Turning Your Calling Into a Job

July 10, 2012

The difference between fear and aversion

“Just do it” ought to be the motto, not of a shoe company, but of our culture.We’re supposed to get over it, push ourselves outside our comfort zone, challenge ourselves, take no prisoners. We’re supposed to listen to our guts, be brave, take chances.

At the same time, we’re supposed to get in touch with our feelings, honor our boundaries, be true to ourselves.

It’s enough to make a girl crazy.

But what if…

This particular back and forth always led me into a back and forth.

When was I supposed to believe my gut and my feelings, and when was I supposed to recognize that I was holding myself back out of anxiety? When was I supposed to push and when was I supposed to accede?

Was I conflict averse, or was this not important to me? Did I really not want to do this or was I just afraid of possibly failing?

Invariably, I’d end up pushing myself because the “what ifs” were so much more regretful on the “not pushing” side. What if it turned out I was just scared and I didn’t pursue my dream?

Often enough, I found myself on the other side of something I really wish I hadn’t done, something that, in retrospect, was so obviously wrong for me. The journey was still worth it, but oh, what I could have saved myself.

Back to you, dear reader

I bring this up because it’s something I see all the time in my clients. They’re procrastinating writing that job application, or they’re not sure whether to try the academic job search one more time or bag it altogether, or they can’t decide if this possible career they’re considering is a good idea or a very, very bad one.

This is totally normal. Whenever we’re faced with a decision, especially a big decision, these brains we’ve trained to look at all sides … look at all sides and find them all valid.

That’s great in academic research, and not so great when you’re trying to decide where to leap next on your grand life adventure.

How to get out of the paralysis

When you’re in that kind of back-and-forth, pay attention to the difference between fear and aversion.

In a situation that isn’t actually life-threatening, fear is a sign of beliefs we’re believing — and that might not be true. (If the situation is actually dangerous to your existence, you won’t be thinking. You’ll be acting.)

What if I don’t prepare well enough and I embarrass myself? What if I’m so unqualified that they laugh at my application? What if I decide to leave academia and the job market turns around and I could have stayed if I had just waited a little longer?

Each of those anxieties is based on some deeper belief. Embarrassing myself is the end of the world. Not doing it perfectly will cause shame. I should be able to predict the future.

Given our cultural and academic backgrounds, it makes total sense that we’d have these beliefs and the attendant anxieties. It’s just that they aren’t based in reality. And if they aren’t based in reality, then they’re things we’d do well to work with and untangle and trace back to their origins and disprove.

I still don’t think “just do it” is all that effective, because what we do straightjacketed by fear is unlikely to be our best work. But it makes sense to gently work on dislodging the fear so you can move forward.

Aversion, on the other hand, needs to be respected.

Have you ever had really bad food poisoning or a really bad case of the flu, and suddenly you can’t eat whatever it was you ate right before your guts turned inside out? When you encounter that food again, you probably have a bodily sense of near-nausea, a complete lack of desire for it, even though your rational mind knows that this food is perfectly fine this time.

That’s aversion. When you experience that about a choice you’re considering, it’s your being’s way of saying NO. It’s your essential you-ness trying to say this is a bad idea, no matter how good it looks on paper.

We often override the no with those logical brains, because we don’t trust our bodies, because we can’t figure out how to explain WHY we don’t want to do whatever it is, because we’re afraid of getting judged for it. (Notice all of those are fears that can be untangled.)

But we generally regret it when we push on through aversion.

You have to get quiet to tell the difference

In the moment, it can be hard to tell fear from aversion. Our minds are a tangle of thoughts, our bodies are tense with anxiety, and we don’t really know up from down.

When you’re in that situation, you’ve got to stop. Just stop trying to make the decision. Get in touch with your insides however you best do that. Meditate and quiet your mind, go for a run, write in your journal — whatever will get you connected to yourself.

Then notice what’s coming up. Is it a whole set of stories about you and this decision? Is it a feeling you can’t shake but can’t explain? If it’s the former, start untangling them. If it’s the latter, pay attention.

When we’re surrounded by other people’s judgments and expectations, it’s even more important to get quiet, because they make an added layer of fear and anxiety. But they don’t tell you what you should do, only what someone else thinks you should do.

