Stop Trying to Be Your Own Chief How Officer
For most of my life, I thought success came from having a plan.
Actually…let me correct that.
I thought success came from having every plan.
A backup plan.A contingency plan.A spreadsheet.A timeline.A risk assessment.
Thirty years in corporate project management will do that to a person.
If there was a problem, I believed my job was to solve it.If there was uncertainty, my job was to eliminate it.If I couldn’t see every step ahead, I assumed I wasn’t ready to begin.
Then life did something remarkable.
It ignored my plans.
Losing my career, reinventing myself, becoming an entrepreneur, writing books—none of it happened according to a carefully crafted roadmap.
Looking back now, I realize something that would have saved me years of unnecessary worry.
I was trying to do a job that was never mine.
I like to joke that I have a Chief How Officer.
My CHO.
Some people call it God.Some call it the Universe.Some call it intuition, divine guidance, higher wisdom, or simply life unfolding.
The name doesn’t matter nearly as much as the lesson.
The CHO’s job is figuring out how.
My job is deciding where I want to go.
Somewhere along the way, many of us accepted the belief that before we take the first step, we need to know every step that follows.
But that’s almost never how meaningful change works.
When I decided not to spend the rest of my life chasing another corporate job, I had no idea I’d become an author.
When I wrote Bloom Again, I certainly didn’t know it would lead me to writing Now What?
When I began sharing my thoughts online, I couldn’t have predicted the people I’d meet, the conversations we’d have, or the opportunities that would appear because I simply showed up.
None of those things were visible from the starting line.
They appeared because I started walking.
I’ve noticed something else over the years.
The harder I grip the steering wheel of life, the harder life seems to become.
When I loosen my grip—not my commitment, but my need to control every outcome—ideas begin to arrive.
A conversation.
An unexpected invitation.
A sentence that suddenly appears while I’m making coffee.
A person who crosses my path at exactly the right moment.
Coincidence?
Maybe.
Or maybe life has always been speaking this way, and we simply don’t hear it because we’re too busy trying to micromanage tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean we sit on the couch waiting for the Universe to do all the work.
Far from it.
We still have responsibilities.
We still make decisions.
We still do the work that’s ours to do.
But we stop believing that every answer has to originate from us.
Sometimes our only assignment is to become quiet enough to recognize the next idea when it arrives.
I’ve learned to ask a simple question whenever I’m standing at the edge of uncertainty.
“What is mine to do today?”
Not next year.
Not five years from now.
Today.
Because tomorrow’s steps have a funny way of revealing themselves after today’s step has been taken.
Maybe you’ve been trying to carry a burden that was never yours.
Maybe you’ve been exhausting yourself trying to solve a problem whose answer hasn’t had the chance to appear yet.
Maybe you’ve been acting as your own Chief How Officer.
If that’s you, here’s your permission to resign from that position.
Set your intention.
Be clear about the direction you want your life to move.
Pay attention.
Trust the ideas that arrive with a quiet sense of rightness.
Then take the next step.
You don’t have to know the entire route.
That’s above your pay grade.
Julie Bolejack, MBA
The Mindful Activist
Reflection
Where in your life are you trying to control how instead of trusting yourself enough to simply take the next step?
What might become possible if you let your own Chief How Officer handle the route while you focused on walking with courage?
Sometimes the greatest act of faith isn’t believing everything will work out.
It’s believing that the next step is enough.
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