My intent with this series of posts is to offer another story, a different perspective to job hunting and career transition. I wasn’t sure if I should or could do this, but a fellow blogger and friend reminded me that I’m not alone. He’s right. I am definitely not the only one out there right now who is working hard and struggling at the job search. And definitely not alone in trying to create a life and career that’s focused on passionately living true to my purpose and talents. If you’re in the middle of a career change or thinking about one, my hope is that my experiences and insights resonate with you. Please feel free to comment or email me privately.

(Before reading further, I would recommend breezing through my earlier post: Let’s Change The Way We Hire Talent, Okay?)

I think the one thing that has surprised me the most is not just the vast range of emotions I’ve experienced, but the speed in which they change. It’s not unlike a rollercoaster with the highs and lows and nausea-inducing loops coming in rapid succession. There are times just this week I have felt energized about going in an exciting new direction, depressed when even temp agencies don’t contact me, confused when amazing job leads suddenly dry up, and scared witless whenever the idea of paying the mortgage comes up. Then, there’s the feeling of sheepish embarassment that comes with not having a job and anger for anxiously waiting for a call or email to set up an interview that never comes. I’m sure there’s plenty more out there.

One thing that I’ve tried to remember through the job search process is that each of these feelings is valid. They are a part of the entire process as painful as that may be at times. Sometimes they seem managable, sometimes they seem overwhelming. Find someone you trust and love and share what you are going through with them. You’re not alone.

With these wildly conflicting emotions comes a question requiring action: How do you manage to keep moving, keep working toward the career that’s sparking the whole process in the first place? Here are three things that I am doing right now.

Taking Care of the Basics Tough as this is at times, I’m trying to take care of me. I’m running for the first time in years, trying to eat better, (trying to) meditate. I’m also looking for part-time/temp work, which has a couple of purposes: one, it would get me out of the house and occupy my mind with other things; two, it would bring in some income.

Informational Interviews I’m finding folks who are doing the kind of work that I want to do or work in organizations that are attractive to me. So far, I’ve met some amazing and interesting people. I don’t consider it networking, I do think of it as relationship-building. I’m joining professional organizations and volunteering on committees. It’s effective, but requires patience (something that my wife would agree is not one of my stronger attributes).

Envisioning that ‘Perfect’ Job At some point, someone’s going to ask what kind of job you’re looking for. You can give them a vanilla answer or you can give them you idea of the ‘perfect’ job. This is a time to dream and to inspire yourself. When times seem bleak, its gratifying to have this mental picture available. This is how I defined my ‘perfect’ job for a friend recently:

It would be a manager of leadership development programs for a mid- to large-sized organization.

Ideally, I would be able to do one-on-one coaching with managers and executives, helping them to develop working environments that reward creativity and their employee’s innate talents. I would also be able to conduct faciliations and trainings to small to medium sized groups.

I also have to be surrounded by highly creative, energetic, soulful people; individuals who love to learn and help others learn. The organizational environment should be one that encourages risk as well as reflection.

And while we’re talking ‘perfect,’ I want to be fired-up each Monday morning when I go to work. I want to be proud to tell people of the work that I do and the organization in which I work. I want to know that what I do has meaning and purpose and that I am contributing to the wellbeing of those professionals around me.

I think that covers the main stuff. And you know, I do believe its out there and someone is searching for me, too. Its just having the faith that it will come. And soon.

I guarantee there will be more to come. If you’re out there and experiencing the career change rollercoaster, my hope is that you’ll arrive back at the finish both soon and safe. But most of all, I hope that place you arrive is where you are most fulfilled, most passionate, most able to use all that makes you unique.

Dan at Oestreich Associates has a brilliant post today – On Finding A Mirror (actually, most of his posts are pretty brilliant). He writes:

I am sometimes faced with audiences that seem to me like they want such a hard, definitive, literal answers: here is what leadership is; here are the five (or six or seven) qualities that define it; here is the way you evaluate yourself to make sure you are effective in each of these pre-defined areas — as if reality could be pinned down so neatly and easily.

Hence, all the books out there on leadership. But, Dan reminds us that we really do know how to be the leader we most want to be. Midway, he offers an exercise that gets to the heart of our own personal conception of leadership, our gifts and our shadows. Why do this exercise? Dan explains:

Well, after working with it with hundreds of people I would say the main benefit is to get completely away from intellectualizing the answer to the question, "What does it mean to be a good leader?" It gets us away from believing someone actually knows the full story, knows our full story. That kind of believing can lead to such abstraction — as if there were some final answer and if we talk enough it will materialize. I’m more interested in the part of us that already seems to have some answers to that question and from a distinctly personal vantage point.

