I was talking to a job-seeker who has been in a yearlong transition from one career to the next. This process has involved an enormous amount of effort and no small amount of angst.
Complicating everything has been the fact that he was successful in his first career and easily could have stayed in it, were it not for the deadening feeling it gave him. So he left that work, without having a new job or even a career idea, to launch a year of exploration funded by temporary jobs.
As you can imagine, this has not been an easy year. In addition to the normal ups and downs of career exploration, he's had to deal with the fact that he voluntarily left his first vocation. He wasn't laid off or fired, and his industry didn't dry up. If this risk didn't pay off, he'd have no one to blame but himself.
This person is now on a path and has chosen new work, so many of the emotional pitfalls of this process are behind him. Now comes the fun part, as well as the hard-work part, of putting his new plans into action. Now also comes the opportunity to review the last year from a perspective of relative equanimity. Here's a discovery that has surprised him: People he thought were not supportive of him actually were being supportive -- although not always effective in showing their support.
In particular, he thought that his life partner had been unhappy with his quitting his job and with the year of temporary work. He also perceived that she wanted him to veer toward a more white-collar choice than his explorations were leading him toward. These assumptions about her feelings were making him unhappy and uncertain about his choices.
Imagine his surprise when he reassessed the events of the last year and realized that she had been showing her support all along. He had been interpreting things from his own fears rather than from the truth of how she was stating them.
While the lesson of this story may be obvious (never assume, always ask others what they're feeling and believe them when they answer), it's not particularly easy to apply. Career transition and job search are almost guaranteed to make us feel insecure, uncertain, scared and even panicky. For that reason, practical advice that starts with the words "relax" or "everything will turn out fine" tends to fall on deaf ears.
With that in mind, it seems that another moral needs to be derived from this story, for the people who care about job-seekers, and it might go like this: Speak your support, say it often and demonstrate it whenever possible.
For example: "I support you in taking this year to explore new careers. I'm OK with the wacky schedule your temp work has created. To make things easier, I'm going to do some of your chores around the house."
OK, maybe doing the extra chores is going too far. You don't want to get sappy about it. But there is something true about the idea that we show our support through our actions, more than our words.
My client discovered this in reverse when some of his friends kept sending him job leads from his old profession. Although they said they supported him in changing fields, they showed a resistance to his plans by sending him exactly what he said he didn't want anymore.
Bottom line? If you have a job-seeker or career-changer in your life, understand that he or she almost certainly is experiencing emotions you're not seeing.
The frustration and fear that most people feel during a transition are not easy to discuss. For example, they might complain about employers who aren't calling back, but they might not express the underlying terror that no one ever will call back.
While you can't do much to remove those fears, you can listen, ask good questions and share stories of success or hope. Or you can take your friend to the movies to escape for a while.
Just don't cut out ads for jobs that are from last year's career.
- Amy Lindgren owns Prototype Career Service, a career consulting firm in St. Paul, Minn. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice. com or at 1071 W. Seventh St., St. Paul, MN 55102.