An Explorer's Tale

Only later did I come to appreciate how normal my career angst was. In large commercial law firms, people who truly love their work are rare. The same is true, I believe, of many other white-collar organizations. That is because so many people do as I did: they stumble unthinkingly into a career to derive external rewards - material possessions, financial security, social status or the approval of others. Unhappiness is a predictable outcome.

I’m no longer a lawyer. Nowadays I’m a management consultant, mentor, and author. My portfolio includes a lot of volunteer work. It’s a mix I love.

I have learnt many lessons on my journey from misery to happiness, and have written a book about the process: The Money Is The Gravy. This article sets out some of the key learnings. They seem self-evident to me now. But they weren’t self-evident to me fifteen years ago; they aren’t to most of my clients; and they aren’t to millions of talented individuals who, at this very moment, regard career happiness as an impossible dream.

Lesson 1: Career happiness comes from aligning your work with your Core Self.

In her autobiography, Margot Fonteyn writes of the instant when, as a young child, she was “suddenly and overwhelmingly struck with the greatest revelation of all: that I was an individual person different from anyone else.”

I wasn’t lucky enough to have such a revelation as a child. Of course, I understood at an intellectual level that there was only one me, but I didn’t feel it viscerally. In my early 30s, however, I began to read a few psychology books. These challenged my sense that I was nothing more than an assemblage of social roles. Phrases like “to be that self which one truly is” (Soren Kierkegaard), “the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being” (Carl Jung), and “becoming a person” (Carl Rogers), stirred something in me.

For me, this has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful insight. Maybe it’s simplistic, but nothing I’ve experienced or learnt since has shaken my belief in its fundamental truth.

Lesson 2: Aligning your work with your Core Self means "following your bliss."

My first move away from a legal career took me into general management. At the age of 33, I found myself the national managing partner of a large commercial law firm. In that role I worked closely with highly talented individuals who were recognized throughout the commercial community as leading lawyers in their various specialties. And yet, for all their success, I sensed that most of them were falling short of their potential. I worked intensively with them to find the key that would bring them to peak performance, but mostly to no avail.

Frustrated, I resolved to write a book on unleashing talent. I was just a few months into my research when, coincidentally, a friend sent me videos of the PBS television series The Power of Myth, comprising Bill Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell. One five-minute passage captivated me. “Follow your bliss,” said Campbell; “go where your body and soul want to go”. Found your life on the irrational, idiosyncratic passions that stir you deep inside, the things that go beyond “food, shelter, progeny, and wealth”

I knew instantly that I had found the missing key. Those extraordinarily talented and high-achieving lawyers whose talents remained in some way shackled - they were not working in the field of their bliss! I imagined Picasso working as a designer in an ad agency. Would he produce excellent work? Of course. But would he unleash his talents through such work? Would he be truly happy in such work? No way.

From that moment, the focus of my book changed. No longer was it about unleashing talent. Rather it was about how each person could find and follow his or her bliss.

The “follow your bliss” tenet has also given me a new focus for my own working life. It has served as a lodestar, guiding me in constructing the work portfolio that now brings me so much happiness.

Lesson 3: If you “follow your bliss,” you have a calling, not a career.

People who follow their bliss learn to develop a strong sense of self. They are tuned into their passions. They hear the call from deep within and answer it. They have, in short, a calling.

We tend to confine the word “calling” to certain spiritual or artistic occupations. That limitation is absurd. No type of work is, by its very nature, a calling. And no type of work is, by its very nature, incapable of being a calling. What distinguishes a calling from a career is simply the motivation with which a given individual undertakes it. People who follow their bliss have a calling, regardless of whether they are ministers or mechanics, poets or plumbers, star-gazers or stock-brokers.

According to Hans Selye in Stress Without Distress, “The best way to avoid harmful stress is to select an environment (wife, boss, friends) which is in line with your innate preferences - find an activity which you like and respect.... The art is to find, among the jobs you are capable of doing, the one you really like best”.

In those few words, Selye captures the essence of a calling. It involves doing something that, innately, you are capable of doing, you like, and you respect. Skill - enjoyment - meaning - those are the three elements of a calling, the stuff from which work happiness is made.

I picture the three elements of a calling as interlocking hoops, like this:

As a lawyer, I was at Point A, inside only one circle. I had the skills to perform at a high level, and my work delivered in terms of extrinsic factors like money, status, and approval. But it did not begin to satisfy the intrinsic elements of enjoyment and meaning. I was therefore like Picasso in the ad agency.

Subsequently, during my time as a managing partner, I moved inside a second circle, to Point B. By and large I enjoyed being a manager. But for me it still lacked meaning.

To find my bliss, to find my calling, I had to keep journeying. Thus, at the end of 1993, I moved on from general management into a portfolio of activities that gave expression to my fundamental values. Now I am at Point X. It is in this zone where all three circles interlock that true work happiness is to be found.