I’m a book junkie and a large part of my library is devoted to leadership (considering it’s part of what I do with my coaching practice, that only makes sense). I love getting the thoughts and experiences of other leaders; sometimes get seduced into looking for that little nugget of gold that’s going to transform my own understanding of and abilities in leadership. I think Dan just reminds us that we have most of what we need inside already. We just need to trust ourselves more.

Or its kind of like the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials – chocolate and peanut butter are the two great tastes that taste great together.

Jodee Bock, a kindred spirit who writes a blog called You Already Know This Stuff, asks some great questions. Her most recent entry is called: LOVE and WORK in the same sentence? She asks, "So, is it possible to utter the words "LOVE" and "WORK" in the same sentence? Can those two concepts co-exist?" She offers Southwest Airlines and Wegmans grocery chain as prime examples; that bringing together the two concepts can be both good for business and the people who work the business. Seems pretty obvious yet these organizations tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

I like her sports analogy: too many companies play not to lose rather than play to win. What’s the difference?

Organizations employing the former strategy regard mistakes as cardinal sins and a source of punishment instead of learning; be tight with their information to employees, customers, and stockholders; consider their employees at best cogs in the machine and at worst untrustworthy and in need of arbitrary rules; and otherwise view the world as a nasty, brutish place where everyone’s out to get you. You can sense this attitude in the culture and see it at work in its ability to be innovative. Quick, spot the playfulness and creativity in the office. None there? Probably playing not to lose.

On the other side of the fence is the organization that’s playing to win. It sets its own tempo (or vision) and doesn’t worry about the competition’s game; it knows its own strengths as well as its weaknesses; it sees its people and customers as absolutely integral to its success; it cultivates the abilities and talents of its people and lets them loose to do their thing while trusting that they will contribute to the overarching business goals.

Let’s be honest, which one would you rather work for?

One of the really cool fringe benefits of being a dad is getting to read great stories to my girls. One book that Leah (my oldest) and I share as a favorite is The Chicken Sisters by Laura Numeroff. It’s about three sisters – one who loves to bake, one who loves to knit, and one who loves to sing. They’re not very good at what they love to do, but they keep doing it anyway. However, their neighbors (who are rabbits and squirrels) don’t care for the constant smoke billowing from the kitchen or the off-key singing and are determined to put a stop to it. That is until an old wolf moves in next door and scares everyone to death – except the chicken sisters. They love visitors and invite him in for cookies and a singing performance that give the poor wolf a horrible tummy and headache. The neighbors come to finally say that they’ve had enough of the sisters when they see the wolf, semi-conscious and trying to escape the sisters’s house. The wolf (who turns out to be quite harmless) finally agrees to leave the neighborhood and move in with his mother in Atlantic City.

Each time we read this book, we talk about enjoying the things we love to do, even if we’re not very good at them. For instance, I’m not a very good softball player (though there was a time I was a decent athlete). I usually hit the ball consistently to the shortstop and frequently overrun the ball when playing the outfield. But I really enjoy playing and try not to let my more competitive nature kick in.

We also talked about how there were always going to be "neighbors" who get angry or annoyed with us for not being good at something. These could be any number of people in our lives who think we should either give up or desperately try to improve. But they will always miss the point: it’s not whether you’re good at something, it’s about enjoying it.

The end of the book shows the neighbors and chicken sisters having a party together. The sisters serve burnt cookies, offer itchy wool party hats, and sing. And their neighbors appreciate it all.

There must be something in the air today because I’m truly juiced, revived from a few weeks of fear-induced mental/emotional paralysis. Why? What’s been going on, you might ask…

[full disclosure]In August 2004, I left my stable, but increasingly unfulfilling job with a non-profit in order to check out the solopreneur world. I was passionate about coaching, particularly when it came to helping others find their voice as a leader and their path as a professional. I wanted to know if I could support myself and my family while going for this "dream work." While so much good came from taking this leap of faith, I’ve also come to understand that this was not the time to go out on my own. Well, at least completely on my own – my solo work can exist as part-time and continue to grow. So, I’ve thrust myself back into the world of job hunting, the very world I had been coaching others to navigate. Oh, the irony. Perhaps now that I have made this disclosure (which in itself is kind of a risk), I’ll blog a bit more on the process. I do have to admit my hunting successes and failures over the past couple of months have made me a better coach.[/full disclosure]

So, I’m working through my morning ritual of reading other’s blogs and I come across Seth Godin’s collection of entries on the job hunting process: Are you looking for a great job?
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Talk about someone speaking directly to me. As someone trying to make a leap rather than take a sidestep (I want to move from non-profit management to organizational development work), the resume is a sad way to move. Even though I have tried to highlight my transferrable skills, emphasize my unique background, yada yada yada, it usually doesn’t fit right into the small box that the hiring powers want. Reminds me… I currently coach a couple of early career professionals who want to do something different and the common lament is the old chicken/egg argument of the workworld: how do you get the experience that is required if no one will bother to let you get that experience in the first place?