You know, better than anyone else ever could, what the right answer is in this moment. You know, better than anyone else, whether what you’re feeling is fear or aversion.

Trust yourself. I do.

January 30, 2012

Are you resisting practical?

There’s been a theme in my conversations with clients lately. They’re at a crossroads in their life and career. Something has shifted for them. They’re trying to figure out what to do next.

Everyone around them is making suggestions for that next, suggestions that seem to make a lot of sense. These suggestions are direct outgrowths of degrees my clients already have, or interests they’ve already expressed. These loved ones are even offering to put money behind their suggestions.

My clients want to like these suggestions. They think they should like these suggestions. But really, the idea of carrying out these suggestions make them want to lie down on the floor with the dust bunnies and never get up.

Oh, stability. How we long for the idea of you.

All of these practical suggestions have certain things in common.

They’re full-time jobs with reasonable benefits packages.
They’re in existing career fields that have a certain level of professionalism or prestige. They’re “good” careers, in other words.
They’re coming from a place of fear.

If my clients were jumping up and down at the very idea of getting to do this work that’s being suggested to them, I would be jumping up and down with them. Yay! Work you want to do! Paycheck! Yee-haw!

But my clients are not jumping up and down. They come to me because they’re afraid that the fact that they aren’t jumping up and down means that they’re ungrateful or entitled or lazy or impractical, and they want to talk it out with someone who has no stake in the outcome of their choices. (I don’t claim to be objective. I’m firmly on the side of my clients.)

As we talk, it becomes clear that there is something they’re passionate about, something they dream about doing, but it doesn’t fit a neat career path, and they don’t know how to turn it into a job, and they certainly don’t know how to explain it to the people who love them, who only want what’s best for them, dammit.

And so they’re stuck. They think they should want the practical option, but they almost never do.

Yes, paying the rent is important

It’s not that practical things don’t matter.

I’ve not talked to one client who wasn’t interested in paying the rent or buying groceries, and a fair number of clients have been more than happy to get a part-time or full-time “just for now” job to ease the pressure of financial necessity while they figure out what they really want to do and how to make it happen.

But let’s be honest here about work and how it fits into our life. We have this story that we work to pay the bills, and that that’s good enough.

If the work is reasonably challenging (i.e., not boring), pays well, with good coworkers, maybe that is good enough. It’s not boring, it’s not conflictual, it’s not undervaluing you, and it gives you the freedom to pursue the things you really care about in your free time. (Assuming there is any. A 40 hour a week job takes up about 35% of our waking weekly hours, and that doesn’t account for the commute, self-care like eating and showering, or life maintenance like laundry.)

But most of us got into academia precisely because that kind of job wasn’t something we wanted. We didn’t want good enough. We wanted vocation. We wanted engagement. We wanted to follow our own intellectual curiosity.

And that means that to get out of academia, a good enough job (which is different from the “for now” job) may not cut it. We may need that same sense of vocation, engagement, and curiosity in a different venue.

It just doesn’t look practical

Many of the clients in this predicament have a cluster of things they want to do.

Maybe they love teaching and want to keep 2 courses a semester as an adjunct. Maybe they just had twins and recognized that there’s nothing out there to help new moms of twins figure out how to, for example, sleep train two kids at the same time. Maybe they’ve always wanted to be a writer and they thought academia would scratch that itch and it so didn’t. Maybe they love making and selling things on Etsy. Maybe they’re passionate about ethics in adoption and want to help train prospective parents.

They get stuck because they can’t figure out how to make any one of them into a full-time, traditional job. And they get frustrated because they don’t necessarily want to choose only one.

The reality is that you don’t have to.

The goal is not a traditional full-time job, necessarily. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals. A traditional full-time job is one way to meet that goal. But there are others.

Let me say that again. The goal is doing meaningful work that helps you meet your family’s financial needs and goals.

Once you shift away from assuming a traditional job to recognizing that a traditional job is only one way to meet the real goal, you open yourself up to other possibilities.

Maybe it’s working two or three part-time, flexible, at-home gigs. Maybe it’s finding a traditional job that meets your needs. Maybe it’s moving back and forth between traditional jobs and non-traditional options.

