Copyright
Copyright 2007 Timothy Butler
All rights reserved
“Archaic Torso of Apollo,” copyright 1982 by Stephen Mitchell, from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to [email protected], or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.
First eBook Edition: August 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4221-0225-1
To Linda, Kiera, Amelia, and my parents,
to my good friend Jim,
and to all of my teachers.
The way up and the way down are one and the same.
—Heraclitus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have made this book and the work on which it is based possible. Psychology is itself a form of disciplined storytelling, a reflection on human experience that, in the end, comes to us one unique story at a time. First to thank then are my students and clients from whom I have learned so much. Some of their stories appear in the pages that follow, but each has trusted me to share and participate in his or her unique experience at a time of career or life impasse.
At the Harvard Business School, I have received generous support and encouragement for my work from Steve Nelson, Executive Director of the MBA Program, and from two MBA program faculty chairpersons, Carl Kester and Rick Ruback. These individuals, along with deans Kim Clark and Jay Light, have been generous in their support of the MBA coaching program and of my research efforts. The staff of MBA Career Services have been great colleagues and fellow coaches from whom I have learned much. Their management talent and dedication has allowed my research and writing work to continue amid the busy demands of an office that offers thousands of coaching sessions every year. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Jana Kierstead, Lauren Murphy, Betsy Strickland, Mat Merrick, and Stacey Kessel.
Jim Waldroop and Dave LeLacheur have been great partners, colleagues, and friends over the years that we have built the Career- Leader program. I am excited about the work that lies ahead of us.
From Beijing, Chicago, and Singapore, to Barcelona, Cambridge, and Lausanne, and from many other cities around the world, over a thousand counselors, professors, and career services professionals have sponsored or participated in the workshops on counseling and self-assessment that my colleagues and I have taught. I thank them all for their enthusiasm, ideas, friendship, and dedication to their students.
I want to thank Kris Dahl, my agent at ICM, for taking on this, our third project together.
A special thanks goes to Melinda Merino at Harvard Business School Press, who championed this project from the beginning and saw it through its many phases. Julia Ely has worked diligently during the production process. Rick Ruback, Linda Butler, Laura Nash, Fran Davis, Pam Lassiter, Jim Waldroop, and an anonymous reviewer read early drafts and provided valuable suggestions and encouragement. Connie Hale’s editorial contributions have been truly extraordinary. Her enthusiasm, talent, and persistence have made this a much more accessible (and much shorter) book. Andrea Truax’s careful and quick typing saved the day when deadlines loomed, and Pam Goett provided thoughtful and detailed copy editing. Jennifer Waring skillfully guided this project through the production process.
As always, I am full of gratitude for my wife Linda’s patience, insight, and unwavering support.
INTRODUCTION
In 1995, Betsy Sloan was thirty-five years old and had worked her way into “the perfect job.” As a CPA in a large California insurance company, she had a great salary, stock options, a “fabulous boss,” and hours that were the envy of her friends.
“And I was miserable,” she says today. She leans comfortably into the back of a chair, her dark eyes sharply focused behind her stylish, orange-framed glasses. “The art of the deal, the big transaction— that never did it for me. What was worse, I could project thirty years into the future and know exactly what I’d be doing every quarter—making SEC filings, doing internal reporting for the CFO. It was mind-numbing.”
“I felt totally stuck,” she adds. “I made too much money to quit, but I hated not being able to do what I really wanted.”
Betsy had never been encouraged to “do what she really wanted.” Her middle-class, suburban family had urged her to develop strong skills and then find a job that would set her up for life. Always good at pleasing teachers, parents, and professors, she’d earned a 4.0 average in high school, won a full scholarship to college, excelled in accounting, and landed a job in a “Big Eight” CPA firm. After six years, she moved to the dream job at the insurance company.
Then one day she decided she couldn’t do it anymore. She quit and left the office—and its financial security—the very same day. Betsy moved in with her parents and started taking classes at the local community college. One of those classes was creative writing. “I started writing about what I loved,” she recalls. “I realized that I had been happiest in my life when I was in school. I loved that environment. Actually, I’d always secretly wanted to be a teacher. So I took the subject-matter proficiency classes to be a math teacher, and then I applied to graduate school for a master’s in education.”
By the time she turned thirty-eight, Betsy was teaching ninthgrade algebra and pre-calculus honors at a Seattle public high school. She had gone from making $106,000 a year to making $34,000. And she was loving every minute of it.
All of us, like Betsy, can suddenly find ourselves stuck and miserable. These feelings might come at predictable moments: with the loss of a job; the end of a romance; the departure of a child and the sudden yawning of an empty nest; or the death of someone who has long helped us feel recognized, loved, and appreciated. But they might also come at unpredictable moments: when the job of a lifetime somehow loses its juice; when we ache for intimacy but can’t seem to find the right partner; when we find ourselves longing to renew a sense of life’s adventure.
At these moments, we find ourselves at an impasse, and we suffer. At work we feel stale or unchallenged—or fret that we are not progressing to a more rewarding role. In our personal lives we feel agitated, deflated, or downright bored. We are desperate to discover a meaningful way to contribute at work, to find a reinvigorated role in our families, and to dive back into the current of our own lives. We sense that life is flowing all around us, but we sit like a boulder in a river, yearning to be swept along and transformed by the river’s great energy.
The experience of being carried off by this energy is the surge of life, a time when our ideas and the will to act on them come from a well deeper than our own small selves. We feel connected; we get things done; we sense something exciting is at hand. We are, as the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would say, “in the flow.”
When we are at an impasse, we often cannot even sense this flow—or see how close we are to a dynamic dislodging that would place us back into the energy of the moving current. When we are feeling stuck, we forget that the next thing that will wake us up and energize us deeply is already in motion upstream, moving toward our awareness. When we have run aground, we sometimes fail to realize that this is a necessary crisis; without it we cannot grow, change, and—eventually—live more fully in a larger world.
Impasse and Vision
This is a book about how impasse, like