I think Seth meanders along only as Seth can, but he does make a couple of interesting points.

Point 1.
The way organizations look for talent is broken. A potential candidate sends in a boring resume that is supposed to attract attention while including drab, lifeless language (read: keywords) that hopefully will make its way to being read by a human being. Once past this stage, you go in for an interview and try to be "coglike in your malleability and desire to fit in." Of course, the only way to get around this process is to actually know someone within the company who can add the necessary humanity to the potential candidate. What it often boils down to is a lot of hard work and even more luck.

Point 2.
We need a way to radically circumvent this old way of hiring. Companies love their job descriptions to the point where they are cast in stone. This happens far more with small- to mid-sized organizations; large corporations can usually find ways to include talented, creative people if they desire. But Seth poses an obvious, yet smart question: "If the single-most-important thing a business can do is hire amazing people, why shouldn’t that process be more flexible and be built around the people, not the slots?"

So here’s a shameless request: If you or someone you know is looking for a talented, creative individual to add to your talented, creative organization, let me know. I might not exactly fit inside a standard job description, but it’s the cool stuff that’s lying outside that makes me (and any of us passionate professionals) worth getting to know.

On a few occasions I’ve written a few things that I’ve been prodded to reconsider lately. Call it a part of my ego-reduction therapy.

Previous idea: Organizations need us more than we need organizations.

New idea: The healthy relationship between individual and organization is interconnected.

Somewhere in the past I’ve written and openly advocated that organizations need us far more than we need them. As a “free agent,” “solo-preneur,” or whatever I might be, this was perhaps a way for me to distance myself from the organization. It was my declaration that I control my destiny and that I am free of the bindings of the corporate world. I alone was the broker of my own unique talent.

Yet, today I’ve been forced to confront this idea and consider something different: the relationship between individual and organization is far more interconnected. We actually might be good for each other. The organization can provide certain things to an individual that they would struggle to get on their own. For instance, the opportunity to work with exciting, creative people; accelerated learning through innovative projects; cool fringe benefits like paid sabbaticals, access to corporate resources, etc. And this all works if the organization remembers one thing: it can pay its employees, but it cannot buy them.

Previous idea: The idea of balance in life is an illusion and therefore unrealistic as a metaphor.

New idea: The idea of balance in life is an illusion and it IS realistic as a metaphor.

I’m a big fan of a guy named Charlie Badenhop who has a coaching practice called Seishindo. He has a newsletter and today’s issue is called Are You Feeling In Control? (absolutely perfect question for me today) He starts with a bittersweet story about a biker whose motorcycle topples over oddly when he stops at a traffic light. Charlie writes:

I smile at the guy, and playfully ask him if he has had a tough night, and a bit too much to drink. “No, no, nothing at all to drink.” he says. “My girlfriend just broke up with me, and I am broken hearted. We divided everything up as equally as we could. I kept the bike and all the rest of what I am carrying. She kept her belongings and the sidecar for the bike, which she always rode around in with me. I guess it’s going to take a while to get used to no longer needing to balance her weight.

He later goes on to write:

Life is a balancing act, and as long as we are alive, the need to maintain, lose, and once again regain our balance, goes on constantly. We don’t so much maintain our balance as a constant. Much more so we need to lose and regain our balance over and over again.

There is something about that notion of returning to balance. It’s unrealistic to believe we can find balance as a constant, but something deeply uplifting to the idea that we can always right ourselves when life and career knock us off kilter.

Previous idea: Work is intensely personal.

New idea: Work is personal AND it’s not personal.

Bren at Slacker Manager recently wrote about how work wasn’t personal for him. He went on to write:

It’s business and it’s removed from who I am. I work and I have standards and ethics toward which I strive. Also, because of values congruency, I define my own work. But my work doesn’t define me.

For a long time, I held fast to my conviction that work had to be personal. I had seen too many folks languish in dead-end jobs who did not make their work personally fulfilling. And I argued this point with Bren.

Now, I get what he was talking about. I think he puts a nice, healthy “and” into how he approaches his work. If you allow your work to get too personal, it does tend to define who you are. What happens if you lose your job or your boss takes you to task for speaking out against an idea that’s bad for your customers?

You can put your passion into your work and you can maintain your core identity and values. Bren, it took a while, but now I see your point.