At the height of the dot-com craze, at an “Internet boot camp” near Silicon Valley, a thousand people gathered in a ballroom to learn how to become Internet entrepreneurs. PowerPoint presentation after PowerPoint presentation told the audience how to do it. But the real action was between presentations. During the coffee breaks, participants could go to booths, lined up as if going to confession, to tell their stories to and receive feedback from specialists on the “elevator pitch,” the two-minute compact story used to talk your way in the door of a new career. The waiting lines were long.

In one of those lines was Roy Holstrom, a fifty-three-year-old mechanical engineer. A victim of his manufacturing firm’s last wave of downsizing, Roy had quickly come to the conclusion, in the spirit of Groucho Marx, that he did not want to join any corporation that would have him. He had spent his severance time in the library, searching for patents without a home. After months of research, he had found the needle in a haystack—a solar energy device—and had tracked down the inventor, proposing that they join forces. Now he was at boot camp, hoping to find capital or advisory board members. And to get those, he knew he needed to get the story just right. He was in line for a second round of coaching on his pitch.

People devote considerable energy to developing their stories—what key experiences marked their path; what meanings they attribute to those experiences; and, more importantly, what common thread links old and new.^[23] Precisely for that reason, some academics argue that interviewing people about why and how they are changing is a flawed approach. Interviews, the argument goes, just yield a self-presentation: the cleaned-up identity a person puts on for the outside world. They can never unearth the “truth” because, as any good social psychologist will tell us, people can’t resist embellishing their stories, making themselves look braver and smarter than they really are and coming up with logical explanations for events that are really random. So our stories never reflect objective reality.

That is why revising our stories is a fundamental tool for reinventing ourselves. One of the central identity problems that has to be worked out during a career transition is deciding on the story that links the old and new self. Until that is solved, the external audience to whom we are selling our reinvention remains dubious, and we too feel unsettled and uncertain of our own identity. To be compelling, the story must explain why we must reinvent ourselves, who we are becoming, and how we will get there. Early versions are always rough drafts. They get floated to friends, families, and new contacts, whose reactions prompt revisions. Since often we don’t know exactly where we are going or what the critical events along the way will be, the story will necessarily go through many iterations before it is finalized.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

Julio Gonzales, like many of his fellow students in a one-year midcareer master’s program, approached the end of his sabbatical with a mix of anxiety and anticipation. That year had given all the students a chance to design experiments, to make new connections, and to step back from daily routines. A lot had happened in that year, enough to raise awareness of the problems, but in many cases, not enough to point to good solutions. Time had run out. When Julio and his peers started the program, a year had seemed like an eternity. But major transitions often require two or three years. Now the questions burning in their minds were: “Can I take an interim step? If I do that, how do I protect myself from falling back into the same old, same old? How long do I have before inertia sets in?”

These are very good questions. In a series of studies on the introduction of new technologies (for instance, software engineering tools or graphics software), MIT researchers discovered a windows of opportunity effect.^[20] They found that managers have only a discrete time period in which to effect a real change after introducing a new technology. After that period, use of the technology tended to “congeal,” freezing unresolved problems in the technology and fixing its use in a specific organizational context, at least until the next crisis. Adaptation to new technologies was rarely a smooth, continuous process. Rather, it occurred in fits and stops; whatever changes did not get made at first were put off for much later, usually not until the consequences of those latent problems accumulated to provoke a crisis, opening the next window for change. Research on leaders newly taking charge of organizations shows the same effect: New leaders have a fixed time period in which to make changes; after that, it gets harder.^[21]

Nathalie Gaumont, a thirty-nine-year-old French nutritionist and M.B.A., came to understand the windows-of-opportunity effect. In the heat of the moment, she informally accepted an attractive job offer from a former boss. It was the perfect offer, according to Susan Fontaine’s logic of CV progression. Nathalie would move up a big notch in prestige and responsibility, moving from heading a European group to overseeing operations worldwide. The new firm, Nomad, was moving up economically, while her current employer was losing market share. But as a senior nutritionist for the European division of a major U.S. food company, she was already feeling burned out; the new job meant even more responsibility, more hours, and more international travel. The one thing she knew was that she wanted less of all that. And the new job offered only an incremental change. Approaching forty, she wondered whether the time was “now or never” to make a sweeping change in her life. But could she pass up a concrete offer that promised at least some change to her professional life?

