Recruited

So, I started working with a recruiter this week. This is a strange experience for me. I've never NOT gotten jobs that I've applied for, never been unemployed, and in fact, what used to happen is that I would get offered jobs before I really had thought about applying for them. I had a series of jobs that evolved this way, and some of them I held for years. So, the stark reality that I've now been unemployed for coming up on three months is a little startling for me.

When offered the chance to work with a recruiter, I immediately thought, "Ummmm, no. I'm good." But if I'm being honest, I've done really well getting myself some interviews; better even than most in this economy. But, it's been three months, and I haven't closed an offer. And here's why - I have a lot of skills, but may not posses a lot of experience in negotiating. I can do full splits, train the heck out of someone on something that is killer boring and make them laugh while doing it, and make some out of this world black bean soup. But negotiating my worth is completely foreign to me.

This office specializes with helping people who want to make a career change, re-packaging skills and experience, and helping people haggle their offers, without making it seem like they're greasy-car-salesmanning their way through it. I need this.

It's funny how I wrote unabashedly about being someone who needs a lot of professional help. I don't hesitate to pay for my pants to get hemmed, because I cannot do that with any degree of even pretending to get a good finished product. I didn't think twice about emailing my therapist today to make an appointment for next week. So, why the stigma about working with someone who does this for a living? I am someone with short legs, so I need hemmed pants. I am someone who wants to process my life and be healthier, so I log hours on the therapy couch. I am someone who wants to get a job, so why shouldn't I spend time with a recruiter who is a professional job-getter?

I think this whole thing feels so amazingly singularly defining, that my brain somehow can't process that it relates to other things I've walked through. I think somehow the lessons I've learned don't apply. When I was training for my black belt test, there were things I could do on my own, and things I couldn't. I put myself on a serious regimen of conditioning 3-4 hours a week, in addition to my classes and running. I worked on my essay for months. But I couldn't tailor my Gi (uniform) without taking it to someone, I couldn't spar without a partner, and I asked one fellow instructor to do an hour of additional sparring with me every week, and another instructor to work mitts with me every week. I couldn't have gotten there on my own, and my essay reflected that. So, expecting the multi-faceted challenge of job searching and applying to include only tasks I can excel at by myself, at my kitchen table is probably not the best perspective.

Now, before everyone jumps to tell me their good or bad experiences with a recruiter, you have to all know that I was very deliberate and cautious in making this decision. I spent two weeks talking to them, talked to almost all of their staff, talked to former clients, got their placement stats for the last year (because I wanted to focus on information pertinent to the economy and the recent market), stats for people in my pay range, and stats for people in my age range. I did my own re-con on their results, and compared them with results for other recruiting groups. None of this negates the tinge of anxiety I feel about handing some of this over to someone else; but the bigger thing for me is that I can't keep doing this by myself and feeling like I don't know what I'm doing well and what I'm missing.

I admitted to a couple of people that while significant pressure would not have induced me to say this, I needed the time not working in January and February. I needed time to re-center, to focus on what's important, to get the expectations and disappointments of my last employer out of my system. But, now it's the third month, and I'm DONE. I'm done second guessing myself, I'm done going on bad interviews. I'm done networking and applying my way into jobs where the employer hasn't decided what they can budget for the position, or ones who are making a nod at an external search when they are already certain they are filling it internally. I'm done not being sure what else I should be doing. It's go time.

What's ironic about all of this, is that after spending two months writing, and walking, and praying, and meditating, processing, rationalizing, and shoring up my self-esteem, and then, abandoning trying to renovate that part of my life in favor of building a whole new foundation and housing my self-esteem inside of that . . . After all of this, the first thing the recruiting team asked me to do is fill out a lengthy survey about my successes, goals, skills, and work experience. No brainer, right? But the second part of the survey was about what motivates and excites me (I resisted the urge to just cut and paste the URL for this blog as answer to those queries), and what tangible results I garnered in my last job.

I worked on this survey for about 10-12 hours. Over the span of 60 hours. I wrote 35 pages. THIRTY.FIVE.

I gather it usually takes most people a bit longer on this, so I am grateful to the people in my network and in my support system who pushed me to define my thoughts about a perfect job, about what I'm enthusiastic about, and defining deal-breakers and wish lists earlier. I was able to quickly synthesize thoughts and feelings and information I had gathered before and complete those parts of the survey pretty expeditiously.


What was hard for me was writing about all of my results, quantitative and qualitative. I went into that part with about 4 things in mind. As I went down the list, four more came out of my typing fingers, almost without my thought. Then five more. And on, and on until I had collected close to 30.

And then I was. so. angry.

