The answer was, “Yes, as long as the forty-four-year-old gave it his best shot.” And I then said, “OK, next question. Same vantage point, same younger guy. Let’s assume the forty-four-yearold knew what he wanted to do, had identified it, but decided that the risk for social failure and economic failure was just too great and therefore never did it. How would the seventy-fiveyear-old feel about that?” And I thought that would be unforgivable. Next, a very weird thing happened to me: It was almost a physical sensation. At that instant, I lost the fear of failure, and it has never come back. It was like losing vertigo. By the way, I am not indifferent to failure. I worried about what people would think and what would happen if I failed.
John did all the research for his first book, a financial-world thriller, in his spare time, then scraped together every possible bit of vacation time to go away and write it. By the time he left the bank a year later, the novel was finished, and he had a contract to publish it. Before quitting, he also sold the film rights to Universal.
Novel writing has become the core of John’s new work life, which comprises a portfolio of different professional activities. A second ring is running Masterprize, an international competition for contemporary composers that he created and convinced the BBC and EMI to sponsor. Founding a boutique investment bank, the third ring, was not part of the plan.
I had expected to leave banking-related things altogether. But three of my clients who were big companies said to me independently that they would like to keep in touch. Could I find a way to make that possible? I said, “I have no brand, no machine.” And they said, “We don’t care about stuff like that. What we appreciate is honest advice, and we always trusted you.” And I learned that giving advice to people who have already decided what they want is really quite enjoyable, provided it didn’t get in the way of the books and the music. The bit I disliked was having to go into that bank every morning.
In the end John settled on a portfolio career, pursuing a varied mix of different ventures, some for pay, some as gift work; some that exploit his past experience, some that let him explore new frontiers.[3] Recognizing that managing any diverse portfolio is a long-term gambit, he concludes:
You have to be willing to say I am actually going to invest in growing a new life, where I am supporting things I really love, where I can meet interesting people, whether they are painters, musicians and dancers, or people who have my accounts. I want to get involved, not just with my money. I want to have a part to play as well.
February 18th, 2009 in
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Decorating house is a very fun thing to do. It will make you feeling more comfortable in your house even if you have a very annoying wife and children. It also makes you proud to show your house to your relatives and business partners since a house may show them how success you are. Indeed, there are many things to do to decorate your house and all of them cost you with very high prices. Moreover, you will spend more money for worse thing if you get those things in a wrong shop. You may say that the best thing to do is shopping through the internet. Obviously, you are right but there are many sites that will rip you off for bad items. Read the rest of this entry »
February 18th, 2009 in
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It is hard to say when I started wanting to write. Many years ago, on vacation, I fooled around with writing a novel, but I never intended to publish it. I never gave it another thought. Writing is something you’re encouraged to perfect in the foreign service, and I had a natural aptitude. So when I decided I would change careers, it seemed a promising possibility.
I started by asking myself how I could take natural interests and convert them into a career. I established a link with two small companies, a car retailer and hi-fi company that I patronized. I became an unpaid consultant and have remained so. In my darkest hours of banking, I took solace from ringing them up and just chatting about what was going on in their worlds. It was quite a good way for me to learn what it felt like to work with them, to understand their pressures, their cash flow problems, their staff problems.
By the time I found myself in front of this astrologer, I had already had three to four years of explaining my predicament to friends and family. It was always, “On the one hand this, on the other that,” with no clear view emerging. They would tend to say, “I can see why writing might be interesting, but you’ve got a very good job and do you really want to jeopardize that?” All their advice had just added up to a fog.
Then, suddenly here was this astrologer who after ninety seconds said, “This is mortal combat. The one that will win is. . . .” She probably didn’t pause at all, but it felt like one of those moments when time freezes. I had clarity after four years of fog. Before she said the next word, suddenly a voice on my shoulder was saying, “Oh please, let it be the artistic side,” knowing that if she said, “By the way, it’s the other one,” I would have died a little. Anyway, she said, “The answer is the artistic side.”
After forty-five minutes, we stopped the astrology and just talked. I admitted my true situation, including the fact that I would like to write a book. I talked about my earlier, nonserious attempt at writing and after about three minutes, she said, “Stop, I can’t stand this. I wish you could hear yourself. You are saying, if I have an idea for a book, which is most unlikely, even if I get a good idea, I’ll probably never get around to starting it, and if I do, obviously I’ll never finish it. If I do, of course it will never get published, even in the wildest chance that it got published, of course it will be unsuccessful. What are you doing? You’re trying to protect yourself from failure, and it won’t work.”
