Writing / self-awareness · growth · presence
Learning to control the volume
What happens when the instincts behind professional success follow you home, and how self-awareness helps turn them down without losing them.
For most of my professional life, I have had an instinct to look for what is next.
What needs to happen next? What could go wrong? What are we not thinking about? What decision can we make today that makes tomorrow easier?
Nobody really asked me to operate that way.
Somewhere along the way, I learned that being prepared, seeing around corners, asking another question, and doing more than what was requested created value. So I kept doing it. Eventually, it stopped being something I consciously did and became part of how I operate.
Professionally, that has been one of my greatest strengths.
But that instinct did not begin in a conference room or a Microsoft Teams meeting. It began much earlier. Many of the cities, classrooms, and systems I moved through were predominantly white, and my family understood that we could not afford to arrive merely prepared. We had to be steps ahead to earn the same respect, opportunity, and recognition that often seemed to come more readily to our counterparts.
Being family-oriented and goal-oriented made that lesson feel like responsibility, not just ambition. I learned to anticipate, to prove, to overdeliver, and to carry myself as though every room required evidence that I belonged there. That way of moving through the world helped me build a life and a career, but it also followed me everywhere.
It has taken 34 years (sheeesh), along with failures, rejections, and a level of anxiety I did not always know how to name, to understand the cost of always trying to stay ahead. I am not trying to lose that drive. I am learning that I do not have to live at its highest volume in every room.
The instinct to look ahead
“I can see the ripple in the water.”
Every time a rock is thrown, more happens than the splash. The water makes room. There is a sound. Then the ripples travel outward. That is how I think about decisions. Every action is a rock, and I am usually watching where the waves might go next.
If the rock is large enough, the impact can be damaging. Most of the time, though, I am simply trying to understand the options in front of us and what each one may set in motion. I am always observing the ripples and planning for what could reach us downstream.
I am also learning that sometimes it is enough to throw the rock and watch the splash. Not every wave will reach me. Not every ripple needs to be anticipated, managed, or turned into a plan. Some things can simply happen.
I have learned how to stay a few steps ahead.
In business, that can feel like a superpower.
But I am realizing that a superpower does not need to be used at full strength all the time, especially outside of work.
There are moments when nobody needs me to anticipate the next five moves. Nobody needs a strategy or a solution. Nobody needs me to figure out how the situation could be better, faster, more efficient, or more prepared.
Sometimes people just need me to be there.
It is not simple for me and I still have not figured it out in all honesty.
When a strength follows you home
This is not really something I can completely turn off. It is part of who I am.
You can call it professional conditioning, personality, experience, survival, ambition, curiosity, or probably some combination of all of them. But after operating this way for long enough, you do not simply walk through the front door at the end of the day and flip a switch.
There is no perfect code switch between professional Nigel and personal Nigel. They are the same person.
The challenge is learning when that part of me needs to be turned down. Not eliminated. Not apologized for. Not hidden. Just minimized enough to make room for something else.
Presence. Patience. Listening. Curiosity without immediately searching for an answer. Being comfortable with something that has not been solved yet. Allowing another person to experience something without needing to move them three steps ahead of where they currently are.
That is a very different skill from the ones that built much of my professional life.
I am starting to understand that growing as an adult, as a man, and really just as a human being requires developing both.
Context changes the gift
There is more to life than learning how to perform at a high level. You also have to learn yourself.
You have to understand what you bring into a room, what you bring into relationships, what you bring home with you, and how the qualities that make you incredibly effective in one part of your life might feel completely different to the people standing closest to you.
That does not make those qualities bad. Context matters.
Being intensely independent can be useful when building something from nothing. It can also make it harder to let someone help you.
Being decisive can make you an effective leader. It can also make you forget that some conversations are not asking for a decision.
Thinking ahead can protect a business from problems that have not happened yet. In life, constantly thinking ahead can make you miss what is happening right now.
Problem-solving can be an incredible gift.
Not everything is a problem.
That might be one of the more important things I have had to learn.
I have spent a significant portion of my life asking, “What else can I do?” What else can I build? What else can I learn? What else should we consider? What did everyone miss? How can I add value before anyone even realizes they need it?
Those questions helped build a career. Personal growth requires some different questions.
What do I need? What am I feeling? Am I actually listening? Does this person need my perspective, or do they need my presence? Am I experiencing this moment, or am I already mentally living three moments ahead?
And maybe the hardest one: Do I feel safe enough here to not always be the person who has everything figured out?
Making room for both
Learning to minimize a superpower does not mean permanently suppressing it.
If being analytical, ambitious, curious, prepared, intense, and forward-thinking is genuinely part of who I am, then the goal cannot be to spend my personal life pretending those qualities do not exist.
There has to be room for them too.
There have to be people and spaces where I can get excited about an idea, chase a rabbit hole, think five steps ahead, question everything, build something, dream bigger, and operate at full speed without feeling like I need to constantly reduce myself.
The work is learning the difference.
When does this moment need that version of me? When does it need less of him? When should I speak? When should I listen? When should I solve? When should I just sit there? When should I push? When should I let something breathe?
I do not think maturity is learning how to shut parts of yourself off. I think it is developing enough self-awareness to understand which parts of yourself a moment actually requires.
That is harder than simply being yourself at full volume all the time. It is also healthier than constantly trying to become someone else.
A different scoreboard
The things that taught me how to survive and succeed were not always the same things that taught me how to love, connect, listen, or simply be present. I do not think I understood that distinction for a long time.
Work has always given me a clear scoreboard: revenue, results, projects, problems solved, things accomplished.
There is no equivalent scoreboard for becoming a better person.
There is no quarterly report showing whether you were more present. There is no promotion for becoming more patient. Nobody hands you an award because you learned how to sit with an uncomfortable emotion instead of trying to immediately fix it. There is no KPI for making the people around you feel heard, safe, valued, or understood.
But those things matter. Probably more than most of the accomplishments we spend our lives chasing.
More has to mean more
I still want more. That has not changed.
I still want to build businesses, challenge myself, chase ideas, learn things I do not understand, create opportunities, and see what is around the next corner.
I do not want to lose that part of myself. I actually like that part of me.
The difference is that “more” cannot only mean professionally.
More also has to mean becoming more emotionally aware. More present. More patient. More comfortable being human instead of always being useful. More willing to let people see the person behind the capability. More aware of when my greatest strengths need to take a back seat. And more intentional about creating relationships and spaces where those strengths do not always have to be restrained either.
Maybe that is the real evolution.
Not turning the superpower off. Learning how to control the volume.
Learning when the situation needs all of it, when it needs some of it, and when the strongest thing I can do is allow it to sit quietly in the background.
For a long time, striving for more meant looking outward and asking what else I could accomplish.
Now I am learning that sometimes striving for more means looking inward and asking who I am becoming while I accomplish it.
There is still work to do.
It is just a different kind of work.