Reason told her to go for it.

I figured there would be more opportunities for growth—lateral moves, taking on other brands. I can’t go any higher at Packard and stay in Europe. And, the company is not doing so well; it’s losing market share worldwide. Now I have a staff job and report to a vice president rather than a division head. I’m getting further and further removed from upper management and am losing visibility. I’m spending a lot of time on regulatory issues, lobbying work, when I’d prefer to be closer to the heart of the business. The downside at Nomad is that I’d be reporting to someone based in Japan. The areas Nomad wants to develop are in Latin America and Asia-Pacific. I already travel more than I want to, but at least it’s within Europe. At Nomad, I’d have two or three big trips each month. I’ve tried to ask how much, but the answer is always that it would be up to me. And I just found out the job will not be based in the city, as I thought. That means a long commute each day.

It was confusing. Nathalie had had little time for any activity outside her job, much less time to devote to any kind of concerted job search.

My job has been very intense. I’m very committed and passionate about it. I work every weekend. Two or three times a week I’m on an airplane. I just endure; I’m a good soldier. I let people put stuff on my back. I have a hard time saying no. But I feel that I’m caught in a spiral. Am I going to keep going in circles? Here is change coming to me on a silver platter. It isn’t perfect, but it’s an escape hatch. I know myself. If I stay here, despite all good intentions, I will easily fall right back into the routine.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

I did know that I wanted to be part of a community, so I started getting involved in Jewish activities and arts organizations. This broke me of the need to have an institutional affiliation. I learned how to listen more to myself, to reflect on what I wanted to do and what I enjoyed doing. I included being successful and making money in “enjoy doing,” but I had to figure out how to put the pleasure back in to a money-making job.

I thought I wanted to work in education. I volunteered in the public schools. I wanted to see what it’s like to teach, to work with eightand nine-year-olds. An ongoing dialogue with my husband helped me see that wasn’t it. He urged me look at what I did back in my twenties, what I fell in love with when I left school. I had loved being an editor. I remember having enormous discussions with him, often pretty anguished ones. I felt editing was women’s work. I thought it was a submissive, or subordinate, kind of helping work. I really fought that. I was trying to reposition myself as a kind of market maker.

He would say to me, “Where’s the scarcity, Brenda? Is there a scarcity of people who are making deals? Is there a scarcity of people who can put together bulleted lists? No, there’s a scarcity of people who can really bring out the best in the people and make great products.” That dialogue allowed me to start working as a freelance editor, which was really only a step. I thought it would lead to something else, but I didn’t know what. I knew I would be meeting lots of interesting people, that I would be developing a skill again. It was important to me to be able to get in doors and to reestablish a network.

By this time, I had developed a pretty strong point of view about the publishing business. High-quality authors were the scarce commodities. And I thought that being an editor at a publishing house had become a very passive job. It’s become totally P&L-oriented, which is neither a creative nor an innovative way to be involved in a business. And with the “disintermediation” that’s happening in the business, all of the power was accruing to people other than acquisitions editors—people outside the publishing houses, like agents. Slowly, it began to dawn on me that being an agent might be the absolute best option. I could have more reach than I had ever imagined. I could be true to who I was, and not just by being a deal maker. I mean, there are literary agents who are deal makers, who are very transactional and extremely focused on their relationships with publishers and who do not serve the interests of their authors particularly well. But I knew that that would not be how I would operate. I would stay true to being relational, being concerned about the content of books, being absolutely an authors’ agent, because the publishers don’t have as much power as they used to have. And I knew this would be a very good selling line to authors.

It is hard for people to achieve the objectivity they need to question and change their daily routines while they are still actively immersed in them. Time-out periods—sometimes as short as Jane’s ten-hour drive, other times as long as Brenda’s multiyear moratorium—help people make changes by providing a space for reflective observation.^[18] Stepping back makes room for insights we have been incubating but cannot yet articulate. It helps us see the coexistence—and incompatibility—of old and new. Changes in the habitual rhythm of our work or halts in our normal productive activity can work as triggers, waking us up from our daily routines and refocusing our attention on change.^[19] In a time-out, attention shifts away from everyday pressures, creating the space needed to reconsider the future.

