Is Xennial Really a Thing?

"Xennial You are a true xennial. Well done. You understand modern technology but are not so emotionally needy as to need constant validation from strangers you will never meet."

That was the result I got when I took a quiz promising to let me know if I was a Xennial or not. (You could take it too right here). What's a Xennial? Well it's the generation that falls in the gap of Gen X and The Millennials. It's pretty much the Michael-went-solo era meets Thriller (1977-1983).

The thing is, I don't think what's taken into consideration is birth order. Younger siblings born in the gap are more likely to lean Gen X than those who are the oldest in the gap.

So who are the Xennials? We were the Promised Ones, the most-educated under-employed crew. The generation full of potential and our parents' hopes. The ones whose entrepreneurial dreams went up in smoke with the Dot Com Bust and adult-life fear set in, driving us to seek comfort in the arms of 30-year-stable jobs only to find ourselves in the 2005 bubble burst that was the economy. Yep. Started before 2008.

The struggle was real. We ended up back home with parents and our own children. Some divorced because we also were the kids who grew up seeing that a marriage that took work was too much work and we had options, baby! The era that lost our religion because the ones who introduced us proved fallible and faulty. The era where affordable housing became a thing of folklore and the introduction of terms like the ever elusive "job-fit" made us unsettled and unsatisfied. We pay into a social security system we will never get to use. We've learned the paradoxical truth of "Our vote doesn't count" but "Every voice matters".

We are the gap between the old world and the new, the fearful and the infallible. We were the kick off to the Millennial era. We gave them comforting words like, "You can be whatever you want to be," "Hard work pays off," and "Failure is not an option".

We are the generation who is awakening to the fact that we are still called to blaze our own paths because we have to. Because nothing is promised. Not jobs, not relationships, not even our safety. We now know the truth: "You can be whatever you BELIEVE you can be," "Smart work pays off," and "Failure is not an option; it's a requirement on the road to Success".

We are the generation who is finally readying to launch.

We are Xennials.

#MindShift #MindTheGap

Do you fit in the gap? If you're finally ready to tap into your potential and shift into your power, I can help. Send me a message and let's see if we're a great fit.