After writing all of this, I talked with a friend. And realized, there was about 3% of anger directed towards the people who overlooked my significant contributions. And 97% of regret and bitterness towards myself . . . how could I give so much? How could I do it so blindly without regard for what was good for me and what I was appreciated for? How could I do it for so long, unhappily, plugging away pulling together more and more results, and all the while being less and less satisfied?

And then, it hit me.

I finished the survey. And I read back over it, and saw all I had done, felt, accomplished, was motivated by, and was disappointed by. And it washed over me. And I was completely overwhelmed, and disheartened.

I sent off the survey, meanwhile kicking myself. It didn't matter that I had walked for over an hour that morning, followed by some really clarifying meditation, I was able to speak up (type up?) and say,
"After that I need to go clear my head." So, I went and walked for another hour, followed by cooking for 2. Thusly, the Christie processes, moves towards acceptance, and sees a glimmer of peace off in the distance.

This wouldn't have happened six months ago. I would have been upset, or demotivated, or disheartened or disappointed by whatever, and then just gone onto the next thing on my list without consideration for my all-rightness, without processing even where I was or the fact that I was feeling less than good. Which probably means I was less than alright often.

None of that is good, but if it lead me to a place where I can see that I need help, where I can take advantage of help that is being offered (be it a walk with a friend, therapy, working with a recruiter), and where I am in a position to assess what I need in the moment, and then do it . . . then it's ok that I did what I did to get to this place. I have to forgive myself for the hole I let myself fall down, because getting out of the hole is so powerful and has created so much healthy momentum for me as I climb up.

And that's all for today. I could go on and on, but, I think what this means is that I am ready not just to tear it up in a new job, but to give my best to myself in the new career and lifestyle I discover. And so, with some luck, or effort, or help, or mad recruitment up in here, let's all believe that can happen soon.

Change and inspiration

A new friend and I have found ourselves in a recurring conversation. The conversation goes something like this. There are two different kinds of people in the world. Almost everyone sorts themselves primarily into one of these two categories, though of course, almost nobody is an absolutist about this. There are people who enjoy following a process, having a routine, and completing tasks generally by checking things off a list. They may or may not have been involved in creating that process or generating that list, but once there is a flow chart or operations process in place a process person will follow it unless there is very strong motivation to do otherwise. Then, there are people who look at a process, list, or assignment and instantly start thinking of improvements, ways to be more efficient, or something cooler to do. These are the people who would not do well as a personal assistant or as a prep chef - they're not going to do it the way someone else wants them to do it, but rather in the way that makes the most sense to them given their knowledge, experience, what seems most pressing at the moment, and what results they place weight on. These people won't follow a recipe, but they'll happily make one up. Or take a recipe and completely deviate from it and re-invent it. And it will at least be interesting, and likely be very good.

It will not surprise anyone to hear me say I am more the former than the latter (I know. Me, solid and boringly process oriented. You guys are all going to have a heart attack and die from that surprise). At least in things I am less confident in, I really want external validation or need to be seen as clearly doing a good job and so I'll revert to a process or shadow someone else's footsteps before I carve my own path. I once stood in a friend's kitchen an chopped root vegetables into a dice finer than a Kitchen Aid could have delivered, and was completely happy for that hour. (And if I do say so, made a fine white-goy-girl contribution to a Sephardic Orthodox Pesach with that salad) When I bake cookies, they are placed in rows as they cool. (Unless Rob is around to make fun of my and push my boundaries all at once by quietly and wickedly rearranging and de-row-ifying them. Smile) And I am the queen of checklists.

It's not an absolute for me, and there are places where I am more creative. There's no right and wrong in my writing life, so there's no operations process to measure myself against. More to the point, my writing isn't anyone else's writing so it's not really worth the time to compare apples to watermelons when I consider my writing. But if I'm baking, my mother is somewhere metaphorically over my shoulder, so yes, I am following the recipe exactly. Then again if I'm cooking? Anything could happen. I'll cook following a recipe only a few times a year and when I do, I'm usually starting to alter it about two steps into the process . . . vegetable broth here instead of water, less sugar there, and this should have rosemary in it!! I also stopped following anyone else's process for teaching after teaching my first course and find it reee-heeally constraining now if I'm limited by curriculum, materials, or too-specific expectations of what I'll deliver in any class meeting. So, I'm not all process, but I'm certainly not firmly planted in the camp of innovation either.