Brenda’s first reaction to a trigger—the menace of a caricature—was to overcompensate for the void she felt by putting her career at the bottom of her list of priorities. But stepping back led her to a more creative solution, in which she combined the best of all worlds.

Being an agent gives me a complete career and a complete life. There’s no trade-off. Sure, I get busy and, of course, on any given task, I have to decide what comes first, my job or my life. My life is more enjoyable all around. It’s not just about work versus personal life. It’s about “What’s my voice? Can I be creative? Am I just a corporate drone? Do I just exist as a thank-you in people’s prefaces? Am I a writer?” If someone were to draw that cartoon of me now, what would I tell the artist about myself? Lots: arts boards, philanthropy, a dog, a great marriage, a Jewish faith, Pilates, dance class. . . .

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

The French phrase reculer pour mieux sauter literally means “stepping back to better leap forward.” It expresses how much we need perspective to arrive at the novel recombination of existing elements that defines an invention or creation.^[17] Jane Stevens, a thirty-two-year-old with an M.B.A. in finance, knew something was wrong in her life but could not put her finger on it. Awareness clicked during a solo, ten-hour drive to a college friend’s wedding. Five years earlier, while working on her master’s degree in international development, Jane had gotten a dream offer, a project with a young firm doing pioneering lending work in Latin America. The project led to a country-manager role, then a position as regional director creating institutions that served the needs of craftspeople known as “microentrepreneurs.”

I was doing something I really believed in, using a business model that works, and the results were spectacular. But I had stopped feeling fulfilled. Being in consulting was no longer gratifying. And the calculus of my professional and personal lives was changing. I was on the road all the time and wanted to put down some roots. I was not developing my own life and knew I had to invest in myself differently to have a family. And I was working very long hours for nonprofit wages.

All these things lurked in the back of her mind, but Jane had not had the time or psychological distance to analyze all these elements in tandem. “I was in cognitive dissonance for six months, caught between the growing realization that I wasn’t happy and my belief in the vision of my firm.” During the ten hours in the car, however, she put together the pieces in a way that led to an obvious conclusion. After that, things happened very quickly. Two weeks later, at her five-year M.B.A. reunion, she reconnected with two former classmates who had acquired a group of firms in the telecommunications industry. By the end of the weekend, they told her they had a new company and they wanted her to run it. A week later, she accepted their formal offer.

Jane was lucky. A relatively short time-out allowed her to break frame; it also enhanced the probability that when something new “drifted by,” she would have courage enough to go for it. For others, like Brenda Rayport, the realization that one has been stuck for quite a while in an ill-fitting career provokes a desire for a longer moratorium, a break from active decision making and job hunting. Like so many other people we have seen so far, Brenda only knew what she didn’t want to do and that she needed time. When she got married and moved to Chicago, she used the move as an excuse to step back.

The big decision wasn’t moving to Chicago. It was deciding not to go back to my firm in a comparable position. I could have done that, and they encouraged me to, but I really didn’t want to. I was headhunted by everybody for jobs close to what I had done before. But I didn’t want to be part of a company. It was too similar. I didn’t see any advantage to it. The problem was, I didn’t have a forward trajectory, I couldn’t see where I was going. I really wanted a time-out at that point.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

“Fortune,” said Louis Pasteur, “favors the prepared mind.”^[12] The story behind his famous dictum illustrates the mechanics of insight in any domain, including career change.

At age fifty-seven, Pasteur was studying chicken cholera. Because of an oversight, he left some batches of bacillus culture, taken from some diseased chickens, unattended in his laboratory over the summer. When he returned in the fall, he injected his chickens with the bacilli out of a relentless spirit of experimentation. To his surprise, the chickens did not die. He concluded that the bacillus cultures had spoiled over the summer and went out to get a new, more potent batch as well as some new chickens. Both old and new chickens were injected with the new culture. The new chickens all died, while the old ones survived. When he realized that all the survivors had been injected once before with the weaker strain, the account tells us that Pasteur “remained silent for a minute, then exclaimed as if he had seen a vision: ‘Don’t you see they have been vaccinated.’ ”^[13]

Although vaccination against smallpox had already existed for seventy-five years, no one before had hit on the idea of extending vaccination from smallpox to other infectious diseases. Pasteur saw the analogy: His surviving chickens were protected against cholera by the spoiled bacilli just as humans were protected from smallpox by inoculation with cowpox cultures. He also saw a second analogy: The weakening of the cultures left unattended in the lab was akin to the weakening of the smallpox bacilli that happened naturally inside a cow’s body. The vaccine for the latter had to be extracted physically from cows. Now Pasteur saw that vaccines could be produced at will in the laboratory.