Yes, part-time work can be low-paid and casual, the way adjuncting often is in academia. But it can also be incredibly lucractive and flexible, depending on your skills, your clients, and your goals.

Like everything else, work varies.

And so do you. You are a unique expression of life. What might work for someone else doesn’t have to work for you. You only have to figure out what you care about and where that might take you.

I say “only” like it’s easy, but it isn’t easy. If you want support figuring out what you bring to the table, check out Choosing Your Career Consciously, a course designed to help you figure out what else you could do. A new course starts in March.

October 10, 2011

Value your time, work, and expertise

When the eight months that marked finishing the dissertation, defending the dissertation, and being on the academic job market simultaneously finally ended with an accepted offer, all I could do was exhale. Well, exhale and lay on the couch blearily watching television, sick as a dog.

Once I recovered, I was in touch with the committee who hired me, letting them know when I planned to arrive in town (a month and a half before my contract started) and that I would get started program-planning once I got settled in.

I immediately received an email in return from one particular committee member, castigating me for working ahead of my contract and announcing (with plenty of cc:s), that clearly I wasn’t up on the most recent Marxist theory. (Thank goodness Marxist theory wasn’t my area of expertise.)

The rest of the committee, to their credit, swooped in to blunt the damage of that email and make me feel welcome.

The problem is, he had a point

One of the problems of academia is that it has no boundaries. The vaunted flexibility that means we don’t have to be in an office between 9 and 5 every day also means there’s no container for our work.

Despite media and political claims to the contrary, academics work far more than 40 hours a week. In fact, you could argue that academics work all the damn time. They work evenings. They work weekends. They work holidays. There’s always more work to be done, more tasks that need to be squeezed in between classes and research and advising and all of the other commitments that constitute academic work at every level.

And yet despite working around the clock, on vacations, on holidays, (American) academics are typically paid for the nine months of the year that map onto the fall and spring semesters’ teaching. (Yes, some schools pay the 9 months’ salary out in 12 months, but that’s not the same as a 12 month salary.)

And that’s only if you’ve been lucky enough to get a tenure-track or post-doc position – adjuncts get paid by the course. The logic of the academic wage is made most explicit right there.

Forget overtime. There’s an immense amount of unpaid labor built in to the academic system under the rubric of vocation. You’re supposed to love it so much that you do it even though you aren’t getting paid. One might even argue that you’re structurally forced to do it, because it’s all that unpaid labor that gets you tenure or a promotion or a slim chance at a job that 400 other people are also applying for.

The unpaid labor is what is structurally rewarded. The less-valued labor is paid for.

This is some messed-up shit.

Straight to burnout

The most successful academics I know said no. They said no to committee work that didn’t serve them and wasn’t in line with what their colleagues were doing. They said no to being too flexible with teaching schedules. They said no to working all their waking hours.

And yet, the job market being what it is, graduate students are urged to take on more, do more, publish more, teach more, serve more, all in the name of trying to beat out peers to win that job that has, let’s face it, something like 400:1 odds.

Better departments protect assistant professors so they can achieve tenure, but the downsizing of the faculty means that assistant professors, more and more, are being burdened with too much work to do the work that gets them tenure.

This is unsustainable. It’s unsustainable personally, and its unsustainable institutionally.

I hear story after story of people who are burnt out, who have no enthusiasm or energy left for the work that they love or at least like, because they’ve had no time to recharge.

This does not make for happiness, and it’s unlikely to get better.

There are other options

There are options other than working crazy hours for not enough pay.

Set reasonable time boundaries, and triage your work. You know as well as I do that some work actually matters, and some doesn’t. Spend the bulk of your best time on the work that matters. Do the rest as well as you can given the time remaining.

Benchmark yourself against your colleagues. If you’re doing more than they are, either in teaching or in service, let some things go.

Know that there are non-academic options that really are 9-5, which leaves an unbelievable amount of time free for things that aren’t work. And they pay all year round, too.

Value your own time, work, and expertise. They’re worth a lot.

Know you’re leaving but not sure how to actually make that happen? I offer two things that might help: a resume and cover letter writing service and a class designed to help you create a successful job search system.