This session was, by far, the most significant hour of my life. I left her house and went for a little walk in a public park. I devised two questions for myself there and then. It’s so simple that it’s ludicrous, but my God, it worked for me. I was forty-four. I fast-forwarded to an age at which I thought, fundamentally, it’s all over. I picked seventy-five. My first question, starting from the vantage point of the seventy-five-year-old looking back at the forty-four-year-old, was, “If the forty-four-year-old identified something that he really wanted to do and it was really risky and he tried it and he failed—possibly fell on his face very publicly, with dire economic consequences—can the seventy-five-year-old cope with that?”
Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
February 17th, 2009 in
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John Alexander, a forty-four-year-old British investment banker, decided to put aside his skepticism when a friend urged him to go see an astrologer. He expected a generic prognosis. To his surprise, the first thing she said to him was, “I’m glad I haven’t been you for the last two or three years. You have been undergoing a painful internal tug-of-war between two opposing factions. One side wants stability, economic well-being, and social status, and the other craves artistic expression, maybe as a writer or an impresario. You may wish to believe that there can be reconciliation between these two. I tell you, there cannot be.”
Around his fortieth birthday, John had given himself two years to devise a way out of a successful but unsatisfying career in the City, London’s financial district.
In fact, it took me five years. I think when you’re going for a complete change, it takes longer than you guess. All I knew to begin with was that I didn’t like being a banker. There is something rather empty about finance. It’s glossy. It’s interesting. Sometimes, there are really good moments. And clearly you’re well paid. But most bankers do not feel, at the heart of it, that they’re doing something worthwhile. I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable as my role shifted from being a client’s trusted adviser to being a salesman pushing the deal. I hated having to admit at a party that I was an investment banker. I would go to intense lengths to try to avoid it.
To tell the truth, I never felt comfortable in my own skin in the City. I was recruited to banking out of the foreign service, where over lunch you might talk about archeology or butterflies or Chinese ceramics—we were conversant in a whole range of subjects. I remember the first day I went to the Buren’s canteen. All people could talk about, in some form or another, was money. In fifteen years, I never went back.
But the reason I wanted out, really, was much more fundamental. I just believed that if I stayed there until, say, age fifty-five, and then put my feet up for five years and then at age sixty looked back on what I’d done, I would not feel that I had made the most of my one unrepeatable life. So I decided I had to get out.
At first I went through the fairly routine areas former bankers enter: How about something like venture capital? Could I get a fund together? Could I form a team to buy some company, improve it, then sell it? I concluded that that was just the same thing dressed in different clothes. I would just be deferring a problem, not solving it, and it would not get easier to solve. I urgently felt the need to change sooner rather than later.
But I utterly rejected the thought of looking for just any new job. I had figured out by then that I didn’t want to be part of an organization, that I’d come to dislike everything that went with a big one—not the work per se, but the interminable meetings, the constant e-mail junk, and all the other busywork. Another thing that put me off it was the increasingly political nature of those places. One year, you can be the guy that everybody wants to have on every committee, your star is on the rise, and then six months later, nobody wants to say hello. I’m not a political animal, and I didn’t want to try to become one.
Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
February 16th, 2009 in
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In the middle of confusion, many of us hope for one event that will clarify everything, that will transform our stumbling moves into a story that makes sense. Julio Gonzales, a doctor trying to leave the practice of medicine, put it like this: “I was waiting for an epiphany. I wake up in the middle of the night and the Angel of Mercy tells me this is what I should do.” Some people do experience pivotal moments in which what they are seeking is crystallized. But for every person who changes career in response to some sort of trigger, another fails to take the leap, and a third finds a moment of truth in a trivial but symbolic occurrence.
Making sense refers to the practice of putting a frame around experience: interpreting what is happening today, reinterpreting past events, and creating compelling stories that link the two.[1] A life story defines us. Consider how we come to feel that we really know someone: We might know them well enough to predict their behavior; but we only really know them when we know their stories—the underlying narratives that lend meaning, unity, and purpose to their lives.[2] The same is true for knowing ourselves. As this chapter illustrates, we make sense of chaotic changes by infusing events with special meaning and weaving them into coherent stories about who we are becoming.
Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
February 15th, 2009 in
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All transformation processes, in nature as in society, require a protected space for change—the cocoon, the chrysalis, the womb, the make-believe space, the apprenticeship, or the internship. Making a career transition likewise requires psychological safety.[15] To come up with a creative solution for a next career, we have to be able to test unformed, even risky, identities in a relatively safe and secure environment, an incubator of sorts in which premature identities can be nurtured until a viable possibility emerges. Relationships create such an environment.
