Caroline’s Dilemma
My friend Caroline and I were walking the other day. She’s a very busy mom. Two young girls, a great husband with a knack for being caught up in business and his consuming passion, triathlon, and an extended network of friends and family who all would like a little more of her time.
But before the deluge Caroline was a very successful creative professional in the advertising business. The day we were walking she reminisced about that former life and wondered aloud if, now that the girls are in school all day, she should return to the business world.
“The longer I stay out, the more I worry that my skills are eroding” she said. Not that she doesn’t love her vocation as a mother, but time moves quickly in the advertising world. How soon will the value of her college degree and her job experience diminish to the point she has to start from scratch?
At this stage, Caroline isn’t ready to make a move, it’s simply a matter of taking the issues out of her head and talking to someone about it. This is, however, an excellent time to make a serious review of the situation and to begin to develop some fresh thinking.
Here’s what I would recommend to Caroline:
1 – Don’t look back. In too many ways to enumerate, the old job is gone. Which is another way of saying that the old Caroline is gone.
2 – Expand yourself. By this I mean that it’s time to reinvent yourself using a more diverse palette, one which includes even more of your core talents than before.
3 – Seek self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment comes from putting as much of your talent and ability to work as possible, which means that you’ve got to dig hard to find the important stuff within. Self-fulfillment also comes when you work in accordance with your deepest, most cherished values. It is the merging of your core talents with your core values to produce benefit for all concerned.
Just before Caroline and I finished our walk, she began to tell me about her love of drawing and painting. As I suspected, she touched on the most important thing last. This signaled to me that she had begun to draw near to her home, so to speak. She was talking about the talent that matters to her most. This, it seemed to me, was where she would solve her dilemma.
Posted: September 12th, 2006 under Dot2Dot, the ME niche.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Susan
Time: September 13, 2006, 11:13 pm
First, I think this is SO telling, as people do tend to say what they really think at the end of a conversation. I think we tend to beat around the bush a bit before we get to the point, either so as not to be too blunt or because it takes us a while to realize where we’re really going. Second, the (compound) question, what do you really want out of life and how can you get it, is tough. It depends upon the resources available to you and your imagination. My experience tells me one can find gratification that was previously realized professionally in many other places, sometimes literally. Perhaps the answer lies in having: (a) the respect for your talent or expertise from others in one arena, (b) enjoying what you do in another, and (c) feeling good about your contribution to society in another. If you don’t need to, you shouldn’t rush into getting a “job.”
Comment from Bennyboy
Time: September 21, 2006, 9:30 am
What rings most true for me about Stewart’s recommendations to Caroline is how hard it is to dig for the most important stuff within. It’s even harder if you’ve spent most of you life trying to be someone you are not, which makes an even longer road back to your true self. After many years of developing self awareness, things started to look and feel strangley familiar. “So THIS is who I am, …cool.” Yet I was totally unprepared for what I would discover next. I still had difficulty accepting and beliving it. I mean, what good does it do to find yourself if you don’t believe it? The good news is learning to trust doesn’t take quite as long as discovering who you really are. Trust is faith in action. Truth is truth. If it’s true, it can be trusted. From there, you just close your eyes and jump.
Had I know the surge of power I would recive from taking this step of faith, I would have done it a long time ago. Turns out being yourself is way easier and much less scarier than I had imagined. Today making good choices about what I will do, will not do, say, not say, eat, not eat, think about, not think about comes very easily because I’m measuring it all up against what I value. And, miracle of miracles, not only do I know what I value… but I believe it 
Comment from uagbpfeupn
Time: July 3, 2007, 3:38 pm
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Comment from tip
Time: November 20, 2008, 7:42 am
Keep it up (like I do ) Great site - loved the bit about yourselves.
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