The Authentic Career: Following the Path of Self-Discovery to Professional Fulfillment

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Introduction

Many people tell me they would be delighted to work hard, take risks, and even make serious sacrifices to follow their life’s dream — if only they knew what that dream was. As work demands more of our energy and time, people whose jobs hold little meaning beyond a paycheck find themselves suffering from poverty of purpose. Left unaddressed, this poverty eventually leads to professional sabotage.

One of the most dangerous types of professional sabotage takes place when, driven by a sense of panic that life is passing them by, people leave promising careers prematurely. The emotional drain of a career that seems to have no meaning becomes overwhelming. Without the patience or skills necessary to build the internal emotional foundation necessary for a successful career strategy, anyone can feel his or her job is a dead end, even when it isn’t.

This book is for people struggling with job dissatisfaction. This process is equally helpful for people who are working to get to the next level in their current jobs as it is for people who are contemplating a career change. Whether your goal is to get promoted at your current firm, to launch a new career, or to decide what you want to do next, this process can help you. The Authentic Career Process is designed to help you get out of a professional rut, when you feel like you are giving more than you are getting, and to create a career that is an authentic reflection of your talents and desires.

This book began almost a decade ago on a trading floor. As a young portfolio manager at the investment firm Scudder, Stevens & Clark who had just won the Lipper Award for having the top-performing mutual fund in my fund class nationwide, I should have felt professionally fulfilled. What most people saw was a young woman who was quoted in the financial headlines, spoke frequently at national investment conferences, and had been profiled on a special segment of CNBC. What few people saw was someone who had worked with a variety of therapists to keep depression at bay and was spending virtually every weekend at a spiritual retreat trying to understand why success, an active social life, and tons of terribly expensive therapy weren’t enough to help her feel whole.

For years I searched to find meaningful support in facing the challenges of protecting both my intellectual integrity and my intuition in a competitive corporate culture. Gradually, I learned that my situation was far from unique. What’s more, in my search for meaningful answers, I found a direct parallel to what investors go through when searching for qualified money managers. Plenty of experts could outline the problems with what sounded like persuasive empathy, but few were actually able to deliver the solutions they proposed. What’s more, many individuals trying to reconcile their powerfully competing drives for meaning and money become confused when they seek advice, since the disciplines of consulting, psychotherapy, and spiritual growth often remain jealously distinct.

This book offers you an executive coaching program that brings together some of the most valuable aspects of corporate consulting, psychoanalysis, and spiritual growth to guide you as you define and achieve success on your own terms. Please note that whenever I use the word spiritual in this book, I am referring to an individual’s innate connection with his or her authentic nature — not to the ideology of any mainstream religious movement. Particularly today, when religion is being scrutinized for the same power struggles and philosophical confusion that plague our workplace cultures, if we don’t separate the concepts of religion and spirituality, the viability of a spiritual perspective in helping us to overcome professional challenges will be seriously undermined.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men — that is genius.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the business world, taking a best practices approach is using a strategic plan based on concepts that have proven effective in solving past critical problems. One of the most unique aspects of this approach to coaching, as I will explain in this book, is its emphasis on the sequence that clients follow as they work through the ideas, feelings, behavior, and energy that form the building blocks of success. Following the proper sequence is vital to what I call the Authentic Career Process. Most of us consider the word authentic to mean the opposite of something that is false or fake. Initially, this may make the concept of an authentic career seem a bit ironic. After all, if you are collecting a paycheck, it’s a real career, right? I use the term authentic career, however, to mean a truthful reflection of your genuine values and ideals as opposed to a reflection of the values and ideals of others.

An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.

— Victor Hugo

This book also frequently asks you to make the distinction between the perspective of the role you have learned to play to survive and your authentic self. For the purposes of this book, operating from your role means using the skills and traits you have developed over time to survive in your family and in your workplace. When the persona you use to survive forces you to compromise your values or your genuine desires, you are not behaving authentically.

In contrast, when you are operating from your authentic self you are functioning at the highest level you are capable of on your best day. As your authentic self evolves, your ability to function will improve, and your goals will be transformed as well. What’s more, many of your less-than-ideal feelings and reactions are important aspects of the authentic self, since they are wakeup calls about things that need to be changed in your life. To be true to yourself, you need to embrace your less-than-perfect parts, or you will fall into the trap of behaving according to someone else’s ideal of who you should be. The Authentic Career Process consists of four stages: the Awareness Stage, the Emotional Ownership Stage, the Interaction Stage, and the Integration Stage. Each stage is designed to help you achieve a series of goals that will lead to authentic success. The exercises you will complete in each stage provide the necessary insight and skill to successfully complete the work in the next stage.