Lesson 4: Bliss is discovered by a process of exploration.

It sounds easy: all I had to do to be happy was find work that I was good at, enjoyed and respected. But the reality is that two decades ago I had a flawed idea of my skills and almost no idea at all (consciously at least) of my passions and values. Before I could follow my bliss, I had to find it.

To do this, I have had to explore. The word “exploring” is apt. I have been seeking when I haven’t known what I would find, or when I would find it. Uncertainty and fear have been part of the territory.

Career explorers, it seems to me, require one essential attribute: a staunch commitment to personal growth. That commitment must be long-term. Small, incremental changes are at the heart of exploring. Changes need not be - usually should not be - momentous. The strong temptation to seek a quick fix, which often entails hopping erratically between jobs, organizations, and careers, must be resisted.

My own exploring, which has continued for 20 years so far, has been eclectic. I’ve read widely, in fields as diverse as psychology, science, spirituality, management, politics, sport, and health. I’ve kept a journal. I’ve had periods of counseling. I’ve undertaken psychometric testing. I’ve attended workshops. I’ve learnt meditation. I’ve taken up some hobbies, discarded others, joined some organizations, quit others. I’ve experimented with work and lifestyle changes and broadened my circle of friends. I’ve spent a lot of time at home parenting. And I’ve also spent much time alone, reflecting.

It is hard to attribute particular learnings to any one of these activities: it has been the mix that has moved me forward. For all that, when I look back a few items stand out:

Alan Lakein’s time-management book, How To Get Control Of Your Time And Your Life

I came across this book in 1984 when I was desperately trying to confine my work hours by becoming more efficient. Lakein’s theme was that time management was about priorities: not just work priorities but life priorities. This prompted me to contemplate what was the revolutionary idea that I could actively shape my own life.

Lakein outlined a simple exercise for identifying lifetime goals. I’ve carried out this exercise dozens of times since then; it has always served to de-clutter my mind and bring me back to what, fundamentally, I want my life to be about. (A similar task that I have always found helpful involves writing my own obituary.) 

Psychometric testing

I first heard of psychometric testing in 1986 when reading the autobiography of John Bertrand, Australia’s winning America’s Cup skipper in 1983. Intrigued, I called an occupational psychologist and asked him to administer a battery of tests. The results jolted me because they raised so many questions. For example, was I, as I believed, an “amiable” - expressive and non-assertive? Or was I a “driver” - assertive and non-expressive? (My wife was clear: I was the latter!) My fascination with personality testing as a tool for providing food for thought has continued. I recall vividly the moment in 1992 when I read a lengthy description of my Myers-Briggs type, the INFP. I experienced a thrill of recognition and an enormous sense of relief: “Yes, yes, at last, that’s it, that’s me!”

Mentoring

The occupational psychologist whom I had called out of the blue in 1986 became my mentor for the next three years. His impact on my life was remarkable. He took a range of different approaches, listening gently to me one day, aggressively challenging me the next, sometimes dissuading me from taking foolish steps, other times urging me to pursue options that I disdained. He often served as a coach, teaching me for example to accommodate my recurring need for space and time alone. He also introduced me to journal-writing. To this day, whenever I am flat emotionally, I resort to my journal and ask, “What is my body trying to tell me? What am I not owning up to? What change am I being called upon to make?”

Twice in my exploring I’ve made major work changes. They weren’t leaps into the dark, however, because they were preceded by prolonged exploring. The first occurred in 1986 when I stopped being a lawyer and became a manager. The second came in 1993 when I resigned from my firm with the intention of building a work portfolio. A few years earlier, it would have been reckless for me to break away from a secure livelihood without a clear sense of where the next dollar would come from. By 1993, however, I was beginning to build up a richer sense of my Core Self. This self-knowledge brought security - a willingness to trust myself and my abilities.

I tend when I look back to recall the good things: the moments of exhilarating insight, achievement, or serendipity. But it wasn’t all like that. 1986 is illustrative. In that year, I underwent my first psychometric testing, took three months’ sabbatical leave in Europe, found an mentor, and moved into the role of managing partner. I often look back fondly on 1986 as the pivotal year when I made the break from legal practice, discovered what I then believed was going to be an enduring passion (management) and generally took giant strides in building a new picture of myself. Yet for all the highs, I experienced in that year some of the worst lows I have ever known. I was depressed through most of the sabbatical, and distraught when, on my return, I found that my mentor was unimpressed with my plan to quit the firm. Despair turned to excitement when I found that my partners wanted me to assume a full-time management role. But when I found that my dreams to transform the firm were not widely shared, I once again experienced exhaustion, disillusionment, and the old, familiar feeling of being lost.

And so it continued, ups followed by downs, feelings of progress followed by feelings of hopelessness. The constant support of my wife was crucial. Only over the last ten years have I progressed to the stage where my normal state is happiness, interspersed with occasional spells of angst, rather than the other way round.