Tag: change of plans
Dying trees and new jobs
I’d hoped the tree would recover but after two years of stunted growth and increasingly bare limbs, I had to face that this wasn’t going to happen. A fungus got in the soil and the 16-year-old Japanese maple was too weakened to heal. It was sad; I had watched that red-leafed maple grow from 6 feet all the way up to the top of my second story window. I wanted to give it a chance.
I finally accepted that to have a healthy tree that will live a long time and grow to a full height, the diseased tree would have to be removed. Even part of the roots, to make room for the new planting.
I wanted to replace it with an identical tree that matched my neighbors’, but that would leave the new tree susceptible to the same infection. Instead, the arborist recommended a different species that is immune to the fungus.
I had invested a lot of time in caring for the tree and it was familiar and important to me. In the last few years it was finally tall enough to offer some shade on the hot, western side of my home. A new planting would be expensive, especially one that was partially grown. Although I had good reasons to keep my tree, or at least a replica of it, it wasn’t the smartest choice.
This is a great metaphor for a job that is no longer right for you. Just as I was invested in my tree and the shade it provided, you might be deeply enmeshed in your current role and have valid reasons why you want to stay, even though parts of your job are “diseased.”
And just as I knew that a replacement would have costs, including years of growing tall enough to provide protection from the sun, a new job often means losing some benefits and requires time to develop credibility and goodwill with new coworkers and managers.
Thinking about what you’ll give up and the risks of making a change can be paralyzing. But if I had replaced the maple when it first showed signs of damage, I would be much closer to having the shade I want for my window and balcony. Waiting didn’t change the inevitable outcome…it just raised the price of the tree with inflation and lengthened the time I’ll have to wait for it to grow tall.
If you are unhappy in your job but delay getting a new one, how much more will your confidence and stress levels continue to suffer? Bad jobs drain energy and wellbeing. It’s easier to look for a job and convince interviewers to hire you when you’re mentally and physically strong.
Back in November, I finally had the tree replaced. The new planting was about 6 feet tall but thin and bare-branched. I had a bag around the trunk to fill with water during dry weather and nurtured the heck out of that tree. It paid off. The over-wintering allowed roots to get established and by the time it started leafing, it had already grown more than a foot taller.
And then, because life is like that: PLOT TWIST!
As the leaves started to develop in April, I kept remarking to my neighbors that even though it was a different species, it looked very similar to the other Japanese maples. After the third time I said this, it dawned on me that they had planted the wrong tree.
The arborist had provided two quotes back in November. One was for an “Acer Palmatum Blood Good” – a Japanese maple varietal and the other was for a Stewartia Pseudocamelia. I ordered the Stewartia but they planted the maple.
At this point, I was attached to this little tree that had been growing for months and reluctant to start over. After multiple conversations with the arborist, I agreed that the best long-term choice was to replace the maple with the Stewartia because it isn’t susceptible to the fungus in the soil. But when the day came, they called me from the nursery to double check that the green-leaved Stewartia was what I wanted.
Uh…it had been over 7 months since I first met with the arborist, but I remember seeing a picture of a red-leafed tree. On the phone, they said that the tree turns red in autumn, but is green the rest of the year.
That was enough for me to say no to the replacement.
My new tree was already established, thriving and matched the neighborhood trees. I know there’s a risk that if the limbs suffer damage, it won’t be able to fight off the fungus and I will have to replace it. It is not an ideal environment for its longevity. But right now, the young maple is healthy and beautiful, and I want to keep it. If in later years it becomes diseased, I will immediately have it replaced – with as large of a tree as possible to more quickly reach the height I want.
This is another metaphor for changing jobs. You go into a new role with expectations based on your research and what you’ve been told, but sometimes the reality is different. Your day-to-day tasks aren’t what you thought they would be. The manager who hired you leaves, and now you must get to know their successor. The organization’s priorities change, and you are asked to cancel a project or take on a new set of responsibilities.