STAGE I

AWARENESS

In the Awareness Stage, you will learn to separate what you really want in your life and career from what you have been taught by family, friends, and workplace cultures that you should want. This is a kind of mental sorting process. In a world where many of us have lost touch with our genuine desires because we’ve learned to base our self-esteem on others’ approval, separating our ideas from those of others can be tricky indeed. The goals of the Awareness Stage are to:

How do geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us, there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown.

— Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

• Distinguish your personal values from the ideals you learned from your family and significant others

• Understand the role that financial considerations have played in your career choices

• Separate your desires from the goals dictated to you by others

People who are unable to separate their priorities and values from those of their bosses, their family, and the nonstop chatter of the media get caught in an internal civil war between what they truly want and what others have taught them they should want. Not only is this internal conflict draining, it also makes it virtually impossible to stay focused on goals long enough to take meaningful steps toward achieving them. The work in the Awareness Stage will help you to identify your authentic goals and separate them from others’ agendas. This enhanced mental clarity provides the insight necessary to proceed to the next stage, Emotional Ownership.

STAGE II

EMOTIONAL OWNERSHIP

Challenging the limiting core beliefs identified in the Awareness Stage inevitably leads to an emotional backlash. Facing this backlash is a central part of the Emotional Ownership Stage. By strengthening your mind-body connection, you become better able to identify and release limiting emotions that would otherwise keep you paralyzed.

Enhancing this mind-body connection is vital to achieving success because taking meaningful risks creates powerful emotional responses. These responses don’t just produce doubtful thoughts; they also induce physiological reactions, ranging from shallow breathing to a too-rapid heartbeat. What’s more, you can’t think your way through primal feelings such as fear. Like any feeling blocking our progress, fear lurks where we hide the things we don’t want to know about ourselves. The work involved in the Emotional Ownership Stage helps you to release the energy devoted to avoiding these feelings and in the process clear out the emotional blocks holding you back. The goals of the Emotional Ownership Stage are to:

The privilege of a lifetime is being what you are.

— Joseph Campbell

• Identify the ways physical sensations stimulate thought patterns that protect you from what you would prefer not to know about yourself

• Understand the way the roles you have learned to play personally and professionally have helped you to suppress uncomfortable feelings

• Learn to channel the energy you had previously devoted to suppressing uncomfortable feelings into achieving your professional goals

Emotional energy is a source of tremendous power. To successfully focus your emotional energy, you must learn to trust your inner longings and the power of your imagination. Trusting your internal urges is a natural process that comes from heeding your body’s signals and clearing the blocks restricting your range of emotional experience. The spontaneity you cultivate in this stage builds the self-trust necessary to put your ideas into action. This self-trust also gives you the courage necessary to proceed to the Interaction Stage.

He who does not lose his soul will endure.

— Lao-tzu

STAGE III

INTERACTION

The first half of the Authentic Career Process is largely introspective and stems from the premise that you can’t be more successful than your self-image allows you to be. As you begin the Interaction Stage, you are at the midpoint of the coaching process. Here the emphasis shifts from an introspective focus to work that is interactive with the environment around you. The Interaction Stage is about translating your enhanced self-knowledge into effective action in the workplace.

Aerodynamically the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it, and so goes on flying anyway.

— Mary Kay Ash

Your environment plays a powerful role in shaping your sense of self. Over time, the values, pace, and emotional tone of your work environment will subtly seep into your psyche. The way you are treated by your professional peers has a tremendous impact on your quality of life, both personally and professionally. When you walk down the halls of your office, what feelings are triggered? Is your workplace bustling with creativity and excitement? Is it saturated with tension and paranoia? In a world where more of us are working closer together, we end up sharing a lot more than a watercooler; we also share emotional highs and lows much more than we realize. The goals of the Interaction Stage are to:

• Help you understand the way your view of reality either resonates or clashes with the dominant values in your workplace

• Understand the importance of peer support and feedback in achieving your long-term career goals

• Monitor your internal responses to workplace challenges to develop options for transforming conflict into collaboration

Success is a team sport. The dominant beliefs and values of your workplace create a group energy that can either support or sabotage your career. To work harmoniously with the group energy of any workplace, you need to remember that the first place that energy is shifted is in the self. The behavioral skills you cultivate in the Interaction Stage will help you to develop the interpersonal relationships necessary to further your career. These professional alliances also form the foundation necessary for proceeding to the Integration Stage.

