Week 388 (brendan@brendanbarca.com)

Here's your weekly dose of Fuel Your Mind Friday where I share business building ideas, lifestyle design hacks, and inspirational content to help you thrive in your work and find purpose in your life.

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PSA: My wife, Pema Sherpa, and I have another blog called The Mindful Minute! Check it out.

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DON'T JUST DO SOMETHING, SIT THERE!

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Ten years ago, at the start of 2014, I found myself in my first sales job. My daily responsibilities included:

• 60 cold calls
• 60 emails
• 12 sales contacts

Coming from a service oriented background, this amount of output felt overwhelming. But as a competitive young guy, I raced to hit and often exceed these metrics. Within a year, I was near the top in activity on a sales team that was 55 members strong.

In those days, as I sat in my cube with my headset on, I had one motto:

"Don't just sit there, do something!"

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This propelled me to make cold calls when I was afraid, send emails when I was tired, and conduct sales conversations with strangers all across the state of Texas.

But, it wasn't all upside.

Within three years of my start, I experienced burnout. All of a sudden, the phone felt heavier, the email campaigns felt repetitive, and my career path felt uncertain.

In my first two years, I fell in love with sales and thought it would be my career forever. But, in that third year, my sales job seemed to lose its luster.

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Years later, it's easy for me to see that I was sprinting too fast with no awareness around why I was sprinting. I consider myself lucky for experiencing burnout as soon as I did. This intense burnout led me to asking hard questions and eventually carving a new path - a path which I still find myself on today.

One of the inflection points from this period came from a book called Pease Is Every Step by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. Here's the quote that shook me awake:

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Hanh's lesson, a direct contradiction to my own motto in those days forced me to reexamine how I did things. I was spending too much time doing and not enough time being.

Upon hearing this quote, I started to find little pockets in my week alone - away from work, away from my friends - where I would just sit and be. This slowly allowed me to become more aware of my situation and think up more sustainable career options.

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Today, years later, I still find myself remembering Hanh's quote. Every time I feel myself moving too fast and trending towards burnout, I think of this lesson.

While it's doing that gets us from "A to B," it's the awareness of being that allows us to figure out what "B" is at all.

As the late, great Thich Nhat Hanh once said...

"Don't just do something, sit there!"

When you realize fear is a choice, you can choose the life you want.

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Thanks for subscribing,

- Brendan

​Let's connect on LinkedIn!

​brendanbarca.com​

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Don't miss our newest creation, The Mindful Minute -> ​Check it out here!