What to do when you’ve climbed your Everest

By Zoë Wundenberg

I was one of the many millions of sports lovers who watched Ash Barty’s incredible performance on Saturday night to win the Wimbledon ladies crown.

Watching someone achieve a lifetime dream was remarkable.

However, Todd Woodbridge’s comment about the reality of the experience was a telling one.

He said that his response was, “is this it?”, explaining it as being a feeling of surrealism and one that didn’t sink in properly for some time.

This really spoke to me, as the achievement of a goal – especially one that is as momentous as winning Wimbledon – can leave you feeling somewhat cast adrift, like your life’s purpose is suddenly behind you. So, what’s next?

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The problem with the question, “what’s next” after achieving such an enormous goal, is the question of whether any other goal can now compare.

So the biggest challenge in setting your sights on achieving your dreams is not actually the achievement of the dream, but having a plan to help you through the other side once you have achieved it.

The same principle applies to non-world championship sporting feats of glory.

There are plenty of articles out there about why gunning for your dream job is important, about how to set yourself up for success, how to pursue your dream job and so on, but there isn’t a lot out there addressing what to do when you get there.

If your dream job is dreamy, and you love every day, then woohoo! But you need to keep yourself motivated, so identifying what this will mean is important.

Are you the kind of person who needs to be challenged? Do you want to continue to make more money? Do you want to pursue further development? Or education? Or promotion?

These questions are important to ensure that you don’t lapse into comfortable apathy and wake up one morning realising that you’ve lost your way.

But, if you finally land that dream opportunity only to discover that it’s not what you thought it was going to be, or you do in fact feel a little cast adrift, then all is not lost.

Very rarely does the achievement of one’s dreams come without sacrifice.

This means that the price we pay for our goals is an even heavier burden if the goals don’t turn out to be what we expect.

Many of us double down at this point and refuse to cut our losses because of the sacrifices that we made to get there.

But the truth is, that this just compounds the sacrifices and without any promise of a pay-off: it becomes self-punishment.

Experience is never wasted – everything that we go to forms a part of who we become, how we think, what we see in the world around us. There is power is pivoting when our dreams become nightmares.

Feeling like you’ve already climbed Mount Everest and have nowhere left to focus your energy after the achievement of your goals is a danger to focusing on one tangible outcome.

Our career development structure is traditionally developed around the idea of achieving a dream job title, without a whole lot of energy being put into how we want to feel about our work.

Recently, we’ve seen a shift towards identifying our values and ensuring our work connects with a broader sense of purpose than a specific title, and this means that our career planning needs to be a continual evolution and requires ongoing attention throughout our careers.

For Ash, the next goal is likely Olympic gold, then the round of grand slams continues, but keeping your eye on this prize after you’ve just achieved your life’s ambition will be psychologically challenging.

Ash strikes me as someone who is incredibly resilient, dedicated and genuinely passionate about her career, and I’ll be one of many (again) cheering for her from home as she fights the next fight.

But for the rest of us, it’s vital to ensure that we can see beyond our dreams and that we don’t pin everything on the achievement of that goal.

Because whether we achieve it or not, there is always going to be a tomorrow and we need to make sure that we are planning for that too.

This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on July 12, 2021.