Guiding Figures

Yale psychologist Daniel Levinson, whose book The Seasons of a Man’s Life explained the midlife crisis, emphasized the importance of guiding figures: people from whom the person in transition gets encouragement and learns new ways to live and work.^{[8 ]}Guiding figures help us to endure the ambiguity of the in-between period by conferring blessings, believing in our dreams, and creating safe spaces within which we can imagine and try out possibilities. More than a contact who opens a door or offers a job lead, the guiding figure is special because of his or her connection to our dream of the life we want to move into. The “dream” as Levinson describes it is much like a favorite possible self: “It has the quality of a vision, and imagined possibility that generates excitement and vitality. At the start it is poorly articulated and only tenuously connected to reality.”^[9] The guiding figure embodies that possibility and shapes it through his or her efforts as teacher, critic, sponsor, or mentor. In Gerry Evans, Harris found a person who not only believed in his potential as a general manager but who also offered him the kind of close and interdependent working relationship he had never had before and now was ready for.

It was such a contrast to my relationship with Alfred. It’s not as paternal. Gerry knows things I need to learn—things that relate to creative financing, ways to raise money—but he also needs to learn from me. He doesn’t know how to run a company, and I do. He’s looking to me to teach him what’s necessary to develop an organization, to build a foundation. I think I can learn a lot from Gerry, but it’s a more mature and more professional relationship than I had with Alfred.

Another important role a guiding figure plays is to reassure us that we are not out of our minds, to convey that what we are contemplating is not only reasonable but totally consistent with a wise assessment of our potential. The counsel of an elder is also essential because the person in transition cannot see what lies over the horizon: “He needs guidance not merely because in the conventional sense he needs someone to teach him skills, but because some very surprising things are happening to him that require explanation,” writes sociologist Anselm L. Strauss in his seminal work on the search for identity, “because the sequence of steps are in some measure obscure, and because one’s own responses become something out of the ordinary, someone must stand prepared to predict, indicate, and explain the signs.”^[10]

Ben Forrester, who shifted from academia to nonprofit consulting, relied on a former boss, Tim Turner, to step in and help him make sense of what was happening to him. The work he was doing required new skills, and the way people worked together was also new and unfamiliar.

As managing partner, I am charged with both setting direction for the organization and ensuring the full engagement of the other partners. It can be challenging trying to sort out those two roles—and it is certainly different than being a professor. The style, pace, and cycle time are not at all the same. When you go out to make a pitch, you can’t be ambivalent about why they should give you a lot of money. In academia, you are supposed to be a dispassionate observer, but now I have to be a strong advocate. And the feedback is immediate. You know right away: They say yes or no to a fund-raising pitch, as opposed to waiting a year to get a reviewer’s comments on an academic article.

Tim reassured Ben that the challenges he was experiencing were normal, that he had once felt those things too, and that it simply was part of the reality of leading a group of professionals.

Tim has great insight. He’ll say, “I know what you’re feeling. That’s what I live with every day. My job is to maximize everyone’s productivity.” Or, when he sees me getting frustrated, he’ll say, “This is an exercise in character building.” When I find myself in an ego battle, I ask myself, “Does this matter?” His coaching has helped me a lot because I’m trying to figure out what is the right model of “leadership” in the professional world. It can’t be run like a conventional business because partners won’t be told what to do. They won’t “work for someone.’’

Having a mentor in Tim was validation for the new but still tentative identity Ben was constructing as a leader of a nonprofit consulting organization.

Since future steps are so unclear to the person who is changing, a guiding figure can also be a reality check. As Julio Gonzales considered alternatives to a medical career, his leadership professor (who was also a psychiatrist) was particularly important, both as a role model for the kind of work Julio dreamed of doing one day and as a valued source of advice for managing the transition. He helped Julio set more realistic expectations and take the edge off the next job decision, telling him,

You’re not going to figure this out this year. A year is not long enough. You’re going to have to consider doing something on the way to something else. So don’t get obsessed about making the right decision. Make a plan to tide you over for the next three years until you figure out the longer-term plan.

Julio’s guide also broke it to him that there would be no easy answers. Says Julio,

My plan was, O.K., I can’t figure it out, but I’m going to step back and take a year off at great financial risk. And then one night at 3:00 in the morning I’m going to be woken up and there’s going to be a star and I’m going to know what to do. I wanted somebody to tell me, “This is what you’ve got to do, and it will be all right.” My professor helped me see my naïveté.

Where does one find such a guide? In many cases, it is a simple matter of serendipity. Pierre Gerard was invited to a dinner with the Buddhist monk who became his guide; Lucy Hartman’s group brought in the organizational development coach who became her own coach and role model. But from there, it was up to them to recognize the potential and pursue the relationship. Gary McCarthy and June Prescott made finding people who might take them on as apprentices their explicit transition goals: Gary made a list of entrepreneurs he admired and set out to network his way into their organizations; June wrote to a columnist whose writing she admired, asking him to meet and advise her.

Although a person with whom we have had a long-standing connection can be a guide, he or she is seldom someone we have been seeing regularly. It might be an old boss (like Ben’s) or a school friend we lost sight of; often guides are completely new contacts (like Harris’s), with whom we feel free to try out new personas without violating anyone’s expectations. Whatever the original relationship, the strong bond that develops between the person in transition and the guiding figure creates a safe zone within which the change idea starts becoming a real possibility. A necessary feature of this relationship is that it develops outside the web of routine professional interactions in which the person has been embedded (and may be trying to break out of).

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