Our Long Winters Nap

 “I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.” –Eric Roth, screenwriter, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

The SJVCEO is taking a break. 

It’s probably long overdue.

We’re tired.

We’re all approaching burnout.

We’re no longer moved by our own content.  We realized we’re producing to meet contracted metrics. We’re not creating and we’re not having fun.

So we’re taking a break.  Call it our long winters nap.  A chance to disconnect from what we do because we’ve always done it and consider what we want to do because it stirs something within us.

At SJVCEO we’re driven by love.  Love for each other, for our colleagues, for the communities we serve.  It’s my job to balance what drives us with what pays us.  And while we’ll always be program implementers, more and more of our new work opportunities come in the form of promotion and outreach.  We became accidental content creators and decided to lean into it.  But in leaning in I didn’t pay enough attention to what it meant to quantify the work.  We’re a qualitative group by nature but delivering work in a quantitative empire (and make no mistake, energy efficiency is  very much a quantitative empire) we had to put metrics to our creativity.  Blog articles became deliverables, and our beloved web series became an indicator.  We started posting copy written by our contract holders, in what we call “CTRL+C, CTRL+V” and we knew it was bad.  Not because it was poorly written, but because it wasn’t written in our voice. 

Inevitably the frustration set in. The prickling each time we posted without authenticity. A resistance to record new episodes because it was due, not necessarily needed. We became disaffected, resentful, and boring.

But our numbers.

Our engagements, impressions, and click throughs keep growing.  By quantitative means we are succeeding.  So why pause? Why not just get over ourselves and accept that this is a business and we’re doing well by business terms?

We can’t—we won’t do that because we’ve worked too hard for too long for our position.  We organically grew our channels and products, and even if the numbers say we’re succeeding we know we’re not.  It’s only a matter of time before the audience senses our disillusionment, before our voice becomes stale, and our credibility falls off.

So, we’re preempting failure—burnout—complacency--and we’re taking a break.  You’ve not heard from us this month and you won’t until February.  Progress is quiet and slow.  And we’re embracing that.  Individually and as a team we’re assessing what we love and what we want to share with you.  We’re defining our own benchmarks of success and we’re talking with our contract holders about what change will look like. 

Going forward content from the SJVCEO will be content from the hearts of the SJVCEO.

The most surprising revelation of this period of quiet is how energizing slowing down can be.  I encourage you to make time to determine what you really want.  Invest the time in yourself, in your team, and figure out what makes you proud.  I hope you have the courage to start all over if that’s what it requires.