In the 1950s, psychologists showed that baby animals could become so highly attached to mother substitutes like brooms and wire figures that they would ignore their actual mothers. Such studies formed the foundation of a more general theory about the sort of human attachment that is critical for any risk taking.[16 ]These “imprinting” studies pointed to the paradoxical nature of self-reliance and paved the way for the notion that people, like baby monkeys, are only capable of being fully self-reliant when they feel supported by and attached to trusted others. In making a career change, we are breaking attachments that no longer work for us, while building new connections that can support us through the transition.
Many of our ideas about psychological safety derive from research on the stages of maturity and predictable transition periods that children go through. Children imagine various possibilities for themselves in the future, and they play out those possibilities via games, reverie, and make-believe explorations. The play world they create demarcates a region between an objective external reality and the entirely subjective internal world in which the child prepares for the hard work of making the illusions real in the external world.[17] The role of the mother is to provide a safety zone in which the child can give rein to his or her imagination. In that space, the child feels protected, safe from any danger. He or she can gradually define and test out a newly emerging self, with the mother’s blessing.
What kind of adult relationship provides such psychological safety? In developmental theory, a “good-enough mother” neither stifles nor ignores the child, neither intrudes nor abandons, but rather gives the child enough rope for discovery, all the while conveying that she is nearby if needed. Likewise, a guiding figure is neither unresponsive when we need help while in transition nor overprotective when we need to operate and explore on our own. Harris’s old mentor was unable to assume this role—he could give Harris neither enough room to experiment with a general management role nor close enough counsel on how to get there. In adulthood, therefore, a guiding figure also helps us get to the next stage by creating a safety zone in which we can create, experiment with, and slowly actualize the new self just starting to take shape.
Like the child taking his or her first steps, the person trying to make a career change will find it difficult to take risks if he or she is preoccupied with psychological safety and security. People of all ages are happiest and best able to deploy their talents when they are confident that, standing behind them, there are one or more trusted persons who will come to their aid should difficulties arise.[18] We need a secure base from which to operate. But there is an added twist when it comes to career change: The necessary secure base cannot be close to home.
Throughout this chapter, we have seen that the only way to make a true career change is by shifting connections from the core to the periphery of our networks—finding new peer groups with whom to compare ourselves, looking for guiding figures to encourage us, and joining new communities of practice. The contacts that bring us new ideas and possibilities are not always immediate sources of comfort and reassurance. We must also venture into unknown networks—and not just for job leads. Making a significant change requires more than a little help from our new friends, mentors, guides, and role models. As we’ll see in the following chapter, often it is strangers who help us make sense of where we are going and who we will become.
February 14th, 2009 in
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The term “communities of practice” was coined to describe a kind of social participation that is crucial for “learning to be.”[11 ]The argument is that learning any line of work is a social process in which we become active participants in the practices of a social community, constructing new identities in relation to this community and its members. Apprentices do not learn a craft by going to school to learn abstract, textbook knowledge; rather, they learn to function as a part of a community in which their initial participation is legitimate but peripheral. We change careers in the same way.
William Bridges, the best-selling author of the book Transitions, was a professor of English for twelve years before he became a consultant, lecturer, and writer on topics related to personal development. By his own account, it took him several years of experimenting to define a next career. Not surprisingly, Bridge’s intimate circle did not encourage him to explore alternatives. His friends and family were voices for stability. Bridges started building his escape route by way of small experiments. But what really allowed him to make the break was the community of practice that became his new home base.
“It took me a couple of years to work up my courage to leave teaching,” he stated in an interview with management thinker Tom Peters.[12]
And then it took me two or three years of experimenting after I had done so to find a path that was a real replacement. It was a five-year process. My experiments started when I was still teaching. I pushed literature courses farther and farther away from literature and toward self-exploration. I, for example, taught a course in autobiography. Which really was a pure and simple excuse for having people search their own lives to find a path for themselves, where they were going. That was one exploration. But I was scared to leave teaching, so I pushed the boundaries of what I was doing as far as I dared.
The actual crossover point came rather serendipitously. I got involved with a group of people who were starting a counseling center in Palo Alto and I got in the training program for lay therapists. There was an experiment to have nonprofessionals actually trained as therapists and to do therapy under the direction of a therapist. I was doing this in my after-hours life. It was very exciting. There were six families in which one or the other partner was in the training program. We were meeting together after these training sessions; we really liked each other. And we talked about living closer together and so on and the upshot of it was that we decided to form an “intentional community.” Not a commune, in one house, but a community.
