Career Courage

Katie Kelley

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780814436752
• Topic: Développement personnel
• Subtopic: Carrières

Learn how to discover your passion, step out of your comfort zone, and create the success you want with the help of this invaluable guide.

How has your answer changed since childhood to the often-asked question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" For most, the answers tend to begin with excited seven-year-olds confidently and excitedly screaming out things like, "A basketball player!" or "A fireman!" or "A cook!" and then ten to fifteen years later those same kids are shrugging their shoulders while saying, "Not sure. Maybe something in accounting?" What happened? When did we lose the courage to find our true calling and not just settle for what make sense in today's workforce, or what our parents pushed us toward?

Career Courage is meant to help you conquer your fears, shed misguided ideas, and muster the strength to let go of a safe job and stage your next act. Whether you're a college grad contemplating choices or a seasoned professional seeking new directions, this guidebook poses tough questions about motivation, confidence, character, risk tolerance, and more.

The answers will power your journey forward as you learn to:

• Clarify what really matters
• Express your point of view
• Build strong relationships and a robust network
• Think like an entrepreneur
• Prioritize a truly fulfilling life

Starting or changing careers can be a scary, soul-searching process. Career Courage will give you the strength and guidance you need to break free from your fears and find fulfillment in the workforce.

chapter one

Motivation: Clarifying What Really Matters to You

Eric began his career as a junior client coordinator at a premier Southern California entertainment agency. Over the years, his natural salesmanship, ease around celebrities, and uncanny ability to close lucrative deals for his clients had propelled him to the higher echelons of the talent business. When a rumor about impending layoffs began drifting through the office, Eric felt confident that the agency would not only keep him on board but even promote him to Senior Vice-President. So why was he lying awake at night, his heart beating with anxiety?

For the first time in his career, Eric had begun thinking long and hard about his future. The constant travel, fifteen-hour days, and high-pressure negotiating had won him a certain amount of fame and fortune, but looking ahead to more of the same made him feel like a hamster on a treadmill. Despite a hefty bank account, he felt bankrupt in terms of personal fulfillment. Fifteen years earlier, he had dreamed of finding a life companion, building a great home life, and discovering pleasures beyond the fast-spinning world of work, work, and more work. When and how had his work and personal life gone off track?

Eric’s situation is not uncommon. At some point, perhaps at many points, during our careers, we wonder, “Is this all there is? Am I really happy? How did I get so far away from the future I had dreamed about when I got out of school?” If you’re like Eric, you must do some deep and honest soul-searching. This chapter will help you gain clarity about what motivates you—what really matters to you in both your work and personal lives. You’ll learn that one size does not fit all and that real satisfaction comes from finding your own unique sweet spot, the best possible combination of deeply satisfying work and a rich personal life. Remember that, as we stressed in the Introduction, a career and a life are a journey, not a destination. As time passes and you grow and change, your “true north” will evolve. The trick is to do so consciously and wisely.

Understanding Your Basic Motivations

You can begin by thinking of yourself as a leader in charge of your own destiny. All leaders play many roles both inside and outside their offices. Like so many of the women I coach, Suzanne serves in multiple roles as a “Do-It-All Mom and Junior Executive”: chauffeur, gourmet cook, wife, mother, head fundraiser at her daughter’s Montessori school, and marketing manager for a sleek start-up firm. She feels as if she’s living in a whirlwind. And she is one unhappy woman. Eric knows exactly how she feels, although in his case he wishes he could serve in more rather than fewer roles. Both of them have achieved some measure of success, but they have lost sight of the most important role anyone can play: their true selves. How can they recapture their unique, innermost desires, drives, and ambitions? If your race to success has sidelined your true self, you will never find your true calling and your most fulfilling personal life.

Expectations shape us in many ways, but we need to discover and heed our own expectations for ourselves and not just struggle to fulfill those of others: friends, family, teachers, coaches, peers, and colleagues. When you more clearly understand yourself, you can begin making decisions that will move you closer to a richer and more rewarding life. Few people I have met know more about doing that than one of my most cherished mentors, Cindy Tortorici.

When I first met Cindy I had recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, from Manhattan and had just launched my coaching business. I knew very few people in town and was feeling very isolated in this far corner of the country. Cindy greeted me with a huge smile and folded me under her incredibly strong wings. As I got to know her, I came to appreciate her basic, or core, motivation: to keep people from feeling alone.

Cindy, CEO and founder of The Link for Women, which provides events and programs that assist women in reaching their full potential, has helped countless people, myself included, to understand and apply our underlying drive in our personal and professional lives. To help us do that, she uses Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, a simple diagram that looks like a target with three circles inside (Why, How, What) that helps people discover what really makes them tick. Sinek’s Golden Circle almost always transcends a mere job description because it goes beyond what we do and how we do it to why we do it.¹ Like Sinek, I believe it’s important that we start with the Why.

Understanding and naming my Why took more time than I’d like to admit. As I described in the Introduction, I spent the first stage of my career gaining credentials as a psychotherapist but as I practiced my profession I began feeling more and more empty inside. I came to realize that while I really did want to help people lead happier, healthier lives, I was not gaining fulfillment from trying to do that as a psychotherapist. When I stopped and forced myself to reexamine my life and work, I realized that I could remain true to my Why even if I radically altered the What and How of my career.

