Lessons on creating stability

You can listen to me reading this blog post below!

One thing that has become clear to me as I have started blogging again this year, is the importance of holding the stories and narratives I have been holding over the years up to the light, turning them around to see them from different angles, and deciding if I will continue to hold onto them, or seek out new narratives that feel more true for who I am now. And one of the stories I am still looking at and turning around in many ways is around the concept of stability.

I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first really started to consider what my thoughts were about stability. It had been over a year since I had changed jobs after being made redundant in summer 2020, and I was walking across town on my way to my work in healthcare. Working clinically during the pandemic was just about one of the most unstable things I could have imagined, and I was questioning everything. Within a year from this walk across town, I would be getting rid of 90% of my possessions and moving to a new city, taking up a new job. But at that moment, I was (like everyone else) navigating hundreds of emotions, and attempting to keep them at bay with my morning walk and podcast.

The episode was about values, and what a study of our values can do to keep us making aligned choices. It suddenly occurred to me - for the first time - that when I list my values, I often consider aspirational values, but that the truth was - above all else I valued stability, and safety, and this was why - despite my best efforts, I found some choices difficult to make, while others seemed to be magnetically pulling me in their direction.

I don’t know why this seemed like a new idea to me, but understanding that, I started to ask myself different questions, and at the heart of them was one overarching inquiry.

What is stability to me?

I spent most of my career being self-employed and I hated every minute. I didn’t hate every minute of life, but I couldn’t stand being self-employed. It felt inherently unstable - not knowing how much money I would earn each month, feeling unmoored every time patients cancelled, and being stressed if I ever got ill. I spent all of my vacations with low key background panic, thinking about how I was not only spending money, but I also wasn’t earning anything. I struggled to figure out how to bring myself some type of equilibrium from month to month, and year to year, and all I wanted was the stability of a “regular job”.

The irony of this was something I realised much later - I had chosen that career because all I wanted was stability - and now practicing it while being self-employed felt almost like a betrayal. In hindsight, I realise when I was growing up, I hadn’t given any thought to the systems of work that existed. I watched my father go from a so-called steady job, to being self-employed even though I had no language or understanding of it at that time for it. And then when I decided what I was going to study, I had no idea whether the people I saw doing jobs were self-employed vs being salaried and employed. I only discovered this close to the end of my studies, or maybe even after I graduated, and even then I had no idea how I would feel operating inside that system.

In addition, I know now that there were also cultural factors at play in my relationship with the story I had around being self-employed. In the back of my mind, I believed that the secret to success in life was “getting a good job”, and when I thought about what that meant - it was more around the type of job than the systems around how I was employed. So once I started work and I was self-employed, and did that for many years, I didn’t really have any positive thoughts about being self-employed, and longed for something different. So of course the pandemic, a redundancy, and heavy restrictions around how we could work while needing to work was a bad combination for someone who was self-employed.

And yet, understanding that the biggest force in my life was towards stability felt like a revelation. I didn’t know it yet, but eventually, I would have another feeling - that if I could untangle my own ideas about stability, things could be different.

I won’t bore you with every thought I have had about stability over the past 5 years - there have been a LOT. And during that time - I moved country and changed to a job that felt very stable, which brought me a great deal of calm after years of being self-employed. The calm allowed me to really examine some of my own behaviours and past choices, and I have written about some of them on this blog over the past year. 

It also allowed me to ask other questions big and small - around retirement, around work, around how I make decisions about when and what to spend, about enoughness where money was concerned and more. And now that I felt more stable - without the ups and downs of self-employment, a deeper question started playing on my mind.

What if stability isn’t something that comes from an institution, or a two income situation, or a family home, or the promise of an inheritance. And if it isn’t those things, is it something that I can create for myself?

Can I create my own stability?

Like many of the questions that I have written about recently, it feels layered, and still not fully answered. On the one hand, I do have monthly bills to pay, and this means that in some ways stability is intimately tied with how much I earn and I can’t just wish it not to be so (although I did recently read some articles about people who are choosing to live without money - another story for another time, but an interesting concept!). On the other hand, why would I trust my stability to an institution instead of myself? Is one really safer than the other?

I am still sitting with many of these questions, playing around with numbers, and getting really clear what it would mean to create my own sense of stability.

What did that mean in terms of my mindset?

For me it meant trusting that I could create stability for myself.

It meant acknowledging that even though self-employment felt so unstable, I had already been creating stability for myself all along, and I could do it again.

It meant re-visiting my ideas about self-employment - something I played around with in a recent post about my life as a business model - and considering that it can be as stable as a fixed income.

It meant understanding my patterns, and gaining control over my spending.

It meant questioning everything and coming up with the one answer that felt true - there is more than one way to cultivate stability - and that it starts with the belief. 

And in addition to my mindset, it meant taking real action.

It meant learning about managing my finances (the two great books I read about this - We should all be millionaires by Rachel Rodgers, and Be your own financial advisor by Jonquil Lowe).

It meant learning about credit scores (Do Not Get Me Started About This) and more.

It meant crunching the numbers and making different decisions about how I spent my time as well as my money.

It meant creating my “break glass in case of emergency” plan which has increased the amount of spaciousness I feel even as I work on creating stability for myself.

And it meant continually sitting with the question - when I get into conversations with others about work and the inherent stability or instability there.

It meant reminding myself that I don’t have all the answers, so that I can continue to be curious about this and what other questions it can bring.

And it meant thinking about other parts of my life that are a scaffolding and support for stability - such as my friendships, and acknowledging that stability in relationships is as much about me being able to give to others as it is about being able to receive

I sometimes wish I had opened questions around stability, and creating it for myself a long time ago. And also - it feels as if it is right on time, as I face down a new decade. Maybe it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that I am doing it now. 

What is a long held belief that you have recently held up to the light?

How has that created change and momentum in your life?

And what does stability mean to you?

I’d love to hear!

And I send you big love.