The decision to take concrete action (chapters 9 and 10).
This is the process that leads to a larger sense of the world and our place in it.
FIGURE I-2
Getting unstuck: the cycle of impasse and vision
My Perspective
My understanding of what we experience when we are stuck, and how we can get ourselves unstuck, has evolved out of more than thirty years of work as a social scientist, psychotherapist, and career counselor. I have worked at Harvard Business School and with people from a variety of organizations, from small startups to Fortune 500 corporations, as well as with individual executives during times of career transition. Some people have come to me when they have been let go or told that termination is imminent; others seek my counsel because they lack a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise stable and lucrative job or because they want to find more rewarding work. Whether consciously or not, they all come looking for meaning. As a result, I have focused much of my research on the “meaning of meaning”—on how individuals find a path to life situations that are satisfying and sustainable.
I am also a teacher of other counselors and mentors. At Harvard, I direct a counseling and coaching program, and I travel around the world to train coaches and counselors at other universities.
In addition to my work on the Harvard Business School faculty as a writer and researcher, I direct a career development program designed to help MBA students develop a vision of their career. When they first set foot on campus, the vast majority of students, at Harvard and elsewhere, lack a clear idea of what they want do with their lives. In fact, many enroll in an MBA program as the first step in finding their future. These students, during two short years in school, must discover how they differ from every other member of the class and how that will help them make the most of the career ahead.
I approach my work with both executives and students with two different but complementary perspectives. First, I am researcher using large databases and sophisticated quantitative analyses to study the way in which personality structure is related to job choice and career satisfaction. My databases now have psychological testing information on more than 150,000 business professionals and MBA students. This research has led to a number of theoretical models and psychological tests that I use in my teaching, mentoring, and counseling.
But I am not just a social scientist; I am also a psychotherapist. My second perspective, then, is that of mentor for the many students and clients who have worked with me personally as they faced their own crises and impasses. It is from the chair in my counseling office that I have learned the most about how people come to a vision of what they want their lives to be and about how they make the bold choices to make that vision real.
How to Use This Book
This book is not about these business executives, these students, or these particular clients. It is about you and the work you must do, many times in the course of your life, to move closer to more meaningful work and a more meaningful life.
You will be using the vision-building exercises I use in my classes at Harvard and in my workshops with executives and career coaches all over the world. Specifically, you will:
Learn how to recognize the state of psychological impasse and use it as the starting point for real change in the way you make life and work choices;
Participate in exercises that activate, evoke, and deepen images that will shape your new life vision;
Learn how to recognize enduring patterns of meaning that point to the activities, rewards, types of people, work cultures, and communities that are most likely to satisfy you;
Learn how the creative work you do at times of impasse can enable you to take action and make life choices that will make your vision a reality.
I emphasize career and work crises, but impasse does not differentiate between the work life and the personal life. This approach is relevant for anyone who has come to realize that something must change—in a job description, in working habits, in a marriage, in a friendship, or in an overly frenetic and frustrating way of living. Even though you have picked up this book, your reasons for doing so may not yet be fully formed or understood. That is a good place to begin—that vague sense of possibility will have the chance to emerge as you move deeper into the way of working that this book presents.
A brief note on the theoretical underpinnings of this material: this book does not offer new developmental theory, although it calls repeatedly on theory to help us look deeper into what is actually going on during a time of impasse. To this end, it will use both the theory and models that have emerged from my own research and from the work of some of the most prominent developmental psychologists of the past century. If you are interested in the potent ideas of these researchers and psychotherapists, you will find references in the notes section and in the annotated bibliography in appendix A.
More important than some schema of adult development, however, is the actual experience of working through psychological impasse. Each phase of the impasse cycle and vision process has its own mood and its own challenges. Each requires its own response. This is not about speed-reading or quick course corrections. There will be times to be still and listen, even when you want to run. There will be times to let your sensibilities sink deeper until you reach a bottom that can support a new movement upward. There will times to be busy, to focus and work as if your life depended on it. It is important to sense the mood, gauge the challenge, and calibrate the response appropriate for each phase.
The book is designed as a journey; you will move through a sequence of meditations, readings, and exercises designed to take you through the full impasse cycle and into a richer vision of your work and life. The best way to get unstuck is to take your time with the book, and to work through each exercise as it appears in the text. Of course, you may want to do some exercises more than once during this journey—and again and again in the future when the feeling of impasse returns.
Betsy’s Vision
“I’ve always liked math, but it’s sharing the ideas with students that gets me out of bed in the morning,” says Betsy Sloan, reflecting on her former career as a CPA and her current life as a teacher. “I care more about people than the bottom line. And I really care about ninth-graders: you get to fall in love with them and then have them for three more years.”
As a high-school teacher, Betsy has found the freedom to be who she really is. “As a CPA in a Big Eight firm in the 1980s,” she says, “I couldn’t wear pants. I couldn’t even wear a dress. It had to be a suit. In the insurance firm in the 1990s maybe I could wear a pants suit.” Her work attire today is a brown button-down blouse and khaki trousers, and her auburn hair falls to her shoulders in graceful waves. But during her nine years as a teacher she’s gone from her natural auburn to black to blonde—and back to auburn.
“Students are very accepting,” she says. “All they care about is how much homework I give them. And all the administration cares about is whether I’m teaching the curriculum.”
“What I care about is that the kids get my jokes,” she adds, laughing. “I’m shy, but put me in front of a class and I’m a ham.”
Quickly settling into a more reflective tone she adds, “My charge is much more than developing good math students.” Betsy has found that the great meaning in her work comes from counseling and mentoring her students, whether leading a discussion after one student died in a car accident or inviting kids into her classroom at lunchtime. “We usually have four games of Scrabble going, kids hanging out over Scrabble and talking.”
DEEP