Discovery literally means uncovering something that has always been there but was hidden from sight by the “blinkers of habit.”^[14] In the case of vaccination, the blinkers of habit stemmed from the convention that work on vaccination and research on microorganisms took place in separate, previously unconnected fields of scientific practice. Pasteur was ready to make a discovery when a favorable opportunity presented itself because he knew both fields and had primed himself through years of study and hard work.

It is also no accident that the vaccination idea came to Pasteur right after his summer break. Having stepped back from his direct work on cholera, he was able to see his old problem in a new light. This is the famous “incubation” phenomenon, in which, “after ceasing to consciously work on a difficult problem, [artists and scientists] sometimes experience an apparent flash of illumination, during which a solution appears to them unexpectedly.”^[15] Professional reinvention also requires a stepping back to obtain a new way of seeing what is.^[16] The full emotional and cognitive complexity of the change process can only be digested with moments of detachment and time for reflective observation. In the same way, time away from the everyday grind creates the “break frame” that allows people in transition to articulate intellectually what they already knew emotionally.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

Early transition events unfreeze us—get us unstuck, ready to move—by making more vivid a feared possible self. Our early doubts about our current career may seem too vague and nonspecific to justify action; but after a defining event, we have concrete evidence of a problem. In Brenda’s case, the cartoon episode showed that her life as an executive was exacting a higher cost than she realized. The event unfreezes by challenging a strongly held or cherished self-conception, such as Brenda’s belief that she was a dynamic person with broad interests. That self-conception was shattered the moment she could not think of what might be drawn around her. Getting fired and receiving a bad performance review are classic unfreezing events. Events like these defy the view of ourselves as competent professionals; they can make us realize we are not in the driver’s seat when it comes to career decisions and bring our feared possible selves more sharply into focus.

Of course, the event by itself is insufficient for sparking change; we can always ignore the information; dismiss it as irrelevant; blame the undesired outcome on fate; or, most common, simply deny its validity.^[9] But, when we are ready (and as we’ll see below, readiness is only a matter of hard work and preparation), events develop self-awareness. Early philosophers argued that we cannot perceive our selves directly, rather our selves must be “caught in the act” of perceiving something that exists in the real world.^{[10 ]}Self-knowledge, therefore, comes from our reactions to things that happen to us and around us. Just as we learn about other people by observing their behavior and making inferences from it, we learn about our selves by examining what we do when events force our hand—yet another reason why solitary introspection is insufficient and why experimenting provides more useful information than reflecting on past experience.

One of the primary ways in which unfreezing events mark a cut with the past and herald the start of a transition period, according to psychoanalyst Manfred Kets de Vries, is by serving as an organizing scheme for everything that occurs afterwards: “From this point on, every new disturbance is recognized as part of the same pattern of dissatisfaction,” he writes.

Complaints coalesce into a coherent entity. Many people have an “aha” experience at this stage, a moment when they are finally able to interpret decisively what is happening to them. They see clearly that neither the passage of time nor minor changes in behavior will improve the situation—indeed the situation is likely to become even worse if nothing drastic is done about it. Even the insight that drastic measures are required does not automatically compel people to take action. However, it typically sets into motion a mental process whereby they consider alternatives to the adverse situation.”^[11]

Unfreezing events may be either happy or sad. People in transition often tell stories of jolts and losses in their personal lives that remind them of ignored possible selves or warn them of the harmful consequences of current identities. But joyful events like births or marriages can also be occasions for revising priorities. Events that mark the passage of time, such as a milestone birthday, a tenth anniversary, or an alumni reunion, can also unfreeze us. Likewise, a natural conclusion to a project or the time when a particular role comes to an end can start our juices flowing. Just as being passed over for a promotion can be a trigger, a new assignment might cause people to see more clearly that they no longer desire the future they were inexorably moving toward.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career

Arranging life’s events into a coherent story is one of the most subtle yet demanding challenges of career reinvention. To reinvent oneself is to rework one’s story, revising it frequently, trying out different versions on others. Events punctuate continuous experience, giving us some pegs on which to hang our reinvention stories. Some events unfreeze us, help us start moving away from the old; other events focus our energies toward the future, helping the new direction to jell.