If you end up disliking your new job, you don’t have to suffer through it. You can attempt to negotiate with your management to improve what isn’t working, especially the parts that are different from the job description you agreed to. If that doesn’t work, you can start the job search again. Just because it’s a new role doesn’t mean you are stuck with it.
Maybe, though, once the surprise has worn off after finding your new role isn’t what you anticipated, you’ll realize that it’s fine. All changes come with risk. Calculated risks are better than steadily declining in a diseased environment.
Death and Taxes
My entire plan for last weekend revolved around two things. The first was to attend a memorial service for a friend that I used to be very close to. I couldn’t imagine not being there to support him and pay tribute to his family. The second part of my weekend was set aside for starting, finishing and filing my taxes.
Death and taxes – that was what was certain about my weekend.
Then I got a message that changed my plans. I packed a bag, got in the car, and drove out of town to visit a sick family member in the hospital. I stayed the weekend, driving back home on Monday morning in time for a business meeting.
Nothing is certain to happen exactly the way we think it will. The more open we are to possibilities, the more flexibility we have to react to changing circumstances.
She Quit Her Teaching Job to Become a Coach, Author and…Teacher
Many people take a winding path when they quit their jobs to do something more meaningful. I’ve written about my own journey that took a number of unexpected turns before I began my consulting business.
It might run in the family! My sister, Kristen Sutich, left her long-time job as a kindergarten teacher in the summer of 2013. She became a certified coach, starting a business that focuses on clients with grief issues and or parents of young school children.
Those areas might overlap – I know plenty of kids who give their parents grief!
While Kristen launched her coaching business, she wrote a book of tips for parents of children who are starting kindergarten. She knew that a published book would be useful in many ways: the hard copies are something tangible she can give to clients, authoring the book demonstrates her credibility as a subject-matter-expert, and it is one more way that she can reach prospective customers.
Then, just before publishing the book she decided to start teaching at a preschool near her. She was drawn to their creative approach, started as a substitute, and quickly became a staff member.
If you had asked her in July of 2013 if she thought she would be teaching preschool a year and a half later, she would have said no – she just quit her kindergarten teaching job!
Yet, by following her interests and building on her experience, Kristen now enjoys teaching preschool, giving book readings and growing her business by connecting with people who may need her coaching services. These three roles complement and add value to each other.
If you’re leaving your current employment soon or have recently started a new career path, keep an eye out for unexpected routes. Once you start putting your time and focus on what brings meaning and enjoyment to your life, you may discover opportunities that you wouldn’t have thought of before. Opportunities that lead you closer to your happiest career yet.
P.S. You can purchase The Kindergarten Toolkit for Parents on Amazon. It manages to be cute, interesting and helpful all at the same time.
How I Got From There to Here
When I first decided that I needed to leave my corporate job for my health and happiness, I didn’t know what else I would do for a living. It was the summer of 2012, and while recovering from a series of cold and flu’s, I read several of Martha Beck’s books. Most notably, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, that I link to on my Resources page (I receive a small commission for items purchased through this link and appreciate them very much!). The book helped me broaden my thinking and to expect to discover little hints and nudges that would point me towards my next career.
I also did a series of mind mapping exercises. I took blank paper and markers and wrote words that described what I valued, what I enjoyed, and what I was good at. Then I drew lines to connect the words and phrases that had something in common with each other. What I discovered surprised me – I was very interested in ambiguous problems, and doggedly researching clues and analyzing my findings until I had a resolution. And then I liked to write up my results in a report. As I considered what I’d learned from Martha Beck’s books and looked at my mind maps, I thought the obvious conclusion was that I should be a detective. More specifically, a Private Investigator.
All the pieces lined up: I wanted to focus deeply on finding the truth and the details in missing persons cases, skip-tracing people who failed to show up for court dates, and run background checks. The results of which I could package into neatly organized reports for my clients.
I was so certain that this was my next career move that I got certified to work as a PI, wrote a business plan, took a human footprint tracking course, and registered a domain name for my future investigation business: Truth and Details.
