Read an Excerpt

MAP YOUR CURRENT  CAREER PATH

YOU ARE ALREADY IN THE MIDDLE of your career. Even if you have never had a job before, you have learned, had experiences, made choices, expressed interests, and here you are deciding where to go next.        To truly understand this requires you to spend time looking backward to map how you ended up here. A beginning can often feel like a cold start with zero momentum. It can be overwhelming, and in a state of panic you may end up on job boards—the last place you should begin (167). You deserve a better beginning that honors your path so far, that is informed by your past and builds on what you have learned.        Mapping your career path to date will help you identify trends, patterns of feelings, and reasons for transitioning out of and into work, insights that will inform your path through this book.        In his bestselling 1980s career book Transitions, William Bridges breaks down the stages of a transition. There is an end, a period of in-between, and a beginning. Each stage is essential yet rarely considered in a distinct way. As you review your map, pay attention to your moments of transition and pause to consider how you navigated each stage in those moments.        What were you ending? What were you beginning? What did you have to let go of in yourself at these times? What beliefs did you have to change and what external changes followed? Do your transitions always follow a place-based change, or do they follow a change in belief? What did you think you were going to gain in the next stage? What ended up happening?        The arc of your career is part of a broader story.        Let’s zoom back out, and as you review your map take note of broader patterns, industries, themes, and clues that could inform your next step. Ask yourself: What do you want to repeat? Do differently? Learn from? What industries or potential jobs emerge that may have been hiding in your peripheral vision? Right before you got your last job what did you feel? Did you listen to your gut, or did you force yourself to change? What are you moving toward? What are you escaping?

THE EXERCISE

Begin mapping your career by following these steps:     1. Make a list of fifteen different milestones, relationships, people, jobs, or experiences that brought you to where you are today.

2. Create a map with your milestones. Connect them chronologically, noting the impact each had on your state of mind at the time. Draw your map on a whiteboard or a large piece of paper.

3. Pick two random points and try to add five more milestones, people, or experiences—no matter how small—that got you from one step to the next. Repeat as necessary to fill in gaps in your map.

4. Choose a different pen color and note your emotions throughout the map. How did you feel before and after you got your last job? When did you last feel overwhelmed or totally satisfied?

WHAT’S NEXT?

Go on a solo trip and spend time in reflection (40)

Find a friend in a similar situation and share your career map (6)

Make your own finish line and mark an ending (139)

Make a list of what you want to learn next (72)

FIND A FRIEND  IN THE SAME SITUATION

THIS IS A JOURNEY that is best done together. Having a partner will help you solidify what you’ve learned along the way, reflect back the boring moments, and open you to a whole other experience of navigating the next steps in your path.        Find someone in the same situation as you. Whether you have both outgrown your current job or you share the same job title, make sure your shared context is the same. The ideal partner could be someone you work with, an old friend you haven’t connected with in a while, or a new one you met at an event (122). This person doesn’t need to be a best friend. It can be someone on the periphery, someone you’ve unexpectedly opened up to about your career and you want to get to know. Feel free to stretch yourself to find someone new; buy them this book or send them to the website.        Do it together.        The benefits of starting this transition alongside someone who is also going through it are innumerable. This friend will hold you accountable, give you momentum, and help you overcome that initial inertia needed to make a change. The things that we want most can be the hardest to do. Your partner for this journey will be a pressure valve—someone who can listen if you need to vent anxieties or share what you’ve learned, someone to help you fend off disappointment and celebrate victories.        You will take different paths through the book. No matter how similar your situations, you will each build your own way and outgrow this guide at different times, finding your own answers and developing your own methods. By working together, you benefit from double the conversations, double the insights, and double the network.        Get together once a week. Notice as you work through the book which exercises you have an aversion to or feel will be hard to do. Talk about those together and commit to doing one each. Pay attention to the voice in your head saying “I don’t need to do that.” These are the exercises you should discuss and decide to tackle with each other’s support.

THE EXERCISE

1. Choose someone who is in the same situation as you.

2. Commit to a weekly meeting for six weeks.

3. Make a commitment to each other to do a number of exercises in the book, taking particular note to discuss the ones you innately want to skip over.

4. During each meeting, share any advice you received and review the people you met that week. Go over the exercises you both completed and compare notes.

WHAT’S NEXT?



Send a “looking for a job” e-mail to five close friends (143)

Practice different ways of introducing yourself (126)

Make a list of twenty people whose careers you admire (99)

