Using This Book
This book is practical. It is meant to be used. It will lead you through the process I use with students at the Harvard Business School and with participants in my workshops. The chapters will lead you in sequence through the six phases of the vision cycle: The arrival of the crisis, the deepening of the crisis, letting go of your current mental model, making a crucial shift to a new perspective, recognizing the deep patterns of your personality, and taking action for meaningful change.
Throughout the book, there are highlighted self-assessment Deep Dive exercises. These exercises allow you to take the material you have just read and focus it immediately and specifically on your own life situation. I encourage you to participate in the One Hundred Jobs exercise presented in chapter 4 as it will provide an experiential basis for many of the ideas discussed in later chapters. A second major exercise, the Image Gathering exercise also introduced in chapter 4, is actually a guided meditation, and you may listen to me presenting this exercise by going to www.careerleader .com/gettingunstuck. This Web site will also provide additional material for applying the ideas presented in this book to your work and life situation. Completing the Image Gathering exercise is not essential for using this book, but it will add richness and texture to the insights you gain from the One Hundred Jobs exercise. For each of these exercises, there are detailed guidance and case examples.
You may, of course, skip the exercises altogether and read the book for the theory it presents. There are many stories and case histories to help bring the ideas to life as you do so. However, I extend an invitation now, as you begin the book, to enter into the reading as fully as possible and make it an experience of your own frontier.
For those of us who, like Betsy, take the time to fully experience impasse—letting the crisis deepen, listening to that clear inner voice, and taking action to make change—life will prove more and challenging than our younger selves had imagined, and it will, at the same time, feel more familiar and authentic.
I wrote this book to guide you through the necessary crisis of growth that each experience at impasse brings. (See “Deep Dive: Using This Book.”) It is my hope that what I have learned about how this process takes place will draw you deeper into your own vision for what needs to come next in life and deeper, as well, into your ability to recognize and help those around you who find themselves at their own frontiers.
PART I
Impasse
Faced with a crisis at work or in our personal life, we try to push our way forward using our old views and methods. Soon we realize this is not working and find ourselves at a dead end. Energy and inspiration begin to evaporate; our conviction seems less certain. We begin to hear the stinging voice of our inner critic and old doubts about our ability and our direction return. We seem to be both sinking and moving backward. These feelings at first may bring alarm, but we must come to recognize them as signals that an important process is beginning. Being at impasse is a developmental necessity. It can lead to a new way of understanding and a new type of information. We have arrived at an important frontier.
ONE
Facing Crisis
IT WAS AN AFTERNOON in late spring, a few weeks before her graduation from the Sloan School of Management at MIT, and Marcy Kaufman was feeling unsettled.1 Sitting in my office, she leaned forward in her chair, her short blonde hair framing an alert expression and a direct gaze. I knew this alertness well, and how it could change in a moment from pensive reflection to a mischievous smile. But today her look was more serious; she wanted to know if she could continue counseling with me after graduation.
Marcy was no stranger to big changes or unsettling times. Bright, athletic, and full of energy, she had a history of taking things straight on. She grew up in Los Angeles, the only girl in a family of sports-oriented boys. Her brothers admired her tomboy toughness and let her into their rough-and-tumble crowd. When high school became boring, she arranged to graduate early, at sixteen, and spend six months traveling alone on a bus tour of Africa. At eighteen she enrolled at California Institute of Technology and majored in computer science. She excelled on all fronts. At five feet ten inches tall, she was a standout on the basketball team. She was also a star student and maintained a wide circle of friends. In business graduate school, she enjoyed her classes, her summer internship, and her time with her classmates.
Now twenty-seven, she had arrived at a place that, at least for the moment, seemed far less certain. She had a boyfriend, Henry, but it was not clear just where that stop-and-go relationship was headed. He was working in New England and so, for the time being, she planned to stay in the greater Boston area. But doing what? Marcy had come to MIT because leadership seemed to be her destiny, but, as for many of her fellow students, the best path toward that destiny was not clear. The job market was good, but as Marcy went from interview to interview she was not sure what she was trying to accomplish. Was she looking for the best job or the least bad job that would allow her to stay with Henry? She was no longer a software engineer, but what then was she?
My clients, unique as they are, all come to me for the same reason: they are stuck. They are uncertain about what to do to move closer to a more fulfilling work or life situation. Marcy was at such an impasse. She had “come to the end of her thinking,” and found herself at an uncomfortable crossroads. She felt torn between following her classmates in pursuing high-paying jobs in prestigious firms and her desire to make the relationship with Henry work. Beneath this tension was another source of stress that was even more unsettling, in that it was far more vague and harder to describe. It was more a feeling in the pit of her stomach than a problem that she could formulate and bring to a counselor.
What I as a career counselor and psychotherapist could see, but Marcy could not, is that as we live our lives, things don’t happen in a straight line, a little bit at a time, day by day. Growth as a person does not occur in a predictable and sequential fashion. Many times a path comes to an abrupt halt, only to continue again at a different place, at a different level. Our lives unfold more like that of the caterpillar and butterfly than we are perhaps ready to acknowledge. An impasse like Marcy’s was the first step in changing her very idea about what she really wanted and about how happiness might come into her world.
To understand this, it can be helpful to think of the worlds we inhabited as seven-year-olds and as seventeen-year-olds. Our lives in our second decade are not continuations of our childhood in a bigger body, but are different altogether. The transition to adolescence brought with it a crisis; the seven-year-old’s way of finding happiness in the world simply no longer worked. With struggle, we were able to forge a whole new perspective and a whole new agenda. The lines of our childhood worlds were broken, and new lines began at a very different place on the page. And this sense of disjunction and radical change happens again and again. When we talk about a childhood and adolescence and adulthood, or about Picasso in his Rose Period and then in his Blue Period, or about the early recordings of Miles Davis and then his last, in a real sense we are talking about almost different characters in each case. The change has been that radical and the life being experienced is that different.
In recent decades, developmental psychologists have created highly useful theoretical models of these necessary disjunctures in human development.2 Our concern here, however, is not theoretical. What does it mean to be, like Marcy, at the very point of the break? How do we find a new line of travel? If we simply try our old ways of understanding, it becomes painfully clear that the crisis is deepening.
The Black Sun
Both Greek and Celtic mythology include a mysterious image known as the “Black Sun,” which can be visualized as tremendous energy radiating from a dense and dark center. (Celtic myths sometimes place it in the center of the earth.) And it stands in contrast to the metaphoric qualities we commonly associate with the sun: The brightness of day gives life its warmth. Good things must be close by when we rise to a sunny morning.
But