It is NOT true that your relationship depends on you continuing contracting

I heard one of my clients utter the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ the other day.

I don’t know the specifics but it is one of those phrases that stops us from taking action. ‘don’t rock the boat’ also comes to mind.

It triggers fear which both makes us unlikely to act and also halts our creativity. Fear closes our mind to possibility.

To be honest it made me quite angry so I thought I’d turn this energy into something positive.

So let’s look at the phrase. What might you be wishing for?

Work that you enjoy? That you find personally rewarding. Where you feel good about the positive impact you can see you are making on people’s lives.

What do you need to be careful about? The power of this is almost in the ambiguity of it. Something unexpected may happen which will really f**k things up. You can see why it gets me angry.

If you find yourself saying similar phrases, it is not your fault, they seep into our brains through the culture we live in. It is a ‘play it safe’ culture where disaster is around every turn. Ultimately it is a culture of compliance. This is not what I am here to write about but I do talk about this in my regular Escape your BA Contracting career (register here).

So the specific thing many of us are afraid of here is our relationship collapsing if we stop contracting.