SCHEDULE A  VACATION BUFFER

WHEN WE HAVE BEEN WORKING in one way for years and we decide to change what we do each day, our old way of living re-creates itself unless we are aware of this pattern. Our brains and our bodies have been taught to move and operate in a specific way, and our natural inclination is not to disrupt it.        When looking at a lineup of Olympic athletes, we can see their different areas of expertise through the shape of their bodies sculpted by their hours of training and practice. Our work and daily routines similarly give shape to our minds. We naturally want to continue moving in the same way we have been. If our jobs are stressful, this could result in a default tendency to re-create this same stress.        If we want something different, we need to begin to move a different way. This shift can feel uncomfortable at first. A vacation buffer is an active acknowledgment that a transition is happening. The exercise has one essential component and it is of particular importance for those who have been in their careers a long time, the seasoned athletes of their field: take a break.        Begin by acknowledging that it won’t always feel comfortable to completely change your everyday way of being. If you structure your days in your work life, try to take a vacation with unstructured time. Stretch yourself and feel the shift. Keep yourself out of the office long enough that you settle into a new rhythm.        This rhythm isn’t the permanent rhythm for your life (alas, it doesn’t include work), but what’s important is that it’s different. Notice how long it takes you to get comfortable with a new rhythm. Consider what is easy about it and admit what is hard. What do you find yourself re-creating from your old patterns? Stay as long as you can in this transition space.        A vacation buffer is a liminal space, an in-between. It is a period to recognize endings and holds open the possibility of what’s to come next. Don’t rush to fill your time. During the course of your vacation buffer consider what rhythm you want to have in your next job, what your life demands of you now, and what is possible now that you know you can change.

THE EXERCISE

1. Choose a date and set a timeline for your trip. The closer you can plan a vacation buffer to the actual end date of your job the better. It will help demarcate the change.

2. Choose a place based on whether you want to combine your vacation with purpose by going on a solo trip (40), traveling to a beach, or clearing your schedule to stay at home. The important thing is to plan activities that are different from what you would normally do.

3. Track how you feel throughout the trip. What is easy and what is hard about this new rhythm? What do you find your mind going back to consistently? These observations will help you figure out how to adjust your rhythm when you get back home.

CHANGING YOUR SPEED

Different stages of life demand different rhythms, different paces. There are great career decisions to be made whether life demands you have to speed up or slow down. Major life experiences such as having a family, moving to a new country, or working through grief all demand a change of speed and accepting these changes does not mean sacrificing ambition. When you accept a change in pace you are able to act from a place of strength that results in less struggle and less stress. Here are three steps you should take when considering a rhythm change.

1. Investigate an Old Rhythm

    What was the rhythm of your last job? What is the speed of the life you want? How do these two overlap? What was the experience and feeling of living with a different rhythm like?

2. Map the Changes

    What factors have changed in the past six months that demand a new pace? Changing your speed begins with accepting these new facts and seeing them as a foundation of strength. Be sure to note both external and internal factors. What rhythms do you want to continue? Should the pace of your life speed up or slow down in response to these changes?

3. Identify Stepping-Stones

    You don’t have to adjust all at once. Identify stepping-stones that you can use to re-create some of the qualities of your old life and provide a bridge toward the new way you want to live.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Learn about how your center of gravity affects your decisions (27)

Practice a new method of taking notes (86)

Reconnect with five mentors from the past (112)

Make a list of your skills (69)

DOWNLOAD YOUR  BANK STATEMENT

Robert Gass, a leadership coach whose work is grounded in Buddhism, says that “stress is resisting the reality of what is happening.” He explains that the world is what it is whether we acknowledge it or not—it is the act of resisting that causes our anxiety. This realization shifts the responsibility back onto us—we’re the ones that must look, accept, and see it for what it is. Although this may be true, it is still hard to put into practice. For example, it’s hard to make yourself sit down and look at the reality of financial information you don’t want to see.        At various points throughout your career there are times when you don’t have the resources you need, and in those moments it is more important than ever not to ignore your financial reality. This exercise can be used to get any information that you need that you have been ignoring—be it a test result, feedback on an interview, or, in this case, a bank statement.        To overcome your resistance, begin with scheduling something that you really want to do with a friend. It can be as simple as lunch, but it must be with someone you enjoy spending time with and who is readily available for a last-minute plan. Schedule it for later today or tomorrow.        Fifteen minutes before you leave the house, put on your shoes and be ready to go. But instead of walking out the door, walk to your computer. Now is the time. You’re all set to head out the door, but instead you sign in to the bank website and download all your bank statements from the last six months.        Begin looking at them and start to figure out how much you have and where you have been spending money. Find out whatever the information is that you have been ignoring. You have to rush, as you have someone waiting—but make sure you begin looking. Maybe you need to categorize the expenses from the last month to figure out what you are spending on, or maybe you need to see how much you still owe on your student loan. This exercise works for any information you are avoiding looking at. This is your chance to get that information. You know what information you’ve been ignoring.        The rush of just doing it will give you about twenty minutes of momentum—there won’t be enough time to really figure out what it all means, but before you know it you will be scrambling, wanting to continue, and then you’re already five minutes late. You have to leave.        Go. Leave the house. Leave the work on the table.        Now you are with your friend doing something that brings you joy, all the while knowing this information you didn’t have before. Enjoy the meal. The world hasn’t ended. Now you know. There is a slight sense of relief. Remind yourself of the quote—“stress is resisting the reality of what is happening.” You no longer have to resist. Your task has changed to simply figuring out what to do next.        The mental anxiety of not knowing is one of the worst types of anxiety. It paralyzes. The fictions that fill the gap between reality and your imagination are never good ones. This is especially true when it comes to your bank accounts, your debt, your money. This “rushing through it” trick works because the alternative—opening up the letters, downloading the bank statements, and then being faced with an endless amount of time to contemplate the decisions that got you here—is much worse.        Rushing isn’t resisting—it’s embracing. This exercise will give you just enough momentum to come home and easily approach the information that you left midstream and continue to figure out what it all means. The hard part is already done. You simply have to continue what you started. Momentum is on your side.