Who Are You? Where Have You Been?
Where Do You Really Want to Go?
Bill: In recruiting candidates for searches, do you find people in corporate America generally happy or unhappy in their careers?
Janice: For too many, itâs a matter of habit, not happiness.
Bill: And too many have accepted that happiness in a career is simply not possible.
Janice: Yes. Thatâs why I advise just about every candidate who comes through my office to stop and evaluate who they are, to take a look in the rearview mirror to see where theyâve been, and only then to figure out where they want to go. The job I am interviewing them for may fit their experiences, but may not be right for what they really want to do next. For the most part, they have not stopped to evaluate other possibilities; they just continue driving on a career highwayâit becomes what they know best, not what is best!
Bill: There are times when you just need to take a break, turn on the lights, and look objectively at every aspect of your life. We just need to stop and reassess.
Janice: Otherwise, you run the risk of crashing and burning. But people are simply afraid that if they stop, they wonât be able to start again.
Bill: Actually, theyâll get off the mark faster, smoother, and better if they take that all-important pause.
FAILURE TO STOP CAN BE DANGEROUS
Remember the rules about what to do at a Stop sign? Youâre required to bring your vehicle to a complete stop, check your rearview mirror, look carefully to the right and left, and, of course, scan the road ahead. Only when you are completely satisfied that the conditions are right and that your way is clear can you take your foot off the brake and put it back on the accelerator.
Chances are that youâre reading this book because you feel youâre driving toward some sort of intersection in your career. Maybe you see a Stop sign ahead. Maybe youâre there, with your foot on the brake and the engine idling, waiting for the other cars to get out of the way. And maybe youâre not quite sure what that sign up there is saying, and you figure you donât need to slow up; youâll just ram through.
Donât.
Failure to stop at a Stop sign is as dangerous in a career as it is on the road. The message itâs giving you is all-important: if you donât stop, look, listen, and assess right now, your career may not make it out of the intersection at all.
So hit the brakes.
Not tomorrow. Today. Now. This minute.
Put down the BlackBerry. Close the cell phone. Clear your mind. Itâs time for a pause.
STOPâBUT DONâT NECESSARILY STOP
WORKING: THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES
High school kids sometimes take a âgap yearâ before they start classes at their prospective colleges. Partly itâs because they are utterly exhaustedâburned-outâfrom all the pressure to get into college. And partly itâs a way of promoting âdiscovery of oneâs own passions,â as an admissions officer at Harvard put itâHarvard being just one of many fine institutions of higher learning that actually advises students to experience the gap year before college.
Professors often take sabbaticals after seven years of steady teaching and scholarship. The mind begins to tire if it concentrates too consistently on any one thing. A change of both pace and scenery refreshes the brainâs capabilities and restores its capacity for thinking.
Even television sitcoms and dramas go on hiatus so the writers, directors, actors, designers, etc., can rest and reinvigorate their creativity. After all, how many plots are there in the worldâand how many jokes can you make about dysfunctional families?
In all of these cases, the value of the pause that refreshes has been recognized. Now itâs time to recognize its value in a career.
Think about it. On any long road trip, you must put on the brakes now and again. You need to take the time to reassess, now that youâve been on the road for a while, whether you want the fastest route, the scenic highway, or the route that meanders through all those towns and cities. You need time to take the car in for some maintenanceâto make sure that the engine is sound, that the air bags will still work if needed, that your tire treads are good enough to take you through bad weather and over rough roads. You need time to adjust the rearview mirror, to make sure you can see with absolute clarity where youâve been and whatâs coming up behind you. And you need time to rethink your destination, to make absolutely sure you know where it is you want to go.
To do all that, you simply have to stop.
But letâs be clear: we are not advising that you necessarily stop working. Weâre in no way hinting that you should quit your job, although a vacation or leave isnât a bad idea, as weâll suggest a bit later. Nor are we talking about blank downtimeâan empty stretch of doing and thinking nothing. After all, high school kids spend their gap year doing something âelseââmaybe traveling to exotic places or signing on to some form of community serviceâsomething that enriches their education. Professors on sabbatical take the opportunity to work on a subject important to them. And TV actors make a movie or do dinner theater or head for Broadway. Stopping, therefore, isnât for vegetating; itâs for stretching. It isnât doing nothing that refreshes you; itâs doing something different, something for you.
We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things . . . [but] there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.
âJAMES CARROLL, COLUMNIST
What we have in mind is doing something for you by stretching your mind, your life, yourselfâtaking time for assessment and evaluation of you, your goals, where youâre coming from, where you want to get to, and whether you can and should go there. And for that, youâll have to stop your forward motion for a bit.
Why is this so important? Because weâve seen too many bright, talented, ambitious individuals crash and burnâonly to discover, as they picked themselves up out of the wreckage, that they crashed and burned for something they didnât really care about. Had they seen the Stop sign staring them in the face and come to the required complete halt, they might have heard that all-important inner voice telling them what it is they really love, what it is that holds meaning for them, what would give their lives purpose so that they wouldnât crash and burn at all.
But to hear that inner voice, you have to listen. And for that, you must stop your headlong rush. You must pause. And you must establish the conditions for hearing what the inner voice is telling you.
Thatâs what the first road sign on the career highway is all about. In a very real sense, if you donât get this one right, the others wonât matter very much. Letâs face it: without the passion for a purpose, no career is really worth it.
So follow this road signâs instruction: bring yourself to a complete stop, and get ready to look back, gaze forward, and do some important maintenance. In doing so, youâll take your thinking beyond what you are doing to find not just what you know, but what you know is right for you.
OUR STOP SIGNS
Some personal history first.
The truth is that both of us have met Stop signs in our careers, and we both agree that the pauses that followed were invaluable. The irony in our casesâand it will doubtless turn out the same for youâis that the stops were the reason that our careers really got moving in the right direction and on faster, smoother tracks.
Bill hit his first Stop sign early in his chosen career as a school-teacher. He has always loved teaching. To this day, he canât think of a higher honor in life than being asked a question. So as a young man, he went out and got two MS degrees to prepare himself for this noble profession. But in time, the rising financial pressures of a growing family proved too burdensome. Bill drove right up to the Stop sign and came to a complete halt so he could rethink, determine how he could better accomplish his goals, find a balance between personal needs and his familyâs economic needs, and see where he could fit. The Stop taught him two things. One, he decided to change direction and head toward corporate America in order to do better economically. Two, he listened to that inner voice telling him that he had to in some way keep the essence of teaching in his life.
Bill hit his second Stop sign in quite a different way, and the pause this time was of a different nature: it helped him draw a line he would not cross. As a product manager in a major food company, he was assigned to carry out an exhaustive study of a proposed new product, still in development. He did so, then reportedâaccuratelyâthat the product was subpar and not likely to succeed. For reasons that can only be guessed at, Billâs supervisor didnât want to hear that. He called Bill a âdopeâ for knocking the product, and he ordered him to water down the report.
Of course, Bill refused. But the incident forced him to halt, look around, and reevaluate whether he fit in this organization. He decided he did not, that his style conflicted too much with the companyâs political emphasis. His inner voice told him that both the industry he was in and the style of the organization went against his grain, so Bill changed both.
The result of these stops for Bill? He found a home in business, but in situations where he could create a one-on-one classroom. Over time, he kept ârefiningâ the situation. Today, he manages his own executive coaching firm. He is still a scholar who consistently studies and observes. He constantly keeps abreast of the latest research. And he is able to bring all that to bear in a setting i...
