David Spinks 

@davidspinks
Coach and writer helping people to stop chasing success and to discover enoughness within. Learn more about our coaching at downshift.me.
Latest post
Lessons in Navigating Career Lostness

Feeling tired and disconnected at work? Sensing something needs to change?

Join us this Friday for our Downshift alumni panel, where three Decelerator participants will share their career transition journeys and answer your questions.

RSVP here:

Our ability to be with the complexity and conflict in the world without getting overwhelmed is directly connected to our ability to be with the complexity and conflict within our inner worlds, without getting overwhelmed.

Burnout doesn’t just come from working too much. It comes from being misaligned with the work you’re doing and having to show up every day and do it anyway.

This was SO good. Grateful to be introduced to

and her thinking on communities. The ideas that stood out to me:

  1. Her reflections on the relationship between our inner patterns and how we show up in communities. How it’s not just about community design, but about us, as individuals, becoming aware of our patterns, fears, and triggers when…

The mysterious, magical, unpredictable human funk of being in community

Powerful piece about ambition and how it’s done us dirty.

I resonate with everything in this post. Though I wonder, and maybe this is semantics, if it’s less that ambition is good or bad, more about the source of that ambition.

When rooted in capitalist expectations and fear of not enoughness, ambition can be quite toxic. But when rooted…

Winter update

I interrupt your Substack programming to share a very important picture I took of this lake in my town.

Navigating a career transition?

Next week I'm hosting an online panel with three Downshift alumni, Lola Wajskop, Riggs Kubiak, and Anne Lebleu, to share their stories of navigating transition.

One of the hardest things about making a big change in your career and life is feeling like you're the only one doing it. You have to go against the grain of all the people around you, and the momentum of your career.

But trust me, you're not alone. Many others have gone through this journey and are going t…

restacked

You are not delusional for not wanting to work a traditional job.

You aren’t wrong for wanting to luxuriate in your time.

You aren’t bad for wanting to lounge and eat grapes.

You are perfectly in your DNA to want to play and make art and have sex and read books and kiss your children and make mud pies with them.

Work is changing. The revolution is coming. What a time to be alive and to pay attention.

Today I shared a bit more about my journey through “career lostness” and some of my biggest lessons from supporting a few dozen ambitious professionals through their own journeys through lostness.

If you’re feeling lost in your career, I hope you find something in here that helps.

I used to associate having a fat wallet with masculinity because my dad's was always overstuffed with cards, receipts, coupons, and who knows what else (not cash), and I would think to myself, "One day, when I'm a man, I'll have a wallet that fat".