Excerpt from
ReArchitecting: One Business Woman's Mid-Career Learning Sabbatical.
Limited First Edition, November 2005. Pages 41 – 43.
Over the months after I left my job, I began to receive a trickle and then a wider stream of phone calls from former colleagues and even current classmates. How had I managed to make the decision and then take the action to leave my employer after 15 years and think I could completely change industries? “Bold,” some called it, and “courageous.”
It wasn’t like that to me. Consider that I’d joined a manufacturing company 15 years earlier armed with a master’s degree in journalism, zero corporate work experience, and no friends, relatives, or even acquaintances in the town to which I moved. I further had essentially no company knowledge except what I had read through media headlines, that it had a VP of public affairs, and that in the mid-80’s it appeared frequently on lists of top companies to work for. Two years later, I accepted a job selling products through the company’s New York sales office having never been on a sales call. Ever.
Maybe it was bold. More likely, it was naive. Primarily, it was within my comfort zone. I believed if the environment was supportive of letting me try new things and make a few mistakes, I could learn new jobs. I had confidence in my ability to learn and adapt – and brought with me a passionate desire to do so. Perhaps this is the most constant thread of my entire life.
The company’s culture proved healthy and a great fit for learning. With just one noteworthy exception – a department in which competitive politics often detracted from the pleasure I normally gained from pursuing a business challenge together – the company was marvelous at letting me grow and contribute to the best of my abilities. I am grateful for that experience.
The real courage test for me came a few months after I left. Those months required the strength of will not to rehash and question my decisions while I was in school when it was too early to begin to seek the next job position. When, frankly, I was most uncomfortable in my new place, even though I was fully committed to being there. And probably, I was mourning the parts of what I left behind that I had valued.
The change in my immediate success scorecard – my paycheck – was the first, most difficult adjustment. I had a financial plan and believed it would work. I’d reviewed it even with a financial advisor. I was surprised how entrenched that monthly income reinforced that I was in some way valuable and had ingrained itself as part of my worth. I didn’t consider myself a person who measured her success by the amount of stuff she could buy, but the adjustment to not being able to flagrantly use my spending power dented my sense of accomplishment. I never fully got used to not having an income that I was earning. It impacted my lifestyle, as I lived on a closer budget, but also my sense of freedom and, more than I like to admit, status. I learned to live with a certain tension about money for the larger goal and now put its role in my life better in perspective for what it is.
During these months, I came to view persistence as the legs of courage. Just to stand with the decisions solidly while waters swirled around my ankles required a new maturity. I was wading across a river, not so wide. I could see the other shore in the distance, but needed to concentrate on my current footing and could not look too far forward or backwards.
The economy was horrible. I watched the first anniversary of 9/11 on TV all day because I didn’t have classes. My mother was still strongly grieving Dad’s death, as were all of us. We experienced every first holiday without him. The USA went to war with Iraq.
Would I finally bend under the stress?
Copyright © 2005 by Jill E. Allemang. ISBN 0-9771481-0-6
Four days of luxurious feeling being home with no plan. Gardening a little. Time with friends. Drinking a Cola Light watching people at the Bellvue tram station. Blog Expert Helen and I sharing music, Thai take-out and books to read. Warm Easter celebration with an added surprise that Dorothee & Farouk married after already a 13-year relationship. Just what I needed. The reminder of love. The smiles of friends. And time to let my own creative spirit wander.