I am driven, often, by concern about doing things well. I suppose I never felt particularly competent at anything growing up, and didn't have a lot of confidence. That started to change for me in college, but it was late in coming. In the back of my head, there is usually a recurring floating thought of, "Am I doing this well enough?" And doing something well is easy to confuse with doing something right. I often feel like what I'm really hoping for is an unambiguous right way to do something so that there is no question of how well I'm going about whatever is in front of me. So, if handed a checklist, I'm likely to follow it for a decent bit before questioning if it's actually working to get the results I want. Over the years, I've gotten better and better at really analyzing what I'm doing or what I'm being asked to do to in terms of what goals I'm trying to achieve and then thinking about the process I'm following, working backwards from the result I want to the process to get there, further back to the starting point I'm standing at present. But if pressed, if it's important to me to seem like I'm doing a good job, or to be seen as being reliable or competent, I'll stfu and follow the process, whatever it is.

There are good things about this, in that I have learned how to be extremely driven, determined, and to make a process work. I am reliable and can often get significantly reproducible results. If given a goal, I will set to meeting it, and then exceeding it as soon as possible. I take everything seriously, even blog "assignments" my friend gives me . . . which this topic is. I will get things in on time, and early. I can translate what someone else was doing into a process, and then write a manual on it. And, no bed that I sleep in ever doesn't have hospital corners. Process people are good for some things, methinks.

The downside is that I often get . . . stuck on things I don't like or aren't working, and fail to evaluate if there is another, better way to tackle it. If I'm teaching, I'll back out and try again. If I'm writing, I'll take a break and then come back and see a better route to go. If I'm cooking, or if I'm doing a job function I've already excelled at, I'll suggest better ways to go about things. But, the rest of the time . . . hospital corners, cookies in rows, and assignments done the day before they're due.

Recently my therapist said to me that with "my personality type," skills, and accomplishments, I am the kind of person who can do something that "changes the world." (Not my words. His. I thought, "umm, really? The WORLD?") He said that people like me who have balanced out all of the pathologies, analyzed, processed, and integrated can write books, give speeches, become president, start movements. (Sidenote: It's always a little hard for me when he talks about "my personality type" because he hasn't really told me what he thinks that is . . . but I'm going with it.) This shocked me, since I'm such a routines person and fall so heavily on the "process" side. Aren't we the boring people? Aren't we the people who become the quiet backbone of the exciting, innovative people's work? Then again, I did very deliberately go to a college where absolutely everything was open ended and structure was there only if you created it for yourself so . . . maybe.

Of course, at the end of this impassioned speech he was giving me, there was a huge BUT. And it was, "you can do amazing things BUT you won't be able to do anything but make the same choices over and over if you don't change this pattern right now. " He was deeply convicted and passionate about this. Any of you who read this blog will not be surprised that some of the things he named as needing to change were making the safe (easy) choice, steeping myself in judgment and obligation, leading to feeling resentful, and taking care of others or considering it my responsibility to fix others before myself. We had talked a lot about patterns in my life, patterns in my family, and hard choices I had made in the last 20 or so years so none of this was surprising to me. And he's not the fist person to note that the overwhelmingly negative voices in my head sometimes outweigh my ability to function as highly as I could - to hear the creative muses, to feel my feelings on time, to think bigger than my little corner of the universe.

I don't actually want to become president, or be a politician of any kind. But moving people, making people think, generating and sharing big ideas does sound like the person I set out to be when a much younger me left home. So I had to sit up and pay attention when he said this. Not because he was flattering me, but because he was describing the painful way in which I have often found myself painted into a corner, holding the offending brush, paint gleaming as it drips down my arm and wondering how I got there.

But changing things means more than just not picking up the brush. It means not going near paint for a long time. It means avoiding corners and their very tempting gravity.

It means doing almost everything differently and shedding all the things that were holding me back before. It means that when I think about working out, I have to remind myself that it's now my pleasure to work out, and get out of the house and out of my head. It means seeing food differently, and giving myself a hand when I get it right. It means I have to find the "grateful" in folding my laundry, which I used to avoid. It means I have to not spend time on people or places that aren't good for me or that hold the same kind of dark gravity corners do. It means considering possible jobs I didn't in the last couple of years, and imagining myself making not just those tasks work, but that lifestyle work. It means asking potential employers hard questions instead of just nodding my head and accepting a job offer in a parking lot an hour after my final interview (which . . . perhaps I did about 6 years ago. Perhaps).