As a thirty-nine-year-old general manager at a large New York publishing house, Brenda Rayport attended a convention of economists to promote one of her books.

We had hired a caricaturist to draw cartoons of the professors whose textbooks we sold, and he offered to do a caricature of me. His technique was to ask people about their hobbies and interests. He would draw the figures with their little emblems around them. I thought, what will he depict in his drawing of me? A textbook? I didn’t have anything else in my life at that point. My marriage was no good. I didn’t have any hobbies. I said to myself, “I’m passionate about my work, but is this what I want arrayed in the caricature of myself that I’ll hang in my office? I don’t think so.” It really bothered me. For the three or four weeks leading up to the conference, I was sweating about what he was going to draw around me. It became clear that I was doing something very wrong in my life.

A major change in her company’s internal management (one she did not like), a new “commuter” relationship, and a looming fortieth birthday were bits and pieces already nudging Brenda to reexamine her fifteen-year career in publishing. The cartoon episode made it all click in a way that started her moving. Anticipating her caricature became a pivotal moment for Brenda.

I graduated from college in 1980 with a liberal arts degree, and I knew I wanted a career in publishing. So I went into educational publishing at Addison-Wesley, which offered a career track and a kind of professionalism. I started in sales. That meant that I lived in a small town; had a home office, a book bag, and a company car; and called on instructors. Then I moved to New York to work as an editor, starting out in engineering. Eventually, I became editor-in-chief of that group, which generated about $7 million in annual revenues. I was starting to think about what might come next when my boss, out of the blue, asked me to take over as head of the English as a second language division, which needed a turnaround. Its revenues started at $14 million a year from sales channels and product lines all across the world. It had grown at about 2 percent for five years. I mean, it was a real backwater. This prompted not only a move to New York but also a divorce, which was long in coming anyway. At the end of three years, my division was worth $40 million and had become a model for the company. Managing that kind of growth was really, really, really fun.

But the mergers and acquisitions of that period led to enormous changes. People were coming and going, and I started to feel how little power I had, even as a pretty successful general manager. I was a considered a star, but I had a small division and not a lot of clout. I started seeing how dependent I was on toplevel managers, for whom I was just a pawn, and I saw that my people were just pawns. There was no way of knowing whether the game being played now would be the game played six months later. The board shifted twice a year. That angered me because real people and real results were riding on the board. I was effective politically, negotiating the interests of my division, but I didn’t like having to focus on the internal dynamics of the company rather than the external dynamics of the market.

And then there was a personal shift. I met my future husband, Aaron, who lived in Chicago. As a general manager, I had completely given up any personal life. I was totally career oriented. I loved my job, but I couldn’t imagine doing it and having a full life. The business was global, I was on the road two weeks out of four the whole year round, I don’t think I spent a Memorial Day or July 4th or a Labor Day at home for four years. Suddenly I was getting married again, and Aaron and I had to decide how to put our lives and careers together. I moved to Chicago determined to be a whole person again, which meant having to develop those parts of me that were quite underdeveloped. I was going to make damn sure that the next time someone had to draw a picture of me, there would be plenty of things to put around it.

It took Brenda close to three years after the cartoon episode to figure out a new direction. In the interim, the episode became a guiding image she used each time she came to a fork in a road, to remind herself of the feared possible self she was still at risk of reverting to, and its counterpart, the still vague but much desired Brenda with a multifaceted, rich life.

All reinvention stories, like Brenda’s and John’s, have defining moments. As we will explore with other examples below, some of these moments can be dramatic, like John’s, and lead to seemingly abrupt shifts. Others, like Brenda’s, are symbolic, small events that gradually shape a whole series of career and life decisions. Some, like Brenda’s, come relatively early in the transition process, unfreezing her and jump-starting change. Others, like John’s, come a bit later and help a new idea to coalesce. Defining moments make it clear that there is no turning back. They tell us that old lines of work have run their course and failed, been irrevocably disrupted, or simply do not satisfy us anymore. They signal that we are ripe for action, make us more attentive to new ideas, and trumpet our readiness to those around us.

Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career