What I'm Sitting With

My 4-year old son asked me as he opened the dresser drawer that holds all of the decorative boxes I’ve collected in my world travels.

He insists that they’re from the “seven seas,” as if I’m a fictional swash-buckling pirate who has collected booty. In reality, the treasure box he spent the most time in contains a collection of coins. Not the rare minted ones, but the challenge coins that were given for a job well done, what feels like a lifetime ago.

I was never in the military, but my work at the National Security Agency was steeped in military tradition. Certain coins—usually from the highest levels of agency leadership—were highly coveted. They were sure signs that the work we did, the stuff we couldn’t talk about outside the walls of the agency, mattered. And, by extension, that the sacrifices we made to stay late, come in on weekends, or work on holidays, mattered. And that we mattered. This final conflation is a tricky one, especially in mission-driven work.

I left the agency more than a decade ago, which means I’ve been outside longer than I was inside. My work there feels like an entirely different life (and it was, in that it was before I was a mom), and the coins live shoved away in a box in a dresser drawer that I had all but forgotten about. I am reminded of the scene in Men in Black when Tommy Lee Jones asks Will Smith to use the memory thing on him, claiming a lifetime of memories he no longer wanted. It’s not that I don’t want those memories, but they live in some sort of segmented part of my brain that I can’t always access unless I try really hard. Most of my 20s do. I don’t remember why I got most of those coins, but I remember how I felt when I got them. Seeing those coins brought little fragments of the warm feeling of mattering.

There’s this thing that happens in life transitions, where we can lose touch with the ways we know that we matter. It’s disorienting when the old markers of success no longer apply and it brings up a whole host of questions.

• When we become parents: how do I know I’m doing this right?
• When we get a promotion: how do I know I’m successful?
• When we leave a job: how do I know I made an impact, or that sacrifices in the name of work were worth it?

I’m not immune to these questions—just last week at dinner with other business owners I was challenged to define ways to measure impact—and they’re central to the experiences my clients are having.

While I have often framed this conundrum as "redefining success,” its anchor points live deeper within us. Confidence is elusive without a sense of mattering, and when the system is so large as to obscure any one person’s individual impact, it’s tempting to pour our effort into the wrong thing to find that sense of mattering. We might attach it to a title, or salary, or even the amount of knowledge we have. Why I think this is important right now is because the external landscape has shifted seismically over the last five years, removing so many of the ways a knowledge worker might know that they matter as companies pivot and chase faster than the lagging metrics can catch up.

Without realizing it, we have tipped into a sneaky sense of scarcity that can leave us just enough off-kilter to feel “not quite right”...a mild sense of dis-ease as we look for the thing that might make us feel more whole. I don’t believe it’s that we matter any less than we used to. I believe our current social environment has pushed us to look for mattering in places that are more like junk food than a nutritious meal. And then we wonder why we’re still hungry.

There’s a name for this: significance scarcity. And as with all forms of scarcity, it tries to convince us to solve it alone. When mattering feels scarce, the instinct is to hunker down —work harder, think harder, prove it privately— rather than lean on the people around us. But identity was never meant to be a solo project. We become who we are in relationship, in reflection, in the presence of others who can see what we can’t see in ourselves. Scarcity tells us to go inward. The truer move is to go toward each other.

If this is you, I see you. Sometimes, I am you. And if you’re interested in thinking about this more —with me, and with each other— I’m hosting a Pop-Up Think Tank on 8/27, 12–1:30pm Eastern. Come toward each other with me.

Riverdrop Coaching News + Offerings

Pop-Up Think Tank: Significance Scarcity​
📅 8/27, 12–1:30pm Eastern | Online

If today's newsletter resonated, come think about it out loud with me and a group of others navigating the same disorientation. This isn't a workshop, nor does it necessarily have a tidy answer — it's a (free!) working session on a real and growing phenomenon that will leave participants feeling more connected and a little less scarce.

Coaching Compass

(You can hit reply if you want to unpack it—I read every message—or you can set up a time to connect with me here.)

P.S. A lot of what I explore in these newsletters comes back to the leadership patterns that emerge under pressure. The way you lead in those moments isn’t random. If you’re curious which pattern you tend to default to, you can take the diagnostic here.