I knew there was a part two to this, it just took a couple of days to get it out…

I found the Fast Talk of the March 2005 issue of Fast Company to be particularly fascinating. Since this is Oscar month, they profiled folks who work in the business of moviemaking. While everyone appreciates the creativity of the actors, set designers, costume designers, etc., the folks who really work behind the scenes demonstrate their own sense of artistry. There’s something very interesting to me about working within the film industry; I can relate with the individuals they profiled and their persistence to make things happen. To me, they offer reminders of how necessary it is to have a strong sense of faith and commitment to your vision, confidence in your abilities and intuition, and a very thick skin for rejection.

I liked what Meredith Finn, the   Director of Acquisitions and Production for Fine Line Features/ New Line Cinema   said:

In my work, it’s so important to remain confident in my own ability. I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t know I was going to work in film, but I’ve always been very opinionated and passionate. It’s other people’s role to question my opinion; they wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t doubt me on some level.

It’s easy to get frustrated and angry when others doubt our opinion and question our abilities (perhaps even more when we’re in the middle of a career transition). But, that can only help us make stronger cases for ourselves. It can set us on fire to improve not only what we do, but be more clear about who we are.

The Clear Leader is the title of the article by Marcus Buckingham who has an intriguing book coming out called The One Thing You Need to Know…About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success (why do business books have such long titles?) Based on the content of the article, I gather that the argument he makes is that great leaders know a thing or two about clarity. One idea that really struck me was this:

Somehow, many leaders think their job is to analyze the world’s reality and complexity and reflect it back to their people. Not true. As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about the future you’re dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why they’re going to win.

It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about when it comes to interviewing. A good interview is really a conversation rather than an interrogation (though I have been in ones where the hiring manager never realized the difference). Just as the hiring manager is trying to determine whether we are a fit for their organization, it’s important for us transitioners to consider what we represent to them. We are the future and we bring something new to their culture. We need to help them feel confident about the future and clearly define why together we can succeed.

It’s been way too long since my last entry. Reason is I’ve landed a short-term gig with the Smithsonian Institution in downtown Washington, DC. The work is nothing too glamorous, but I get to contribute to a good organization and use some of the expertise I’ve built up over the years.

Getting to work means a fairly lengthy commute (pretty common for us DC Metro residents) and I tend to take public transportation so I have a chance to read. If I’m not reading one of the books you see in the left column, I’ll pull out a magazine. Right now, its the March 2005 issue of Fast Company. I know its a good issue by how many pages I have dog-eared and this one’s been well marked up.

Here’s the March issue link: http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/92/index.html
It’s too soon for this issue to be free and open to the public, but log-in if you’re a subscriber.

Here’s one of the highlights for me:
Marshall Goldsmith’s article called Do You Love What You Do? Besides the fact that the article talks about loving your work (not much of a surprise that I’d be interested in something like that), I was drawn to something else. He begins the article with a story about Warren Bennis when he was President at the University of Cincinnati. Goldsmith writes that Bennis was addressing a university audience when a friend asked him, in front of everyone, "Do you love what you do?" After a long, uncomfortable pause Bennis answered that he didn’t know.

What Bennis’s friend did was ask him a disruptive question because it prodded Bennis to deeply question his assumed career path. Goldsmith writes:

That revelation plunged Bennis into deep reflection. It dramatically altered his path through life. He had always thought that he wanted to be the president of a university. It had not dawned on him that after he got there he might not actually enjoy the life of a university president.

This is one of the most effective tools in the coach’s toolbox. As a career coach, my goal is to ask one disruptive question each session. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. I’m also  conscious of the inherent risk when asking clients a disruptive question because it’s ALWAYS uncomfortable to have assumptions challenged. But, that’s the type of question that a client ultimately comes to coaching to be asked. It’s highly difficult to ask yourself a good disruptive question; it lingers in your blind spot – close by, but outside of your immediate awareness.

