The greatest accomplishments of my life have been evolutionary. I went to college after high school. I got married after college. I had children after getting married. I was hired in a district role after working in a school. There is nothing revolutionary about any of those moves. They were safe, almost expected. Sure, I did them with my own little flair, but I donât think that anyone would consider that too extravagant of a path. Sure, I enjoyed every minute, but I donât think that makes for a particularly good movie of the week.
Now there is something inside of me saying that I should attempt a coup.
There is something that is driving me to reach for more than an evolutionary step would allow. It is telling me that now is the time curing which I need to take all that I have learned and created and try to stack in such a way that I could jump up and grab what is just out of reach.
In middle school I thought that there was a metaphorical casino for popularity. You got so many chips to start and depending on how you played, you could win more or lose everything. I believed that if you cashed out at just the right time you would walk home without a better girlfriend or an invitation to the right party. Needless to say, I was not at all popular in those days. By viewing the world in this way, I could make everything a gamble without any kind of relationship setup or long term interest in the actions of making friends or having interesting conversations. As I got older, I started to notice the give and take of popularity and value. I noticed that it didnât really matter which community I was a part of, so long as I felt supported and loved.
The casino metaphor is highly limiting in that it only relies on the social capital that you yourself have raised. It does not take into account that we are all the sum of the connections we maintain. And that is why I feel I have a coup brewing within me. It isnât so much that I know it is time to move on, it is that all of the other people in my life know this for me. They are bracing themselves for a coup and not an evolutionary step.
I donât think that a job reclassification is going to do it. It must be something that disrupts the hierarchy that I have been working in to the point that others question what they are doing and why they didnât think to attempt the coup themselves. It will leaves those who trust in the status quo for their information and power with an uneasy sense that their expectations are about to be swept away.
Words like director, founder, owner and consultant keep filling my head. They are supported by everyone feeding me ideas and fulfilling the part of me that senses the shift coming. It isnât an attempt at vanity or at wishful thinking. I know that those words donât work for wishes. Coups donât come to those who wait. They are in themselves single acts that have been contemplated and reworked until the plans are perfect.
I think mine is a pretty good one, but the one thing about coups is that you never know that they have happened until they are over. Mine is no different.
