Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
Excerpt from The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life
and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Author’s Note. Read This First.
Before you begin with this excerpt, I’ll lay out what’s already been covered. In Sections One and Two of the book, readers discovered the inner framework that makes every comeback possible. Both sections are devoted to recognizing your Life Assets (the inner resources you’ve accumulated that enrich your life, and that are valuable and exchangeable with the world around you), then, how to let them work for you.
Within your portfolio of Life Assets, we have focused on these two:
Your Values. The personal ideals, organizing principles, and natural priorities that keep you sane and true to yourself.
Your STACKWINS. The unique collection of your Skills, Talents, Aptitudes, Competencies, Knowledge, Wisdom, Insights, Nature, and Strengths.
Together, they form an important part of the foundation of who you are, and give you the tools to experience success and satisfaction in everything you do.
This excerpt begins at a key moment in the book when I list the hurdles created by the third of four clusters of megatrends. (For this online series, the full megatrends chapter has been divided into six excerpts for easier reading.) Here you see how these global pressures shape how you live, work, and feel. While I have chosen to isolate this subset into a group, and I have given it a name, the megatrends included are not mine; nor are they theories. They are studied, measurable forces acting on your brain, body, and choices every day. Each one is insidious, sneaking into your life, putting demands on you, and pressuring you to comply.
Cluster by cluster, you’re looking at twenty megatrends that have been pushing and pulling you off your own path. Twenty!! You are discovering why your energy has been leaking…why you have felt tension and exhaustion…why the expression “burn out” makes perfect sense.
After reading more, I hope you have a sense of indignant rebellion. You do not have to live by anyone else’s definition of leadership, family, parenting, or education. Your own ideas of success, happiness, and purpose count.
Excerpt Series: The Comeback Stack
LIFE ASSETS: The Only Way to Light Up Your Life and Love It Again
You Are Better Than Burnout
Excerpt Table of Contents
(You’re reading Part 5 of 6.)
So many people have told me that naming the megatrends was a blessing in disguise. Painful in some ways, yes. Yet, even though all of these things are happening, my clients have reported feeling relief (that it wasn’t their imagination) followed by a newfound freedom to reclaim their own path.
I hope your courage to say how you will process any megatrend is growing. When you circle back to the discoveries you made in Sections One and Two, you will reconfirm the truth: your Life Assets give you the leverage you need to be, do, and have what you want, no matter what. Vestiges of self-doubt, self-denial, self-criticism, and self-devaluation fade away because your Life Assets give you security.
When you know who you are and what your life is about,
your self-worth grows, regardless of external factors.
Your self-worth is the greatest energy shield you have. It protects your heart and mind from alien invasion! I mean that. Without it, unwanted, uninvited thought forms would make their way into your brain, and take over your vital resources. It’s your self-worth that makes it possible for you – as you – to thrive in the world. That’s why it is the first and most important investment you can make in your life.
All right, let’s continue. Now we enter the next cluster, which is called the Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations. There are four in this group; they have to do with the connections that must exist to help us develop as individuals, and to help us guide, support, and protect each other. They also have to do with the civic and relational scaffolds of life. When any of these supports or scaffolds fall, community, family, and continuity suffer – or even fail. Each one of the four profits by lowering your expectations, cracking your foundations, distancing you from your origins, making you question your good sense, and dismissing your standards.
I know each one of these clusters puts you face to face with hard truths. But, stick with me. If you don’t look at it today, you will continue to feel the stress, and struggle to understand why you feel off kilter…and what to do about it.
I’m proving to you right here, right now, exactly why you have felt burdened, bummed out, or burned out. I’m showing you why it’s not your fault. And, if you’re ready, I will give you the secret to step out of the fog of the megatrend-stress-filled ordinary grind into the brightness of an extraordinary life where your brain, body, and being belong.
Every investment you make into your Life Assets grows your self-worth; it’s the renewable resource that lights up your life and makes you love it. That’s why the exercises I gave you in Sections One and Two are so valuable.
Cluster Three: Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations
The Leadership Crisis
Definition: Leadership has shifted from noble stewardship to a power grab, a scramble for titles, visibility and status. Instead of leaders being the steady embodiment of people who know the way, show the way, and go the way, they default to hollow caricatures who talk to us in sound bites as they try to gain control over what they consider their domain.
The Trap: For the one who is seeking a leader, abdicating discernment and following a power grabber will lead you nowhere. For the one stepping into leadership, confusing it with a competition for status or people pleasing will leave you hollow.
The Lie: Popularity, titles, the right pedigree, the perfectly manicured appearance, or a carefully worded speech makes someone a leader.
The Truth: Leadership is earned. It cannot be assigned. It is embodied in action and meaning. It is integrity in motion. It can be seen. It’s demonstrated every day, all day by how and what it solves and grows.
The Cost: When a power grab is mistaken for leadership, the fraud makes us pay thrice: once by being misled, and then again, by frustration as we identify and try to reject the chicanery, and then, worse, by tempting us to give up our integrity and give in to the game. It’s no wonder you feel cynical. When you look around and notice that position and power are handed to slick climbers instead of wise guides, leadership ceases to mean anything. Of course, it seems like the whole system is at risk.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Leadership vacuum, authority crisis, power corruption, institutional breakdown.