So, if your career is not what you want it to be and deep down there’s something gnawing at you, it’s time to find someone who can ask you some disruptive questions. Whether that coach is me or someone else, you owe it to yourself to love what you do.

Don Blohowiak at Leadership Now has a post today called Coddlers. He writes about how twentysomethings just entering the workplace are not truly ready for its demands. He calls it the generation influenced by the evil twins called Needy and Fragility:

The managers lament goes something like this: These kids don’t want to take responsibility. They don’t want to do anything that’s hard. They want positive stroking for the littlest accomplishment, and literally cry at the slightest hint of criticism.

While I take sharp offense by the tone of the post (guess I’m having lunch with Fragility), I can’t help but think that there is some truth to his message. I’ve had this article form MSNBC bookmarked for a couple of weeks and it seems to support at least part of Don’s argument: Prep your child to become an adult. It has an extended excerpt from the book Ready or Not, Here Life Comes by Dr. Mel Levine. He argues:

We are in the midst of an epidemic of work-life unreadiness because an alarming number of emerging adults are unable to find a good fit between their minds and their career directions. Like seabirds mired in an oil spill, these fledgling men and women are stuck, unable to take flight toward a suitable career. Some are crippled before they have a chance to beat their wings; others have tumbled downward in the early stages of their trajectories. Because they are not finding their way, they may feel as if they are going nowhere and have nowhere to go.

So Don’s probably right, there is something going on. But rather than instantly assuming the parental (or perhaps more appropriate paternal) role that traditional managers seem to hold fast to, today’s managers must first understand and attempt to empathize with what’s going on with their younger employees. Consider this from perspective from Mel Levine:

There are dramatic differences between the unwritten rules for growing up and those governing careers. For one thing, a child is encouraged to be well-rounded, while adults are permitted (even required) to commit to specialties. So long as grown-ups are effective within their chosen niches, the world will overlook or even fail to notice their gaping flaws elsewhere…

A sizable hunk of a child’s success is measured by her ability to comply, to learn what she is expected to learn, and to do what she’s told to do. An adult must be able to chart her own road maps. The odyssey leading into adulthood can be a lonely and harsh voyage, especially if a startup adult is naive and uninformed, if he’s never learned to be a mapmaker.

Mel Levine’s book is intended more for parents and those who care for our children than it is for managers. As a parent and a coach who works with emerging professionals and leaders, I understand the deeper issues of what’s taking place right now. I also see where we need to refocus our work as parents. If our children are not ready for adulthood, that’s our failing and no one else’s. One of the chief responsibilities we have as parents is preparing our children for what comes after being a kid. We need to look for opportunities in which they can experience the fact that being an adult can be challenging, arduous, lonely as well as fulfilling, exciting, and fun. That way, when they encounter managers who complain about “kids these days,” they might be able to smile and say, “Yeah, tell me about it…”

Perhaps its the frustrated historian in me, but the title for this article in the Christian Science Monitor caught my eye. It’s titled Presidents’ Day Thoughts on Monuments to Decent Lives and written by Joseph H. Cooper. It’s a thoughtful take on the idea of personal biography and what we can leave behind. Nothing is more powerful than our own stories.

It takes a special kind of following to warrant being memorialized on a postage stamp, let alone on coin or currency…Still, each of us, in our own way, carves out a bit of history that should be set down – for our own edification, and for each of our families and a few friends.

He pens some thoughts for his son at the end and I immediately thought of my two daughters. There will be times in their growing lives that they will wonder who their father was: what he saw that amazed him, what he experienced that influenced him, and he did that made a difference. And there’s room to include the less than perfect moments that taught hard lessons.

This isn’t an exercise that needs to be put off for when we reach a certain age. Consider it an organic document, one that lives to be added on to. Consider how he ends the article:

Appraisals of one’s worth or contributions do not require book-length memoirs. Monuments to a decent life do not require marble or granite. And nothing you set down has to be written in stone.

