Why Meaningful Missions Get Paused
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[00:00:00] James Marland: There's a lot of people in the helping profession who quietly carry a mission inside them. It's like it's an idea, it's a framework. It's a program or a course that they believe could help people beyond the work that they're doing every day. But somewhere along the way that mission paused.
[00:00:23] Not because it stopped mattering to them and not because it stopped mattering to the world, but it paused because the next step became unclear. We're gonna talk about that in this series, how to Restart the Mission. You paused. We're gonna talk about how meaningful work that matters stalls and how it can start moving forward again.
[00:00:46] There are gonna be three episodes in this first episode. We're gonna start with a simple but powerful idea. Missions don't fail. They pause, and once you understand [00:01:00] why missions pause, you can begin to move forward again. I hope that phrase brought you some relief that the thing that you care so much about.
[00:01:13] That you, you wanna bring into the world that other, that can help other people can be unpaused. , This is James Marland and this is the Scaling Therapist Podcast, where we help mission-driven professionals turn their experience into meaningful courses, programs, and resources.
[00:01:35] It's time to put your mission in motion.
[00:01:39] I recently heard. A story from comedian Jeff Foxworthy and he was talking about his early life beca before he became a famous comedian. And at that time he was working at IBM and he told this story about sitting in the break room one day and overhearing two [00:02:00] older employees, maybe executives in their ties, talking about their careers.
[00:02:06] And they, they talked and they were sharing that they had spent decades working there. They had built stable, profitable careers, and they had done everything the right way, the responsible way. But the conversation shifted because instead of talking about how happy they were, they started talking about what they wish they would had done.
[00:02:30] They started about what they left behind the businesses. They never started the ideas. They never tried the dreams. They never followed. And Foxworthy reports that he had a moment there where he said to himself, well, I don't wanna be that guy. I don't wanna reach the end of my career and wonder what might have been, and that moment helped push him towards comedy.
[00:02:57] And I think a lot about that [00:03:00] story. When I think about myself, but also when I think about therapists, coaches and consultants and people who spend their lives helping others, because many of them also carry a quiet dream, a quiet mission of their own. It's an idea that will help people, a framework that people can use a course, a program that they believe could help others in a meaningful way, but they.
[00:03:28] They don't act on it or they acted on it and something happened and now they're, they've paused. They've stopped. I can certainly relate to this because years ago I built a mentoring program for kids that were in mental health programs, and I wanted to connect them with loving people from the local church because I believed deeply that when you connect caring I believed deeply that the kids who survived, the kids who thrived, had an a caring adult that believed in them.
[00:03:59] So I had [00:04:00] believed in this idea. Completely and deeply, and I could see the impact that, that these adults made in the lives of the child. So for a while I started just focusing all my energy and putting real time into trying to build it. But eventually something happened that, that really, I wasn't prepared for.
[00:04:24] People didn't seem to care about the idea, the way I cared about it, and I kept thinking, well, maybe I'm explaining it wrong, or maybe I should have tried to explain it better. Maybe if I shared the vision more clearly or maybe if I worked harder or maybe I'm missing, it's me, uh, and something's wrong with me and I'm missing something.
[00:04:47] And if I did all these things correctly, then people would catch the vision and then they would get excited too. They didn't. And at the same time where I'm trying to get this [00:05:00] program working, there's no income coming in. And I had stepped away from some, um, you know, a career and I had tried to polish this mission and it didn't, it didn't take off.
[00:05:16] And so I, I started feeling this pressure. This pressure that I was putting on my wife, uh, to carry the load. And eventually I reached the place where I just, I just didn't know what to do. I didn't know what the next step was, and everything felt very, very risky. And so I started at thinking to myself and asking questions like well, maybe this, maybe this isn't the right time, or maybe it's something with me.
[00:05:41] Maybe I'm not the right person. Maybe, maybe people don't even care. Maybe this is just something that I care about and other people don't care about. And so I started to doubt. But the thing was, I never really stopped caring about the idea. I didn't [00:06:00] stop believing that something should be done. I just took a pause.
[00:06:06] I didn't kill the idea. I just put it in a drawer and stopped working on it. Maybe you can relate to that. 'cause maybe you've spent time and you're in the helping profession and you have this feeling that there's something more, that you don't have to be chained down to one-on-one sessions all the time.
[00:06:27] That there's something more for you. And you had this idea, it was meaningful to you. You wanted to build it. Maybe it was a course, a program, a workshop. Maybe it was doing some public speaking on that topic, and it, it would've taken you away from your one-to-one sessions and maybe you tried, maybe you tried to get it going, but you the, the ways forward didn't feel clear.
[00:06:53] You didn't get the support. And somewhere on the, the trail on the process, the, it just [00:07:00] stopped. Everything just stopped and you, you paused. Many people assume that this happens because they, they lack something. That there's something internal, like you lack motivation or grit, or you need another degree or you need more experience.
[00:07:18] But that really isn't the real reason why we pause. We actually pause because something is not clear. The next move forward isn't clear. We don't know how to move forward. So we, we do the safe thing and we stop and evaluate, and then sometimes that stop becomes longer and longer. And when this next step isn't clear, just fear just takes over fear and questioning starts showing up.
[00:07:49] What if I fail? What if people criticize me? What if I, I make the wrong decision? What if I invest my resources into something and it doesn't pay off? [00:08:00] And now I'm. Now I'm further behind and shouldn't I be doing the work that pays the bills? And just every next step when things are unclear, starts to feel risky.
[00:08:11] It starts to feel unsafe. And then even the meaningful work, the heart work that you want to do, pauses. But here's the good news. If your mission paused, that doesn't mean it's over sometimes. You're just simply waiting for a clear next step. Over the years, working with therapists, coaches, and consultants, and also doing the work myself, who've wanted to build, uh, meaningful things and they feel like they're built for something more I've seen this pattern again and again.
[00:08:48] People don't lack ideas. You do not lack a good idea. What you lack is clarity about what to do next. And the fear has taken over, [00:09:00] and that's why I've created the Unpause Playbook. It's a symbol framework designed to help people reconnect with the mission they care about and identify the next one, clear, cl clear, next step they can take, get clarity, take a step.
[00:09:18] That's all it is. So let me ask you something, uh, personal, you know. What's that mission that's deep in your heart that you once cared about, that you quietly paused, and every once in a while, this idea pa uh, goes through your mind, it crosses your mind, and you think about it fondly, and you hope that someday you're gonna get it started, but.
[00:09:50] Deep inside, you know, if you don't get clarity, you're not gonna move forward. So if that question about what do you care about stirred [00:10:00] something in you, I'd encourage you to download the unpaused playbook. It's gonna help you reconnect with that mission and identify your next step that moves you forward.
[00:10:11] It's really time to unpause and put your mission in motion, and hopefully you'll discover why you. Why you first fell in love with that mission in the first place, and what's the one thing you can do now to move forward? In the next episode of this series, we're gonna talk about something really important, why this clarity is actually the thing that restarts your momentum, because you're gonna find out when the next step becomes visible, when you can see it.
[00:10:47] You start to move again and movement becomes possible. Friends, it's now time to put your mission in motion.