We started looking for property and finally found eighty acres near the Russian River in California. This thing which had nothing to do with my original purposes for leaving teaching was the precipitating event that finally got me to quit. Mills College, where I’d been teaching, was too far away. I couldn’t keep teaching. I didn’t really want to anyway, but I used that as an excuse to make the break. . . . I came from a long line of teachers and the idea of leaving not only a tenured position, which I had, an endowed professorship, was scary. . . . These voices in my head, which were largely, I think, family voices, said, “This is insane, this is crazy. What is it you’re going to do?” Of course I didn’t have an answer yet. . . . This dialogue was going on in my head and I think finding this community group really helped me.
Just like guiding figures, new communities play a number of important roles: They offer inclusion, provide a safe base, and replace the community that is being lost. Communities of practice are an integral part of the test-and-learn method because we need a context in which to learn both the substance and style of the new self we are trying to become. Some of us, like Ben Forrester, are lucky enough to find a guiding figure who can also teach us the tacit knowledge of the occupation we are trying to enter; more often than not, however, we have to learn by doing and participating in whatever limited way we can in the life of the group we’d like to join.
Consider how a person moves into a career the first time around, as a young adult. Apprentices work with their mentors and learn craftsmanship by observation, imitation, and practice. Newcomers to a profession or organization are socialized by old-timers, meaning that they are taught not only the required skills and rules but also how to acquire the right look and feel—the social norms that govern how they should conduct themselves so as to become true members.[13] In the same way, reinventing oneself as a member of a new occupational world is a process of becoming an insider to that world, learning its subjective viewpoint, language, demeanor, and outlook. But since apprenticeships and internships typically exist in institutional form for only the young, at midcareer we are left to our own devices when it comes to picking up the tacit knowledge of the new work we wish to do. It is up to us to create or find our own community.
If we are free to try out any identity we like, it is also true that we must rely on others to complete the picture of which we are only allowed to paint certain parts.[14] The desired identity remains incomplete and tentative without the stamp of approval of a new peer group, mentor, or community. It is important to conduct our “role rehearsals” outside our usual circles because the old audience tends to narrowly typecast us.
February 13th, 2009 in
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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
February 12th, 2009 in
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For Mr. Smith, who is now a registered customer of Acme’s online brokerage, receipt of the product or service entails having access to Acme’s online self-service trading desk, as well as the firm’s branch offices and brokers who Mr. Smith can contact via Acme’s toll-free telephone number. Read the rest of this entry »
February 11th, 2009 in
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Even before Harris started to look for work outside his firm, he began to shift his point of reference to a new peer group. His boss left for a start-up, followed by a highly regarded peer, Georgina. On the heels of her departure, he attended an alumni reunion event where he met others who had successfully changed careers. It seemed like everyone was changing but him. Much like the participants in the “becoming an ex” study described in chapter 3, Harris began to identify with the values, norms, attitudes, and expectations of entrepreneurs and small-business people. As he sought out those who had already left Pharmaco and saw them accomplishing things they would not previously have imagined, his confidence and resolve were bolstered.
The same occurred for Julio Gonzales, a forty-three-year-old heart surgeon. When Julio started a one-year midcareer course at a public-policy school, he shifted his reference group from medical coworkers at his old job to fellow students and professors. He felt a greater kinship with the latter, and the new relationships that formed became doorways to new worlds for him. His new peers led Julio to realize that he was not a “mutant” for wanting to change; in fact, he became increasingly comfortable with his new affinities. New peer groups might consist of people who are experiencing similar doubts about old paths (e.g., fellow students in a midcareer course) or who are already doing the new (e.g., the small-business entrepreneurs Harris started seeking out). What matters, psychologically, is that we come to feel that important characteristics that define them also define us.
As our points of comparison shift from inside to outside our organization, and as we encounter more and more people who have changed careers, a “tipping point” occurs.[6] Our actions become self-reinforcing: We start to feel more determined to make a change and seek out others who have already done so. Seeing their success makes us doubly determined to make a change, and we take other actions that in turn tip the scales in favor of change. Leif Hagstrom, who went back to school before taking the leap from a large Norwegian bank to a New York travel start-up, for example, sought out among his fellow students those who wanted to make a change. From them, he gained validation for his feelings. In the same way that after we buy a new automobile, we notice how many other people have the same car, once we have decided to change, we look for information that confirms our emerging beliefs (and ignore evidence that might disconfirm our point of view).[7]
Taken From: Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
February 11th, 2009 in
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