| Necessity is the Mother of Re-invention |
A few years ago, after a grueling work search, I finally found a position in the same industry (financial services) as my previous job but in a different role. Okay, so now I had a paycheck and benefits and one other thing that a lot of other people have too – no job satisfaction. It was the wrong job in a dying industry that I really didn’t want to be in any more. The seduct ion of a paycheck and benefits combined with my narrow vision of what I was capable of drove me right back to the only niche I thought I could fit in. About a year later, my division, part of a huge international (and troubled) corporation, was sold to the largest financial services corporation on the planet. Better pay, better benefits, more opportunity, job security? Hardly. I was caught in the layoff net about 6 months later.My first reaction…a little surprise, then a little upset and then I did what most people do, I updated my old résumé and robotically went on line to find another job exactly like the one I just lost. There was one problem. Well, actually, there were a lot of problems, but the first problem was, there were no jobs in my field. It wasn’t just that the economy was bad -- although that did remove a significant number of jobs -- it was that companies who did what I do had either moved out of state or sold that division to another company and they were no longer located in my area. So I decided to “just get an office job.” You know, go in, do a day’s work, get a paycheck and some benefits, and go home. No career path, no stress, no motivation, just a job. The rude awakening was that I couldn’t “just get an office job” because I didn’t have what they were looking for and they mostly saw that I was overqualified for some jobs and not qualified enough for others (because I hadn’t had experience making “complex international travel plans” for CEOs.) Now what? As part of my meager severance, I was given a short stint with an outplacement agency. I finally got my head out of the sand long enough to attend the orientation. I met all these nice people who were amazingly talented and felt both comforted that I wasn’t alone in my plight and scared that if all these talented people were unemployed, who was doing everything they used to do and why hadn’t the earth tipped off its axis yet? The agency offered a number of classes geared toward guiding people through the process of finding a new position. When we'd break into groups, what I kept noticing was that I would end up as the leader in whatever little pod I was in. People would do their “elevator pitch” and I would have a really good suggestion about a resource or a line of work they’d be great at even though it wasn’t what they had stated as their target job, just based on listening to “other things” they’d mention. One day, I had a terrific idea for a woman (I’ll call Ann) in my group and I suggested she use one of her one-on-one sessions that came with her program to speak with a career advisor about the idea. She said this was her last day in the program, so she couldn’t make an appointment. I really wanted her to have the opportunity to explore this option. My program was ending soon as well and I had more one-on-one sessions than I could use by the end date, so I went to the program director, told her the situation and offered to donate one of my sessions to Ann. Apparently, no one had ever done that before. She said I didn’t need to give up one of my sessions and that she’d make sure Ann got to speak with someone. Then she said the magic words: “You should work here. You’d be great at this.” I enthusiastically replied. “I’d love to!” Aha! Bingo! Yes! I was so excited, you’d think someone had just given me a life-time supply of dark chocolate! I went home from that meeting with such an adrenaline rush I should have gotten a speeding ticket for the pace at which my heart was going. Why hadn’t I thought of this before? I can clearly see everyone else’s potential, so why not my own? Everyone had “other things” they’d mentioned, as I said before, but I never heard mine in a way that gelled into anything. Now it was different. Now I needed to “listen” to my “other things.” I know - I’d make a list. I always make lists – they help me think and organize and prioritize. A list should work, right? Always has. But wait. What was I making a list of? Jobs I wanted? Was a list enough? And then what would I do with my list? Actually, a list would work but not the way I was used to. My lists had always been to-do lists. It’s sort of like the old résumé content where you list just your job responsibilities. Now you highlight your accomplishments. That’s what my list needed to do. Highlight my accomplishments that tied into this idea of helping people find their potential and take the next step toward work that would be satisfying in a field they enjoyed. Once I got my head wrapped around that concept, it didn’t take long for me to start the list. I reached way back in my life and found every example of helping people I could remember. And I asked myself what it was that drew me to that work or person or organization. Then I made a sub-list, if you will, of all the skills I had to accomplish the task at hand. I drilled down even further to discover what my work had meant to the recipient and finally, what had it meant to me. How did I feel about what I had done? I realized, as I was writing all this down, that I was smiling. I noticed because I hadn’t been doing much of that recently but now that I started uncovering the talent I had and had been using all these years without really noticing it, I began to feel, well, happy! Coaching three different sports for a total of 30 years, helping stage performers bring out their best or training people in a corporate setting – it didn’t matter. I loved doing it. I had the skills, the patience, a natural intuitive sense for people’s potential, a way of identifying how each person learned things, an ability to adapt my coaching or training techniques to different needs, the satisfaction of knowing I made a difference to each person, a purpose for doing it and a passion that made me continue doing it in so many areas of my life. That’s quite a list. Now I knew that I could take everything on that list, plus my “aha moment” at the outplacement center and create work that matched – career coaching. When I mentioned all this to my friends, they weren’t surprised at all. They all agreed it would be a natural thing for me to do and, knowing me for years, I would be good at it. When I asked them how they knew that, they just smiled. Aha. |