Find Your Y

Photo Fair Use Courtesy of Sesame Street

What’s the question you get asked most?

Think about it. The question colleagues, clients, friends, or complete strangers ask the minute they find out what you do.

Now think about how you answer it.

Is it easy peasy breezy? Does the answer roll out before you’ve even finished your coffee? That ease is worth noticing. We sometimes think expertise should look like struggling over complicated answers, quoting research, or reminding everyone how many letters live behind our names.

But expertise often sounds simple because you’ve spent years making the complicated understandable.

Your most frequently asked question may actually be evidence of what other people already recognize as your expertise. And the questions that fascinate you most may tell you something even bigger.

Which brings me to my favorite letter: Y.

Yes, Sesame Street style: Today’s episode is brought to you by the letter Y.

As a Physician who is also an “addiction expert,” the question I probably get asked most is:

“How many people actually stop?”

My answer is almost always another question:

“Why?”

Why are you asking?

Because before I throw a statistic at you, I need to know what information you’re actually looking for.

Are you asking how many people never use a substance again? How many stop drinking or their drug of choice all together? How many dramatically reduce their use? How many return to work, parenting, housing, relationships, and health? Are you asking because you’re treating someone? Loving someone? Losing hope in someone?

Or maybe yourself?

The why changes the answer.

And that’s probably why Y has become my favorite letter.

At collabo™, we believe why is particularly powerful for busy professional women. We spend so much of our lives answering what’s next? What needs to get done? What does the team need? What do the kids need? What problem needs fixing? What box still needs checking?

Excellence can keep you moving so efficiently that you never notice you’ve moved away from yourself.

Why brings you back.

Why am I doing this?
Why does this matter to me?
Why did I choose this work in the first place?
Why am I brilliant at certain things that feel almost effortless to me?

That kind of questioning isn’t another self-improvement assignment. It is a return to insight, wisdom and wholeness—the wisdom underneath all that productivity and applying it to now.

Sometimes insight is knowing the answer deeply.

Sometimes wisdom is knowing that we’ve been asking the wrong question.

Sometimes taking a step back and looking at the big picture is all we need to know why.

So yes, this episode is brought to you by the letter Y.

Because at collabo™, we’re especially interested in what happens when women like you start under standing why.