I was chasing their scorecard.

I was on vacation when the email came in.

We'd been after this contract for months. My first one. I was nervous when I saw the name. I read it several times. They wanted to meet.

I wrote back that I was out of the country and asked if it could wait until I was home.

Then I sat there running it both ways. I told my husband it could go either direction. Either they wanted to meet to tell me no, or they wanted to meet because it was mine.

We met the week I got back. It was mine.

My first real gig. I closed the Zoom and sat in my office, listening for applause that didn't come.

I caught myself waiting. You know that pause after a win when you expect someone else to declare it official.

There was no team applause. I had to tell myself I did a good job, and it felt weird.

You know the feeling when you've finished something big and had nowhere to put it. The quarter that went well and nobody mentioned it. The problem you solved in the background that no one knew about.

I never had to ask what good looked like. It came pre-written.

There was a rating system and there was a cycle. There was a meeting every fall where leaders sat around comparing their people with each other, and a feedback round where a dozen people wrote down what they thought of me and it came back as a report. Some years a project went well enough that there was an award with my name on it.

I used to tell myself I didn't care about the scorecard.

But I planned my year around it. I knew which projects would show well in the fall and which ones would disappear no matter how hard they were. I knew when to make sure the right person saw something.

That's a woman running on a scorecard she claimed she never looked at.

Somebody wrote that scorecard. It wasn't me. And I had gotten so good at scoring well on it that I never once stopped to ask whether the things on it were the things I actually wanted.

A piece of work came my way that was small. It was not enterprise scale and not squarely in my wheelhouse. At least that's what I told myself.

I almost passed on it.

Small didn't fit the picture of what a serious project was supposed to look like, and that picture came straight from a place I no longer worked.

I took it. And it turned out to be some of the most useful work I've done, because it taught me things I'm using right now, with clients, in ways I couldn't have planned. It improved the way I deliver coaching for clients.

I heard something a while back that has stayed with me since.

Everything else becomes invisible. Enterprise scale was on theirs. That small project taught me what the old scorecard never could.

You don't have to leave to take the scorecard back.

Your company has its ratings and its cycles. Fine. Those are real and you still have to operate inside them. But nobody said that's the only measure allowed. You still get to decide what a good year means to you, and then figure out how to fit that into whatever system you're in.

Mine has revenue on it, because I have to eat. It also has the quality of the work. Project variety, because new challenges excite me. The people I get to work with. Whether it stretches me somewhere uncomfortable. Whether I have a say.

That's mine.

I can't tell you what belongs on yours.

If you want a place to start, try these three small actions this week.

You control the scorecard. Act like it.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh