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

Filed under: Generate Money

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!