• My Why: To alleviate pain and inspire action.

• My What: I work to develop the next generation of business leaders.

• My How: I am a teacher and coach; I make use of broadcast and social media; and I have written this book to share my message with a wider audience.

Sinek’s Golden Circle helped me to understand that I was not getting enough satisfaction from working as a therapist because I was only fulfilling half of my Why. Yes, I was helping my patients alleviate their pain, but I felt deeply frustrated with the fact that traditional psychotherapy felt like such a passive way to help people. Passivity was not in my nature. I wanted to lead, rather than follow, my patients to a better future. During talk therapy, the patient guides the process and direction of the work. This completely suppressed my drive to move people toward action. Now, as a business coach, I fulfill my basic Why, I just do it in a much more action-oriented way.

Eric thought of himself as a talent manager, but that only described what he did for a living. Never having thought deeply about why he did that work, he couldn’t put his finger on what was keeping him awake at night. Deep inside, below his conscious awareness, he was feeling anxious about the lack of meaning of his life, not about keeping his job. Nor had Do-It-All Suzanne stopped to think about why she felt so unhappy as she struggled to maintain the whirlwind.

ASKING THE TOUGH QUESTIONS ABOUT

Your Basic Motivations

Life can get so hard, busy, and all-consuming that we just “go along to get along,” losing control of our destiny as we fly through our days on virtual autopilot. So, stop here for a moment to ask yourself these five important questions:

1. Why do I do what I do? A lot of people accidentally take a job, become dependent on the income it provides, and just keep going along an almost accidental career path.

2. If a wizard could grant me one wish about my career, what would I do with it? I sometimes worry about suggesting that someone consider a major career change in difficult economic times, but it never hurts to dream. In fact, if we forget how to dream, we will never find true happiness in the world.

3. Why do I care for and support my friends and family the way I do? It pays to think about the important people in our life, many of whom we often take for granted. Nevertheless, we may need to make some changes in our care-giving, as we will see in later chapters.

4. What don’t I like about my work? My life? My self? No one wants to dwell on their flaws and shortcomings, but an understanding of the areas in your work and life where you have fallen short of expectations can help you design a self-improvement program for getting better results.

5. What sort of legacy do I want to leave behind? Short- term thinking is the assassin of long-term success. People who think of immortality in terms of the contributions they make to their work and family derive the most joy from life.

It may take a while to answer the tough questions, and your answers may change over time, but continue to keep drilling down until you reach your core and can state your Why in a few simple words. At the core, your Why will go beyond your own personal and financial success to involve those you serve and love. Exercise a little caution, however. You’re always walking a tightrope between your own expectations and those of others. Too much selfishness can estrange you from your supporters; too much attention to their needs can cause you to lose sight of your own. Finding the happy medium between the two will empower you to take more control over your life, filling your heart with more joy and fulfillment and, as a huge plus, making everyone around you happier too. That’s how you expand your role as a leader. I like the way Cindy Tortorici describes it in her contribution to the book Evolutionaries: Transformational Leadership: The Missing Link in Your Organizational Chart.

When we know ourselves we stand a little taller; we become more confident. We are better able to collaborate, participate, step up and volunteer our strengths, and admit when we don’t know something. We are more authentic, and more comfortable with who we are. People are drawn to and will follow that kind of leader.²

Taking the time to identify and then live our core motivations results in lifting our life up to its highest potential and brings hope and inspiration to everyone around us.

Designing Your Motivational Game Plan

Your answers to the tough questions sets the stage for an action plan aimed at maintaining your motivations at a high level. A continually high level of motivation depends on gaining some deep insights into what makes you tick. Deep inside each of us there are a few passionate desires that will figure prominently in our quest for greater fulfillment in our life and work. They are what I call our Vital Dreams. To help my clients discover their vital dreams, I walk them through the following simple but revealing exercise (see Figure 1–1).

This diagram illustrates the intersection of the three major components of any vital dream. Success depends on a clear vision of your life’s trajectory, a propelling drive to reach your goal, and the inspiration to keep you going when the going gets tough. Let’s look at how you can best manage these three components.

FIGURE 1-1 Vital Dreams Detector

CREATE YOUR VISION

Creating your overarching vision requires imagination. Don’t simply think about what you have done in the past or what lies easily within your grasp. Think boldly, outrageously, even off-the-wall. When Eric set aside his fifteen years working as a talent agent, he surprised himself by picturing a new role for himself counseling substance abusers. Whenever he had witnessed or read about someone’s life crashing and burning in the wake of alcohol and drug addiction, he wished he could do something to prevent that all-too-common downward spiral. Those feelings sprang, in part, from his experience with family members who had suffered the corrosive effects of addiction.

West Coast career coach Shari Sambursky offers this advice to people who have embarked on a vision quest:

Signs from the universe are all around you. They may come in the form of the promotion you were hoping for that didn’t come through, or doors being closed to opportunity to advance in your current job. While these may seem like grave disappointments, they may, in fact, be the blessing in disguise guiding you toward your purpose. The key is to recognize the signs, the nudges, and act on them. Acknowledging there is a deeper purpose for you and recognizing the excuses you are making ...