Career Perspective: Get Some Distance

eCurt Rosengren of CurtRosengren.typepad.com is one of my favorite career writers. He's a contributor to a fabulous career magazine:  Worthwhile.  Today he writes about the benefits of telling your career story as if you were discussing a third person.  In a nutshell, tell your story as if you were talking about someone else.

I'll do my own life as an example for you (and as an exercise is personal growth for me). 

The Lawlady's  8 year Career Adventure:  In 1997 the Lawlady (although she wasn't called that then) was finally fed enough, and despairing enough, to do something about her career malaise.  She quit her cushy, part-time insurance defense job with no new job in sight.  Rather than blow her $13,000 car accident settlement money on a trip to Indian to "find herself" she decided she would take a sabbatical from work and figure out her true career path.  She told herself each day when she would get scared, "I'll trust that if I am industrious every day applying my talents, skills and interests, the Universe will reward me and put me to work doing something people will pay for."  The same month that she quit without a new job, she also began an intense meditation practice. Essentially, she was going to make "finding God" a bigger priority during this time off of work.

Fast forward.  Lots of struggling and dark thoughts.  Why is it that periods of unemployment scare us so much?  The mediation classes helped her combat a dark, foul mood that lingered longer than it should have.  Sometimes along the 8 year journey, she would get buzzy insights about work and the way the law could be better; how to blend spirituality and law; and how to weave divorce ritual into the law.  Sometimes she was patently arrogant and missed making valuable connections that could lead her to better speaking gigs, or part-time trainings with more senior family law attorneys.  She clearly wasn't perfect, but she did enjoy a moonlighting stint as a romance columnist for a cheesy, local women's paper, and got to experiment with different modalities for doing divorce. Her work was mostly on the fringe of the mainstream divorce community, so she could explore and try new techniques, blending counseling styles learned during her mediation trainings and at the various self-help trainings she had attended in the past.

After a few false starts with different groups, she eventually found her niche with collaborative divorce. This wasn't a theory of divorce practice she developed herself, but it did have a well established base of practitioners in other states.  She paired with a better known local attorney and they grew Washington's first collaborative law practice up to about 65 paid members, training about 100 lawyers, mediators and allied professionals in the state. She presented for the WSBA and King County Bar Association on the topic, culminating in a year of busy speaking gigs including a presentation on Divorce Ritual to the International Alliance of Collaborative Practitioners.  Then suddenly at the end of the 7th year, she abruptly quit her co-presidency of the local Washington collaborative law group she had founded, and left to buy and renovate a Tudor House in the Roosevelt neighborhood, a few blocks from Whole Foods and East West Bookstore- natural business allies.  The decision to quit NW Collaborative Law (her collaborative law baby) and buy the new facility was a snap decision which is odd for someone who normally makes more thoughtful, meditative decisions. 

Or maybe is wasn't so snap.  Or maybe is wasn't so unusual. In retrospect, the decision to quit 8 years earlier without a job could be called snap. 

What was surprising is that the move to the new location didn't come with a sense of thrill and excitement, as she thought it would.  It was more challenging and difficult.  After the first frenzied year, she felt more disillusioned with the purchase. 

She consulted with an astrologer about the issue.  "You reached the pinnacle.  You set a goal for yourself and achieved it.  The firework display has happened.  Now its time to take your reputation and influence and take yourself down off the mountain top. It's your choice how you get down."

"Wow," she thought, "that's heavy." 

"Go do something you really want to do,"  were his parting words to her.

Comments

[Teak T]

I'm enjoying your blog here relaxing on my garden bench. I enjoy your intellect. Keep up the good work.