I absolutely adore Kathy Sierra and her thinking. I have to admit sometimes I’m afraid to visit her blog Creating Passionate Users because I know I’m going to have to think deeply and maybe, just maybe have to rethink some assumptions.

So, on this beautiful, but cold Virginia Saturday morning, I visit and find another thought-provoking post. I couldn’t but leave this comment:

Once upon a time I was a non-profit manager in charge of membership services. One of the reasons I left was because of the monotonous repetition of the work. Not like doing the same thing day after day after day, but there’s a sort of schedule that you maintain. Each month you know what needs to be done. What I craved was more variety.

Now as I reflect back on that work and reading your post, something interesting has entered my thoughts. I think love and passion are essential, but so is curiosity. I wonder if the Finns get curious each time they perform "Don’t Dream It’s Over" and ask whether they can add something new to it. Not like use a new lyric or sing a different note, but something deeper. Can I explore a new place in my soul when I sing this beautiful song?

And so it has me thinking about how I would moan about the fact that I had to keep doing the same work over and over again (I’ll always seek variety, though). But if I ever find myself in similar situations or jobs, perhaps I can ask that question. Can I explore a new place in my soul, discover a new form of creativity, develop a new method for connecting with my customer/member when I do this task?

Thanks for bringing me back to a deeper place, Kathy.

It’s really cool to run into exciting, interesting people in your own neighborhood. The other day, I noticed a new shop opened in the same shopping center as my Starbucks-home. The name of the store is the Curiosity Zone and with a name like that, who wouldn’t get curious and want to look around inside.

Turns out that this shop is devoted to curious kids and us adults who still have the curious kid inside. It’s described as “a state-of-the-art science and tech enrichment center for kids ages 1-12. It is a place where kids can go to think, invent, create, explore and learn, learn, learn.” Neat, huh? The shop sells neat science-fair kind of stuff, but even better, it has a kid-sized classroom/laboratory where they host hands-on group lessons and birthday parties.

As a dad of two daughters (as well as a bit of an amateur science geek), I was hooked so I found the owner and talked with her for a bit. Mary Porter’s story shows just how powerful a dream can be when it comes to living a life worth living (check out her bio – what’s cute is the “then” and “now” pictures). She’s a former lawyer who had talent and brilliance in that profession, but yearned for something else. From her bio:

But what does growing up to be a corporate lawyer have to do with being a kid scientist/ engineer/inventor? Well, not a whole lot. And that’s kind of my point. It wasn’t until life unexpectedly took me to Seattle and to a startup Internet company that went crazy and went public in a blast of innovation that I finally started to get it. It was like a million of those fireflies glowing at full wattage. I was supposed to be creating and inventing stuff.

And so here I am. It took me a while, but I finally got here. I devoted the last couple of years to studying, playing, brainstorming and creating with some pretty amazing kids, parents and teachers. The result is the Curiosity Zone — a place I wish I’d had as a kid, and a place all of the wonderful kids in my life today are proud to have helped invent. It’s a place where kids can go to let their curiosity fly; where they can think, invent, create, explore and learn, learn, learn!

I have to admit her personality is engaging, her vision is exciting, and her passion is contagious. Listening to her speak with such enthusiasm for growing her business and inspiring children’s curiosity, I’m already thinking about how I can help her. And she wouldn’t have to pay me a dime. I would do it because I believe in what she’s trying to build.

Folks, if you live in the Washington, DC area, come out to Ashburn, VA and visit Mary’s store. Bring your kids and your curiosity. And even if you can’t visit, you can still build a version of the Curiosity Zone in your life and make a place where you can “think, invent, create, explore and learn, learn, learn!”

I’m not sure how I happened to discover Charlie Badenhop and Seishindo.org, but it’s one of those wonderful surprises that life presents you. I subscribe to his e-newsletter, Pure Heart, Simple Mind, and eagerly look forward to each issue. If you want to be treated to some truly soulful writing that gets to the heart of life, do yourself a big favor and subscribe. Trust me, you won’t regret it. Okay, I’m almost finished gushing.

