Did you leave it too long?

Dingaling, dingaling!

What’s that?

Oh, it’s you rudely awoken from the slumber that is your life by an unwelcome shock. Maybe it's dressed up as a P45, or a job 'Termination Agreement' pretending to be in your interest as much as theirs, or a brown envelope of tax or financial doom, foretelling the end of your company. Or worse: an illness.

That’s the nature of alarm calls. The signal quiet at first, growing in intensity and volume the longer we fail to listen. But listening is hard. When you’re asleep. Which mainly you are.

Asleep at home, with family, most definitely in the office.

You might excel in your sleep. Sleeping to the top of your company tree (metaphorically speaking, obvs) and your company to the top of its tree. Mighty impressive. Imagine what you might do awake?

I’m not picking on you. You’re not alone. In a recent talk, Ian Mcgilchrist explained that 95.44% of our psychology is sub conscious. Simple translation: you are mainly asleep, auto piloting from bed to breakfast to cooking and caring, to work and wandering. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

Until you’re not. Back to those rude awakenings interrupting your slumber: the health crisis, a work crisis or family crisis.

There’s a powerful quote from a recent Tom Morgan essay: “...there is a terracotta army of hundreds of thousands of petrified mid-career workers buried under every major city in the world. This isn’t some rarified elite, it’s the mass of dead or dying souls powering the dead or dying industries of the accelerating present. They’ve hit their “peak earning years” in roles they no longer love. They have been told to wait patiently for retirement, the salvation-God of capitalism”.

Ouch. You and yours?

The choice is simple.

Keep sleeping and hope the alarm call doesn’t hurt too much.