When the Tool Becomes Part of the Trap

A man finds himself with a business and less freedom than he thought he was building. Perhaps he, or she, doesn't much enjoy it any more. The advice offered is to delegate and to systemise.

I did this. I did it successfully, and not without a great deal of struggle. And the systemising alone did not achieve the outcome.

You can systemise and process out your business for years and years and still not step away. The systemising can become very enjoyable. It can become soothing. It can be an excuse not to go and do the thing; which is the stepping away, and the allowing of other people to take over. The more you do it, the more entrenched you become in the doing of it, and it continues indefinitely.

My own tendency was to want everything running and humming, so that nothing required me to do anything uncomfortable. I needed the system to legitimise me. To protect me. And so, far from letting me step away, systemising fed the disorder. It built the very thing I couldn't leave.

The mechanism people use to step away becomes the reason they stay.

This is not a small point, because almost everyone I meet has a tendency to pour and pour and pour into something. A business might exist to legitimise somebody. It might exist to prove something. And a thing that exists to prove something never wants to be starved; it has to be fed at all times.

So a man can know, quite clearly, that the business is no longer the best use of his life and potential. He can see that he is constraining himself. He can even accept that it is now a good cash-generating asset and nothing more, and that he ought to be somewhere else entirely. And still it entangles him. He reaches for the tool to escape it, and the tool becomes part of the trap.

What ends it is not a better system. It is the realisation that there is something greater to step into.

That is the whole difference. Stepping away from something, with nothing on the other side, is a vacuum; and no one walks into a vacuum voluntarily, however well documented the handover. But a man who can see what he is stepping toward will finish the job. The pull does what the process could not. In my own case it was not another year of refinement that freed me; it was some excavation in myself, and the recognition that the thing I was protecting was not the thing I was for.

I won't offer advice here, because there isn't a template and the particulars are yours. But if you are currently trying to leave your company and you are systemising it, there are some things worth looking at.

How long has it taken you so far? What is good enough - and did you reach that point some time ago? And then, as you move toward stepping away, as you actually try to do it: what is the thing that catches you in that moment? How does that moment feel? Where are you arrested? Where is the tension? Where is the next excuse coming from?

Awareness alone is often all that is necessary to figure the rest out yourself.