STAGE IV

INTEGRATION

The final stage of the Authentic Career Process helps you to explore the ways your sense of self, your emotional responses, and your significant relationships either can work together to reinforce your commitment to your life goals or can pull you in different directions and undermine your sense of purpose. The Integration Stage brings together the insights and skills you have developed throughout this process to help you focus every aspect of your being — your thoughts, your emotions, and even your spirit — on achieving your goals.

This stage is about practical spirituality. The work you do in this stage will help you to create a holistic definition of success — a success that is nourishing, not draining — that draws on your intellectual abilities and your intuition simultaneously. While we all experience flashes of intuition, this work is designed to help you cultivate the ability to trust your inner knowing consistently rather than erratically. The goals of the Integration Stage are to:

• Harmonize your private desires with your public goals

• Cultivate enough mental flexibility for your intuition and intelligence to reinforce each other

• Unify your need for recognition with your desire to help others

The professional creativity this work unleashes is increasingly critical in a business climate where we are called on to grasp all sides of difficult questions — not just the sides we are emotionally comfortable with. When we are in touch with our inner knowing, we remember that an infinite number of solutions exist to any professional challenge. By working through the fears that lock us into the limited perspective of a restrictive workplace or family system, we become free to achieve our full professional potential.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

— Goethe

The following is a brief synopsis of my personal journey through the Authentic Career Process to show how these four stages have shaped my life as well as my coaching methodology.

MY STORY

In 1992, when I had just entered my thirties as a portfolio manager, my success propelled me onto CNBC and into the financial pages of newspapers across the country. From the outside, it looked like I had it all — a great apartment, great clothes, plenty of money in the bank, and an active dating life. From the inside, things were a little less pristine.

To put my cycle into perspective, let me backtrack a bit to 1987 when I was counting the change in my wallet to figure out how my two housemates and I were going to eat over the weekend. Suddenly, the phone rang. It was one of the big-time investors a family friend had introduced me to at his private club. (My life in those days involved wild economic swings between lavish restaurants and Campbell’s soup on the fire escape.) He wanted to know how my job hunt was going. Still looking, I sighed. Thanks for asking. How are you? There was a long silence. Then he replied quietly, I lost $60 million today.

The genius is in the details.

— Ansel Adams

Welcome to the terrifying job market of 1987. Within four months of graduating from the London School of Economics I was facing one of the largest stock market crashes in American history. It was also one of the toughest years to find a job in financial services.

Never believe you can’t find a job in the worst of times. Three years of dogged persistence later, I had managed to carve out a career as a global bond analyst at Alliance Capital. I loved getting to the trading floor at 6 a.m. Every day, the story of the world played out across the international currency markets like a giant novel unfolding a new chapter. I kept meticulous notes on changes in interest rate spreads around the world and on global economic fundamentals with the love of a cloistered monk driven by the satisfaction of getting every pen stroke right. In my desk drawer, I also kept a detailed paper-trading journal of all my investment recommendations and never told my colleagues about my growing aspirations.

Over time, as my paper-trading journal managed to hold its own against the bets of the big boys, my aspirations hardened into ambition. I found myself in the grip of a full-fledged drive to become a portfolio manager myself. On the face of it, this aspiration seemed hopelessly deluded. My boss was busily hiring boisterous young men who, in my opinion, seemed more focused on self-promotion than on learning the art of investing. But he was teaching these guys the trading skills they needed to actually participate in the market, while I was stuck being the administrative assistant who crunched the numbers and printed the charts.

Being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

— Marlene vos Savant

Time passed, and the increasing sophistication of my research became closely correlated with my boss’s general irritation with me. By this time, I was writing a weekly statistical report on macroeconomic developments in the various international bond markets we covered. At one point, one of the portfolio managers in the firm liked my work enough to send copies to the board of directors of one of the firm’s Fortune 500 clients. "Who does she think she is? " thundered my boss in rage when he heard. At this point it dawned on me that this guy wasn’t exactly poised to nurture my professional development. I figured I had two choices: I could stay huddled in my cubicle and try to spike his coffee with Prozac, or I could look for another job. I opted for the latter.