The most recent issue’s main article is titled Perfect Imperfections and it hits so soundly on a hangup that afflicts so many of us: the desire for perfection. Yet, rather than doing something perfectly (delivering the perfect presentation, acing the interview, hitting a Curt Schilling curveball), Charlie writes about the desire to be perfect. There’s a huge difference and this latter desire is so insidious to our own wellbeing and sense of self-worth. It reminds me of a previous post I wrote in January called Just To Be Enough.

Charlie tells a story about a recent visit to a pottery shop outside of Tokyo, Japan. Admiring the workmanship, he talks to the shops owner and asks her to tell him about some of the pieces. She starts by describing the process of creating her pottery and that she is never sure how the piece will look when she pulls it out of the kiln.

It is the serendipity she said, that makes the work so magical. "It helps you to stay humble, and you learn to surrender to and accept the unknown," she said.

Then she relates to Charlie the "hoped for imperfections" of her work…glazing with inconsistent thickness and a not quite round bowl. Of all her pieces, it’s the ones that are perfect that she values least. They don’t adequately describe her uniqueness.

Charlie ends the article with some powerful questions and insights.

Do you try to make it appear like you have no flaws? Or do you relish how such flaws add to your uniqueness? I find in my own life, it is so important to go beyond the oppositional thinking of right or wrong, good or bad, and in the process, accept, and fall in love with, who I really am.

Why am I including this in my series on career change? Because I think perfection can be very seductive when it comes to the job hunting process. Think about your resume and your interview strategy. If you’re like me, you worry that everything has to be perfect because you’re likely up against so much competition. Everyone tells you that imperfections will get you weeded out. Mind you, not just technical imperfections like a misspelling (though please make sure you’re diligent and use spell-check; I’ve been a hiring manager before and have discarded resumes and cover letters from college graduates that were littered with misspellings), but personal imperfections, as well. Most of the interview guides give advice for glossing over these imperfections when asked to talk about weaknesses. Since when did our uniqueness become a weakness? For instance, I’m incredibly impatient. One option is to tell the interviewer that it’s a weakness that I’m working hard to rid myself of. Or I can fully own this quality of mine and love myself for it. My hope is that a potential employer will decide to accept the wholeness of me, appreciate all that I bring, and welcome my perfect imperfections with open arms.

As I email and chat with some folks who’ve responded to my first post in the Career Change Blues series, I realize just how important it is to have a support network. Family and friends are a vital part of this group, but I think its equally important to find others who are going through the same job hunting issues. Sometimes its good to have an empathetic rather than sympathetic ear to gripe, cry, cheer, whatever you need. Someone who is experiencing similar emotions and issues or has experienced them recently can understand your excitement, disappointment, sadness in very specific ways. And you can do the same for them.

If you have a support network, great. Check in with your network regularly. Share what you’re going through. Feel it and then let it go. This is important because it can be easy and dangerous to wallow around in the more negative emotions that can come with the job change process. As others in your network to keep you accountable. Finally, grow your network. Look for others who need you and your group.

If you don’t have a support network, make an effort to find one. The beauty of the internet and new technology means that the rules for cultivating a network have changed. You no longer are tied to your locality for support.

If you’re currently searching for a support group, here’s what I’m proposing: join me and my growing online network. I’m not sure what this is going to evolve into, but just communicating with other souls has been extremely helpful for me. And I believe its been just as helpful for those with which I’ve been communicating.

I’ve become a big fan of Skype as it’s free and combines the best of chat and voice-over-the-internet. It also has the capability of conferencing multiple users together (did this last night and it was great). If you want to talk with Skype, you’ll need speakers and a microphone set-up; I bought a fairly inexpensive headset at Best Buy. If you’re interested, go to Skype, download the software, then come back here and click the “Skype Me” button on the left column. If you have any questions, just email me.