If I look very thoughtfully and brutally at the last two years of my life I see that I fought to find the time and opportunity to put singing back into my life, but somehow stopped listening to music for fun. Not at work, not in the car, and rarely at home. I made lists of what I should and shouldn't eat, but basically stopped cooking - which is really sad since I cook pretty darn well. I started writing, but only read about 5 books last year. How does that make sense? All of this speaks to me that I was very, very unhappy but avoiding staring that unhappiness in the eye. Had I looked long and hard at it, I would have been forced to make some changes, and as I wrote to a friend earlier this week, "You know how flexible and gracious I am about change." (He was my boss and the lead Sensei at a Karate studio and once, at work, gave me the "Most flexible and adaptable" award. Ha! It was ironic because I could do full splits but would have to take a moment to get over my attachment when he needed me to change lesson plans. )

So, now I'm scared . . . you know, more than a little . . . but happy. Sometimes it takes a scary moment, or 2 months of them, to force change. It's funny to me, actually, how I got launched into this by other people's decisions. I am not sure I would have made these decisions on my own, but I am weirdly grateful for them, and learning to find the grateful in folding my laundry too. It's also amusing to me because there are people in my life who see my rows of cookies, and want to mess with them to point out how structured and "process" I am. (I'll note, some of those same people roll their eyes at my itemized shopping lists but are forced to admit that they helped get the shopping done faster, and with no return trips. Ahem.) But then there are people who look at me and say, "you are so brave. You'll just go out there, see what needs to change, and do it." Those are actual words from another friend.

I suppose process vs. innovation is relative. I won't keep doing things once I'm sure they aren't getting me where I need to go. But, I don't always see what isn't working for me personally. As a consultant, I was incredibly skilled at examining other people's data and summarizing what I thought was the right story to tell about successes and areas of improvement from that data. I would do my homework with this data, engineer a conversation where someone would begin to see for themselves what I had already seen, and then use it to convince them of some things we might work on changing together. I think my instructors thought of me very often as being the harbinger or agent of change. Or maybe they just thought I was pushing them to break out of doing the same things over and over and making them change . . . sometimes painfully.

If I think very carefully about it, then, change for me is about three things. The data demonstrating the need, the will to do it, and a thought about how to change or how to go about doing things differently. But then, I also have to say, I need to unglue myself from whatever structure existed before, and that requires some inspiration to motivate me because who has two thumbs and loves structure? Not me. I have no idea what you're talking about. So then . . four things.

But, here is something else I know. There is a limit to how much change a single person can make. Running an entire region by myself for more than three years, I learned that lesson over, and over, and over again at work. I'm not sure it's different if the thing I am trying to change is me. Someone I really think highly of commented early  in this blog that the crux of what I was writing was boiled down to, what would I change, how would I change it, and how much can I change. I think that is still the main focus .  .  . just a lot of things have changed since then! I still need this accountability and mirror. And I'm still seeking other opportunities to push me when I feel like digging my heels in and pointing to  a process I'm comfortable with.

An important friend told me recently, that you never know who is watching you. Who is inspired by you. Who is moved by you. I hadn't thought about that in a long time. I think I . . . focused so deeply on the process that worked for me at work last year, that I stopped thinking about how I looked from the outside. I stopped thinking of myself as an agent of change for those people, even though that's what I was, to them or anyone. My friend is, I think, a little supernatural. She and I hadn't spoken live in weeks when she gave me a blog assignment last week that spoke to the exact thing I had been struggling with in that moment. This week she asked me to write about this just as I started digging deep down into what needs to change for me in order for things to be truly different. And in the same moment where someone else said to me, "I see and appreciate what you've done, what you've walked through, the struggles you've done. You have more courage than anyone I know."

I want that to be true. I want to be brave enough to do the right thing, even when it's not the easy thing. I want to always walk out the door with the courage of my convictions. I want to have the insight to look at my own life the way I used to analyze business data, and pick out what is working, what isn't, and how to change things so I keep the things that are working, and kick the things that aren't straight out the door.

The thing is, I want it to be true more these days because I want to inspire myself to do things, than I want to do it for others. I want, more than anything, to stop caring so friggin much about other people's expectations. I want to define for myself what winning looks like, and then do that. And. Nothing. Else. All the time. I recently said to someone, "when it comes to getting through school, I think inspiration matters more than we often talk about." I was inspired when I was in school. I haven't been since . . . I'm not sure when it wandered off but it now seems to me to be the only way for me to get back to being happier.

It's strange, right? To say I want to be more self-centered? I think it is, but it is also probably the only way for me to be the change I want to see in my own life.

I might be onto something. I sleep better now, read more, write more, listen more, eat healthier, enjoy my runs, and feel somewhat released from judgement. I've made it this far in the process, able to sleep at night (more than I used to!) and look myself in the eye in the morning, and I've done it mostly by not caring what other people think I should do. So, now the voice in my head is usually mine, and not the voice of what I think someone else thinks. That means, if I lie very still, I can hear what I really want and need now, and if I'm feeling judged or penned in by a process or habit, I'm doing it myself.

Change is painful, but funny too. I laugh a lot these days.