The Fractured Family
Definition: The unraveling of marriage, parenthood, and generational relations widens our connection gap. Bonds that once represented our roots, and carried our families through hardship are frayed to breaking.
The Trap: Settling for family in name only; allowing distance to define us, and communication to fade; and assuming that bonds will survive without presence, or shared life.
The Lie: Believing that families don’t matter anymore, that relations can be replaced by friends, or that tribes can be conjured out of thin air.
The Truth: Families have unique connection points that ground and nourish the collective when they live their shared bonds and legacy through curiosity, communication, and stories.
The Cost: When family bonds weaken, our foundation of security and resilience weakens with them. It’s no wonder that life can seem to lack depth when there is little to no context between our unique histories and our current hopes and dreams. It’s the family bond that offers us both context and confirmation of our path, and our place in the world. Of course, the weakening of family bonds makes you feel disoriented, and even like life is meaningless. It’s normal to have a primal and profound wish to be part of a shared story.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Family breakdown, generational disconnect, kinship erosion, relational fragmentation.
The Outsourcing of Early Childhood
Definition: Daycare is replacing daily interaction, robbing parents and children of shared milestones, and decentralizing the home as the hub. It’s even disconnecting our children from nature. Committees filled with people we don’t know decide what matters to our children’s development, and we’re expected to capitulate. Experts’ opinions demand that we parents doubt our own instincts – as if a certificate matters more than our values and lived experience.
The Trap: Handing the formative years of our children’s growth to strangers whom we don’t interview deeply for alignment with our own values. Nodding to the experts; allowing our voices to go quiet, or becoming subservient to a committee we don’t agree with.
The Lie: Experts know better. Safety and entertainment are all a child needs in the formative years.
The Truth: Children are shaped deeply by the values of the people who surround them. While raising children is a group effort in many ways, and programs may support the environment for learning, it’s up to us to pay attention to our requirements for the foundations for personhood.
The Cost: When the foundations of trust and meaning are being laid down by people who may not share our own values, the bond between parent and child is at risk for weakening during a vital period of development. It’s no wonder you feel trapped by limited choices. Of course, it’s a riddle that leaves you distracted, worried and sometimes even heartbroken. You walk lightly and stay quiet because someone who is certified holds the cards. But, overriding your instincts feels wrong.
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Institutional parenting, daycare dependency, expert worship and parental disempowerment.
The Broken Classrooms
Definition: Education has become score-centric and pedigree-driven, with the rewards being test results and credentials. Compliance has replaced curiosity, and discovery seems to be left behind in the name of efficiency. The gift of individual learning has been discarded in the name of passing.
The Trap: Standing back, assuming education belongs to a system, that children will thrive if they follow curricula designed to measure their performance.
The Lie: Learning can be summed up by a score.
The Truth: Real education is about learning: the curiosity-centric, discovery-driven natural action in human beings. Children flourish when families and communities focus on more than single subject test scores.
The Cost: When our children get exposed to performative learning, they’re trained to fetch, or to be like a seal balancing a ball on its nose in a circus. Without the environment and influence for real education, our children miss the opportunity to love learning. It’s no wonder you worry or feel confused. Of course you want your children – all children – to thrive. It’s normal to want the best for them. You wonder, What happens to a world that is populated by people who were not encouraged (or allowed) to follow their curiosity, but, instead, to parrot responses and perform on command?
Alternative nomenclature for this megatrend: Educational industrial complex, teaching the test, standardization syndrome and creativity deficit.
Hang in there. This Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations cluster disturbs people more than they expect.
One by one, we are facing the megatrends, together. Even if you choose to apply different nomenclature, or to define the trap, the lie, the truth, or the cost slightly differently than I have, at least now you know these things are real. They are happening. They are impacting you, and everyone around you. Despite the pain of seeing them listed one after the other after the other, I am willing to bet that there is some satisfaction in having put words to the tension that’s been pulling and pushing at you. Words are your first step to reestablishing your power over your own life.
Postscript: End-of-Part Reflection
You’ve now seen the third cluster, Broken Bonds and Busted Foundations; a group of four megatrends shaking trust in leadership, belonging, and a shared future that once held communities steady.
This cluster hurts because it exposes the risks to our collective foundations, yet it also proves something vital: you care. Any uneasiness you feel is your integrity reacting. You value good leadership, and hold ideals about how family connection, child-rearing, and education matter.
When such things are at risk, it’s even more important to recognize how much of your stability must be housed within. And that’s where, once again, Life Assets take center stage as your resource center.
In the next part of this series, we’ll move on to Cluster Four: The Body and Spirit Hijack.
This final cluster deals with the most personal front of all: your body, your emotions, and your sacred sense of meaning. What happens when megatrends interfere with the signals that make you feel both human and divine? Let’s find out.
Before you continue, pause for a moment. Feel your breath. The intelligence pulsating through you is reliable. It’s truth-seeking, and you can trust it. Using the same awareness that has helped you process the sixteen megatrends we have already covered, proceed with what comes next. We are about to enter the most intimate terrain of all – your body, your emotions, and the spirit that animates both.
Your perspective matters. It’s the voice of your personal sovereignty. And, yes, it becomes all the more precious when you realize it’s threatened when a megatrend bypasses it.
