have been going through the motions and need strategies to lock in and reset, Port Liz Collective is a space for that work.
