There was a week, not long after I made full professor, when I sat down at my desk and opened my calendar.

It was blank.

Not light. Completely blank.

The week before had been insanely busy. I had closed out a research project, prepped and delivered two webinars, and engaged in a stretch of writing in the mornings before anyone needed me. My calendar had been built this way on purpose, the way I'd built every calendar for years. 

Now there was nothing on it, because there was nothing I had to put on it.

I want to be precise about what I felt, because it wasn't dread. It was actually a sense of relief. I had been climbing toward that promotion for over a decade. 

Every webinar, every paper, every hour blocked out before the sun was up was a thing I owed to the academic rank I was trying to reach.

I'd reached it. The obligations were met. The calendar was empty because I had finally earned an empty calendar. 

I sat there in that relief for a while before I understood what I was really looking at.

This is the part that surprised me, because I've always loved this work. 

The research, the writing, the showing up. I do this work because I'm built to: the hunger to keep learning was never on loan. That part was always mine.

For ten years the ambition of a promotion supplied the direction. 

It told all that genuine curiosity where to aim, and I mistook the direction for the drive. As long as something outside me was pointing the way, I never had to find out where I'd aim on my own.

What the promotion removed was the direction. The hunger had nothing to do with it, and the second it was gone, I got handed a question I'd never actually had to answer: with the road gone and the wanting still here, where do you point it now?

The empty calendar is the prize and the warning sign at the same time, and you can't tell them apart by looking.

The open space I spent ten years earning looks exactly like the open space of a career that has dulled a little. 

Same blank week either way. 

One is rest you earned. The other is a career winding down while it still feels like a break. 

That morning, I couldn't have told you which one I was looking at.

I see a version of this in seasoned career professionals all the time, and I used to read it as a motivation problem. 

The coach who's still running the workshop they built nine years ago. 

The advisor coasting on a framework that was current during grad school and hasn't been refreshed since. 

The practitioner who stopped going to the training, stopped reading the new research, stopped being a student of their own field, and would tell you, honestly, that they don't really need to because they're established and it works for them, so why fix it?

I don't think those people are unmotivated.

I just think the requirement was lifted and nobody told them. The thing that had kept them sharp was the obligation, and when that fell away, so did the growth. They never noticed the difference because coasting on what you already know feels exactly like knowing it.

The reason advice like "just keep learning" never fixes this is that it's aimed at the wrong thing. You can't discipline your way back into curiosity. 

Believe me, I tried. Sitting at that blank calendar, I told myself I should sign up for something, read something, stay current, but none of it took. I was doing it because I thought I should, and that never lasts long.

What pulled me back in wasn't another course for myself. It was building something for someone else. I started writing for other career professionals, creating content I hoped would be useful, building courses that met an educational gap. And the learning came roaring back the moment it had somewhere to go. To write something worth another practitioner's time, I had to go find out what was actually true. The growth I couldn't manufacture for myself showed up the second it was in service of someone on the other end.

That's when I understood what the promotion had really taken. For ten years my growth had a direction, and if I'm honest, it pointed at me. Others benefited on the way, but they weren't the destination. Growth pointed at your own climb has a summit, and when you reach it, you're done. Growth in service of other people doesn't. There's no point at which you've helped enough practitioners get better at this for the work to be finished.

So if the obligation disappeared tomorrow, what would you still choose to do? When you sit at your own blank week, the real question isn't whether you'll keep growing. It's who you're growing for? If the honest answer is nobody, that's the tell, and no amount of willpower will fix it. I didn't keep growing because I'm disciplined. I kept growing because I found people to grow for.

The calendar's full again. This time I know who it's for.

Heather
The Coach for Career Coaches

I’ve got a quick question for you.

If you had more time to invest in your CPD, what would you focus on?