Whatever you do, don’t go through the career change blues alone.

I posted my resume on Monster.com two days ago on the advice from my sister. I wasn’t going to go this route, but she’s had tremendous success with it. So, I created an account. As my wife constantly tells me, "What do you have to lose?"

Today I received an email from an executive recruiting agency that got filtered straight to my MS Outlook junk mail folder. It had a credible sounding name and the subject line looked legitimate. It referenced my resume on Monster and seemed to be interested in helping me. But as I read the message, I quickly realized it was canned and there was something wrong. A little voice said to hold on and research this agency. Lo and behold, it appeared to be a scam. Once again, my intuition guided me in a safe direction and out of harm’s way.

I learned to trust my intuition at a very early stage of my after-college life. I had just graduated with a degree in history and very little idea of what I really wanted to do professionally. So with a bachelors degree in hand, I did what I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do – work retail. But I did that as well as work at a coffee shop and bartend at an Elks Lodge (probably the WORST job I’ve ever had). After a while I simply got tired of making very little money and decided to look through the classifieds of the local paper. Among all the ads, I found a sales job that looked promising. It was for a new environmentally-friendly products company that promised (early red flag) a good salary and training.

I show up for the initial interview and find that the office is filled with about 30 other candidates. The president and his executives gave us a brief presentation and then each had an interview. Honestly, that’s about all I can remember, but I do know that the whole thing lasted around 3 hours. Now that we had more information, we were encouraged to return the next day for orientation. I did my best to make sure the executives of the company remembered who I was.

However, something just didn’t seem right. As I drove home, a voice nagged at me to check into this company. It was contrasted by another voice which reminded me that I might start finally making some good money for a change. The nagging voice got louder as the day wore on until I decided to boot up the computer and do an internet search. Now I wouldn’t say I was a rube, but I clearly didn’t recognize a pyramid scheme when I saw one. My heart sank as I read account after account of the shady practices of this company. All I could think was how close I came to getting caught up in it.

That was the day that I started to understand what intuition is and how important it was to listen to it.

Its something to consider if you are looking for a career or if you are already employed. If something doesn’t seem right in your gut, listen and listen hard. It might not only save you money, but save your integrity as well.

One of the creative habits I’m reinstituting is waking up early each morning as the sun rises and reading in the yellow, cheerful sunroom of my home. I used to do this each workday morning, but somehow I allowed myself to get away from it. Too bad, because now I remember how the act of reading great books on leadership, creativity, or purpose would energize me for the day ahead. Right now, that’s more important than ever.

I’m reading Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life, for the second time (my first read was through a copy from the library, but I recently bought it and now get to scribble notes throughout). It’s billed as a practical guide, which it truly is. She offers plenty of wonderful exercises to help stir the creative juices. One such exercise that I spent some time reflecting on today is a questionnaire she calls Your Creative Autobiography. Here are some of the questions she asks (there are 33 in all):

• What are your [creative] habits? What patterns do you repeat?

   

• What is your creative ambition?

   

• What are the obstacles to this ambition?

   

• What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition?

   

• Who is your muse?

Challenging stuff. For a long time, I didn’t think I was terribly creative. Growing up, I was complimented on my creativity; I liked to sketch, build, create little scenes as only a child can. It was all driven by an innate curiosity of how the world worked. Then I hit adolescence and I tried to cram all of this creativity stuff in a plain box and deny my own creative spirit. Yet, it was always there smoldering, ready to reignite. Thankfully, I’ve rediscovered those traits that make me unique. I like this quote from Twyla:

Each of us is hard-wired a certain way. And that hard-wiring insinuates itself into our work. That’s not a bad thing. Actually, it’s what the world expects from you. We want our artists to take the mundane materials of our lives, run it through their imaginations, and surprise us. (italics added)

Each of us who are passionate about what we do are artists. So what are you hard-wired to do? What kind of creative surprises can you create today?