Find The Pattern in Your Best Moments.
There was a time in my career when I spent way too much energy looking at other people and wondering how they got “there.” I’d see someone make a career jump or land an incredible project, and I’d immediately start asking myself what I was missing. It wasn’t jealousy… it was something more uncomfortable. It was that feeling that everyone else seemed to have cracked a code I couldn’t decipher.
I remember telling this to a mentor during a particularly frustrating time in my career. He listened, let me talk myself in circles, and then said something that stopped me completely. He said, “You’re comparing yourself to the wrong person. The only version of you that matters is the one who felt most alive. Start there.”
At first, I didn’t know what to do with that. But eventually, I started thinking about the moments when I really did feel alive… the ones where my work didn’t feel forced, where I wasn’t second-guessing myself, where things clicked in a way I didn’t have to explain. These weren’t always the big headline moments. Sometimes they were small: a conversation, a decision, a spark of clarity in a meeting that needed it.
But every one of those moments had something in common. I was grounded. I was present. I wasn’t trying to be anything OR anyone other than myself. There was no performance, no proving, no chasing. Just a sense of being in the right place as the right person, doing the thing I was actually built to do.
And once I saw that, I realized how easy it is to lose track of those moments or to downplay them entirely. Our industry moves so fast. We jump from one job to the next, one role to the next, one expectation to the next. We forget to look back at the times when we were fully present in ourselves, and more importantly, we forget to notice the pattern behind those moments.
But there is a pattern. There always is.
Your best moments weren’t random. They weren’t luck. They weren’t one-offs. They were indicators of who you are when all the noise and distractions fall away. Those moments show you the conditions where you thrive, the instincts worth trusting, and the parts of you that have been consistent across every chapter of your career.
The hard part is that you can’t see the pattern while you’re busy comparing yourself to everyone else. Looking outward blurs your vision. Looking backward sharpens it.
This Week’s Question:
When you look back at the moments when you felt most like yourself, what pattern do you see starting to emerge?