As I completed more and more of the items in my plan to quit my job, I decided that immediately after quitting I would spend a month in writing classes at Boulder’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics before launching my PI business. Then in the weeks before heading out to Colorado, a former colleague and I decided to start a real estate investment company that would democratize the way people invested in rental properties.
Suddenly, the PI business was on hold: I could start that at any time. I wanted to immerse myself in writing for a month and then when I got home, to bring this new business idea to life. The writing classes were great. The real estate business didn’t take off. I still believe in the concept, but it would have been a risky, long-term investment and I needed income.
So I turned to consulting, which I always thought of as a backup plan. It turns out that I love consulting, and use many of the skills that attracted me to investigation work. I like to unravel clients’ problems, analyze data, formulate solutions, and wrap everything up in a tidy report-out of results.
I did not transition into the business I planned on in 2012, but taking those steps gave me the confidence and preparation I needed to get to where I am now: in a satisfying career that aligns with my interests and skills. It is interesting that my company name and values remained the same: providing clients the truth and details they need to achieve their objectives.
Savings = Options
One of the most common questions I get when people hear that I quit my corporate job is about how I was able to do it financially. As someone put it delicately the other day, “Isn’t it uncomfortable not having an income?” Well, yes it’s uncomfortable! Seeing all of the money go out of the checking account instead of coming in doesn’t generate feelings of comfort. I take deep breaths and remind myself that this was the plan. This is what I saved for.
Well, to be accurate, I saved for this scenario; the possibility that I would be living off of my savings for an extended period of time. When I first decided to leave my job, nearly a year before I actually left, I planned to start a business. I did research, took training, talked to people in my chosen field, and had a marketing strategy lined up. But as I neared my exit date a different business opportunity came up that I was even more excited about and I turned my attention in that direction. And yet another idea was born during the month I spent at a summer writing program – I formed a solid outline of a book I wanted to write.
By August the new plan was to work on the startup and write my book, and ideally generate income from both starting January 2014. Soon it became clear that the startup and the book were on the slow track and as I learned more about both industries, I realized that neither one were going to provide a living wage anytime soon, if ever. But I was committed. I had a solid start to a book and an interesting new business and wanted to see how much I could do with both of them. Plan V4 was to treat these efforts like full-time jobs and then amp up consulting in 2014. Thankfully I had saved enough money to make this option possible.
I’ve always been a saver but once I made up my mind that I would leave my job, I doubled-down. I got rid of my home phone and cut cable down to the cheapest plan possible. I would have scrapped cable TV altogether but my internet bill was less expensive bundled with TV than without. I stopped buying things. I didn’t shop for clothes and if there was something I saw that I thought I’d like to have, like a kitchen gadget, I just didn’t buy it. I became fond of the saying, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” My one remaining consumer habit was cosmetics. I have a “thing” for shopping at Sephora and long after I stopped buying other stuff I didn’t need, I was still purchasing lipstick and eyeliner. Eventually even that fell away. When I passed up the holiday coupon for $25 off a purchase of $50 or more, I knew I’d transcended.
Alison Green of the blog www.askamanager.org wrote about the choices that savings provides in a 2011 post titled “3 Things I Learned by Quitting my Job in a Recession”. She wrote, “I wanted to quit my job and work for myself for a lot of reasons. I was able to quit my job and work for myself for this reason: savings. Having savings lets you act from strength, not desperation. That has huge ramifications for the decisions you’re able to make and, therefore, for your quality of life.”
If you are considering a career change, maybe this New Year is the right time to make a resolution to save extra money so that you’ll have more options. A great place to start is by finding out how much you really spend, which is probably more than you think. A fellow career-changer, Jennifer Lesher, told me about www.mint.com. It’s the best budgeting tool I’ve seen so far. It sucks your online financial data into a dashboard where you can see your total spending by category (household, auto, insurance, food, etc.).
While it doesn’t feel comfortable to make a career change that involves financial risk, it is liberating to be able to choose. I’m happy with my choice.
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