By 1993 I was standing on the balcony at a spectacular resort in Laguna Beach during an internal investment conference. I had become a portfolio manager at Scudder, Stevens & Clark, and in the previous year my team had won the Lipper Award for the best-performing short-term global bond and currency fund in the nation.

As I surveyed the idyllic setting around me, I realized that I felt completely empty inside. Noticing that this emotional black hole had grown large enough to eclipse these natural wonders surrounding me was my first hint that something was very, very wrong. Around this time, two professional experiences came together to light a spark that eventually was to blaze into a complete change of career. First, I was exposed to some outside consultants and behavioral experts whom management had retained to help us stay competitive under pressure. Second, I was coached for interviews with SEC representatives who were trying to keep up with investment innovations. Separately, neither encounter might have particularly affected me. Together, they changed my life.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

— George Bernard Shaw

The consultants and behavioral experts — we hadn’t yet heard the term executive coach in those days — who came to help us had their work cut out for them. Most people who worked on a trading floor attended these seminars on topics ranging from diversity to client service at gunpoint. We were there to make money, and anything that took us away from our jobs left us cranky at best and on a bad day hostile. We sat around conference tables, adopted polite masks of resignation, and suppressed inner screams of frustration when these human resource types suggested that we all go around the table and introduce ourselves. The relaxed pace was an agonizing contrast to the hyped-up internal pace at which we led our lives. Since senior management was paying the bills, many of us feared these well-intentioned outsiders would never get to the real problems.

Meanwhile, the SEC interviews presented us with another group of outsiders struggling to understand our work from a different angle. I remember answering one regulatory representative’s questions as honestly and clearly as possible but at the same time thinking to myself, I know the information you’re after, but you don’t know the best way to phrase your question to get at it. It was a moment of epiphany. If I knew where that particular SEC guy was today, I’d give him a hug. That’s what’s holding our consultants back! it dawned on me. They haven’t worked in a place like this long enough to internalize the culture, so they don’t know how to frame their questions to get at the real problems! It was in that moment of insight that my professional transition began.

Long before I had ever heard the words executive and coach put together in the same sentence, I realized that there was a need for individuals who could help people at all levels of professional development balance the overlapping economic and emotional challenges they faced in a rapidly changing economy. To become the helping professional I desperately needed at one point in my career but could not find, I researched various counseling degrees and pursued the one I felt was best suited to providing emotional support in a corporate environment. I chose social work.

I’ve dedicated myself to this work, because not only is this a process I’ve developed to empower others; it is also a process I have lived. My Awareness Stage took place during my years as a portfolio manager. As I dealt with both market challenges and clients’ fears during a variety of market cycles, I had a realization. When my trading team and I were buying and selling securities, what we were really doing was dealing in peace of mind.

As I became more aware of the core beliefs and desires driving the portfolio-management industry, I also became aware that the most important investment of my life was my investment in myself. The more I realized this, the more my airplane reading switched from investment research to books on personal growth. During my last two years in financial services, my ambitions changed from the specialized work of helping people create profitable portfolios to the broader work of helping people create profitable lives.

Adventure is worthwhile in itself.

— Amelia Earhart

The decision to forge a new career helping people invest in themselves was only the starting point. My Emotional Ownership work involved digging deep into myself and finding the courage to put my beliefs into practice at a time when there was no discipline known as executive coaching. I was acting on the faith that helping people listen to their inner voice would not only make it possible for them to identify what they wanted to do, it would also help them find a way to get paid to do it. The emotional backlash that I struggled with as this dream formed inside of me involved wrestling with inner doubts that threatened to paralyze me. In those days, the industries of consulting, psychotherapy, and spiritual growth were well established but often poorly integrated. How dare I, as a beginner, attempt to cross boundaries in multiple disciplines simultaneously?

Once I started to take action, the years that I spent developing the inner resilience to follow my dream were critical to my success. My Interaction Stage began as I researched a variety of academic programs to get the therapeutic training I knew I needed to deal responsibly with the issues that come up in coaching. For example, helping people evaluate the risks of taking