Don’t Miss Your Story
The other day I was browsing the career services website of a major university. They had a lot going on!
There were seminars, workshops, and career fairs; there were coaches who would meet with students by last name, there were tips on how to write a resume, how to write a cover letter, how to prepare for a job interview, how to negotiate salary…the list went on.
Looking over these services, something started to stand out: practically all of them had to do with how to make career moves, and not why to do it.
Surely there’s some wisdom in this. For someone setting out on a long journey, the important thing is often just to get started. Put one foot in front of the other and adjust as you go. When someone fresh out of school is stuck in uncertainty about what to do next, this is my go-to advice.
As we go into career, quickly we begin to gather information. A friend described realizing, after training for years and spending hundred of thousands of dollars on school, that she hated working in a law firm. To her great disappointment, she learned in the first week on the job that this was not the direction she wanted to go.
What leads to situations like this one? I believe a big contributor is simply not knowing — not knowing ourselves and what we’re getting into.
So many students get caught up in the prevailing currents of their environment. This definitely happened to me. Back in high school, if you had asked me why I wanted to go to college, my answer would have been something like ‘because that’s what comes next.’ I questioned the decision about as much as I questioned going from 10th grade to 11th. There was nothing to think about.
Once we’re in college though, we do have important choices to make. What to study, for one thing. And what to do after college for another.
These decisions have a large influence on our long-term direction. Now, does our first job out of school define our career? Not by a long shot. My friend who started off in a job she disliked made a change as soon as possible.
But, does our focus in school and our first job begin to set up a pattern that continues long-term? Certainly they have an effect over time. So it makes sense to think through what goes into making those choices — in other words, what are our influences.
What Work Is For
A movie from years ago that I enjoyed is Gravity, where Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut trying to get home after a disaster in space. As Bullock’s character prepares to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere, we know her chance of survival isn’t great.
It’s at this point that the movie turns. In particular, Bullock’s character goes through a transformation. While before she was terrified of dying and filled with fear, she comes to accept what’s happening to her and finds peace.
Watching the movie, we realize that this was the most important thing that needed to happen — even more than her making it back alive. What mattered most was the change in her, and I think this idea applies to our work as well.
One way we can think about work is that it’s about an outcome. It’s about reaching success, or wealth, or stability. Or, it’s about paying the bills (which is a wonderful outcome indeed!).
Without minimizing the importance of what our work does for us, I want to emphasize what our work does to us — how it changes us. We spend so much of our waking life working. It’s worth considering the effect all this activity has on us.
It’s A Story
I think it’s true that we all want the fairy tale ending: ‘and they lived happily ever after.’
We believe there will be some event, some time, some thing that happens which will change everything, and that afterwards all will be well.
It’s easy to look for that something in our work. Maybe when I reach that title, or that salary, or that level in the company, we think — then I’ll have made it.
I knew a guy who used to work for a former employer of mine. He had an idea for a product, started his own company on the side, and became a millionaire selling it.
Every so often he would come back in to consult — always very relaxed, wearing comfort-fit jeans and sipping a huge icy drink he got from a gas station. In my eyes, he had ‘made it.’
But even he still faced challenges. He could work when and how he wanted, but that didn’t make his life perfect. The story kept going on.
This may be one of the hardest facts to accept about our work. About our life, even. The story keeps going on, and nothing we can do will deliver ‘happily ever after.’ We want it so much, but aren’t able to make it happen.
Holding this reality in hand is painful but it also gives clarity. We stop thinking that our work will deliver a perfect life. We stop believing we can ‘arrive.’
When we stop expecting work to work like this, our eyes look for something else to focus on. We start noticing people. We see how we’re changing, and how others are changing, and how important that change is.
We start gaining an interest in creating positive movement. This transition has been described by different people in different ways. Some have called it moving from success to significance, others describe it as moving from our false self to our true self. The important thing is not what we call it, but that it takes place!
Now here’s a question: what if we could come to this insight sooner rather than later? What if we don’t need to spend decades of our career thinking that we can arrive and that work will be the means by which that happens?
As a college student, none of these ideas existed in my mental universe. Along with learning how to write a resume and cover letter, I wonder what difference it might have made if they had.
When we see that our work is about a bigger story going on, it shifts our thinking. It’s less about ourselves and making life great once and for all, and more about an ongoing, upward climb done together.
Like any story, there’s a general arc to our work, but the specifics are unique. Once we see that our work tells a story, we can start to think about what it might say.
It Says Something
My friend Paul was weighing a big decision: stay at his current job, or take on a new, uncertain venture with another company.
As we talked it over, we saw that all through his career Paul has been a risk-taker. Even when he takes a job that doesn’t work out, it doesn’t diminish his willingness to keep pursuing jobs with large potential upsides.
Risk-taking is a theme in the story of Paul’s work. And since it’s a part of who he is, it shows up in other areas too.
Finding out the themes that run through our life is important, because when it comes to the story of our work, our themes show us what we’re likely to do.
But also, and this is where things really get interesting, we have a hand in how our work plays out.
For example, as Paul was recalling his theme of stepping into high-risk, high-reward work situations, we saw that this opened a few different options.
He might say ‘This pattern is something I love — I’m not backing off of being willing to plunge into the unknown. It’s always been a part of my approach to work and life, and I want it to continue.’ In other words, he might see a theme and recognize that it’s good to keep it up.
But what if he decided to make a change? Paul might say instead ‘I see how things usually play out if I follow my natural course, but I want a different outcome. I’m going to do the unexpected, unusual thing, with the hope that this will create a better situation than the option I typically choose.’
Imagine you’re piloting a ship and using a wheel to steer. For most of us, that’s an unfamiliar activity, so we’d need to try moving the wheel a little one way, then see what happened, then a little the other way, and see how the ship responds. Only after we had moved the wheel both ways, a little and a lot, and done this a few times, would we start to get a feel for how to send the ship where were wanted it to go.
In our work, and life more broadly, when we have experience paired with insight, we start to learn how to ‘steer the ship.’
This is big because it means we can influence what the story of our work says. For example, rather than simply taking whatever work was closest at hand (over time, this might tell a message like ‘Take whatever work you get; what you want isn’t important,’ or ‘Work is scarce, don’t think there’s something better available.’), we might decide to change that storyline. We might make a deliberate choice to go against a theme.
But we can make a different choice only if we know what our default is and what kinds of outcomes that creates. Experience and insight are vital.
What if a college career office provided training so students could understand their story, see emerging themes, and make decisions based on this fuller picture? How much career misdirection could be avoided, and how soon students could get on-target for work they’d really love.
Reflecting on your own work story, what’s one theme that stands out? It could be the kind of places you worked, the types of people you seemed to encounter over and over, or a belief you held about work.
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