The Twentysomething Identity Crisis

Listen up, class:  you're getting rid of your professor for a day. (My god, you could at least wait on the hoots and hollers until I'm out the room.) Today we have our first substitute teacher, Ms. Ashley Sapp from Chaos and Words. Ms. Sapp recently approached me, saying she wanted to work with you rowdy bunch. Seeing as how I enjoy her lyrical, impassioned blog - and given the fact that she's an actual twentysomething (read: not an old codger like yours truly) - I thought this would be great. Please give Ms. Sapp a warm Career Avoidance 101 welcome by clicking over to her blog, engaging in some thoughtful post-lecture class discussion, and refraining from throwing spitballs! I'll be back on Friday to dole out penalties accordingly (no recess for you!). What is the identity of the twenty-something? Why does this identity constantly shift?

We feel the need to fit ourselves into categories that make sense because we've got one foot in our adolescence and the other in adulthood - this is a confusing time, and we can end up feeling split between two worlds and not quite like "ourselves". Sometimes, we don’t even know what it means to feel like ourselves. We are still figuring things out, and that’s fine. Some adults don’t have things completely figured out, and that’s also okay. There is incredible pressure to be someone. Particularly growing into a twenty-something and moving through such a defining decade, we don’t always know who that person should be.

As a child, we're asked what we want to be when we grow up. This question is a big deal. At younger ages, these answers can range anywhere from an astronaut to a cowboy to an actress to a race-car driver (or whatever the case may be).

I remember taking little quizzes that told us which profession we would most likely excel at depending on our personalities. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer and performer, and because that’s what I wanted, my quiz answers reflected this. Eventually I heard a recording of myself singing (you know, practicing) and realized that I’m totally tone-deaf. Some dreams just aren’t meant to be.

However, there is a difference between having certain talents (or in my case, not having those talents) and feeling as though we have to fit a certain mold. Parents and teachers can often times play a large role in this, wanting us to become "successful people". What exactly does this mean? Many times, it’s based off monetary success, so careers such as lawyers and doctors are considered the best route to take. Yet, wouldn't any career that makes someone happy be considered a success?

I’m a writer through-and-through, but I’ve still been asked, “Okay, but what are you going to be?” as though my answer was a joke. I’m sure I’m not alone in confessing what my dream is only to have it be deemed ludicrous. We go from declaring ourselves astronauts as children to having that same dream smashed as being too far-reaching (there’s some irony for you).  When does this transition happen? Obviously, some people go on to become all those things.

No, we are not all destined to have out-of-this-world careers, but my point here is who is anyone to tell you what is right for you, your dreams? We made it through the awkward years, the bullies, the drama, the stresses of middle and high school only to be told when we finally reach the end that our dreams are not realistic. We have to start being serious, go to college, get a job. However, it does not always work out the same way for everyone – we can go about these stages at our own pace (or skip some altogether). There is a reason we are individuals, and we don’t all go about living in the same manner.

One thing I’ve learned, though, is that people have a lot of opinions on what you should be doing. Apparently to some what I am  is not good enough – it’s not who I should be. So here’s the number one lesson I can perhaps provide to you today:

It does not matter what anyone else says you should do with your life. It is you who must live it day in and day out, and the only way you’ll ever be satisfied waking up each day is if you do what feels right to you. Your number one concern should be to make you happy, not to satisfy someone else’s idea of you. That will never last. The best way for your life to have any sort of impact is for it to be undeniably, completely, messily, and unabashedly yours.

We have been taught and conditioned that whatever we do for a living is what defines us, makes up our identity, and deems us successful. Perhaps that is why our identities shift so often, but I think it's our perceptions that shift rather than our actual identity. For instance, I'm the same person I was when I worked in retail, but I wasn't defined by that – that does not make up who I am as a person, my morals, my thoughts, my inspirations. Lessons were taken from the experience, certainly (like patience), but that's not my entire make-up.

A career should be something that motivates you and inspires you, and retail just did not do that for me. On that note, retail is not an easy job to have, but people tend to rank it rather low and as being "unsuccessful". That's simply not true. I have a friend who actually enjoys working retail, and I say all the more power to him. When a career coincides with how you feel about yourself and what you desire out of life, I think you’ve made your match.

Going after a certain career can be terrifying and amazing at the same time. We fear we’ll fail, we fear we’re not good enough, and we’re unsure we’re making the right choice at times. Try to remember, though, that whatever career you choose is not your entire identity. Your core is not made up of dollar signs and nine-to-fives.

So if whatever path you choose isn’t right the first time, that’s okay, too! My path of singing was quite short-lived, but I have that notch in my belt and found a different route to take that is right for me. The identity you have is always there, but paths tend to bend and twist and go off-roading at times. Don’t let it become a crisis.

Will the real you please stand up? (Photo credit: Bilal Kamoon)

Hmm, hmm, hmm. (Photo credit: alexanderdrachmann)

Can't We All Be Above Average?

That's what a student with red-rimmed eyes asked me last week. She stood before me, distressed about her average (perfectly acceptable) grade on a paper assignment, visibly willing her tears away. I said her paper was just fine, it's simply that I reserve the top 10% of grades for students who do a standout job, going beyond the requirements or looking at the topic in a novel way. "But that's not fair," she said. "Can't we all be above average?"

I felt like I was watching the "WHY?!" Nancy Kerrigan video play out before me (if you were, like, a year old when this event happened, start the video at 1:55 for a refresher; man, you make me feel old). I alternately wanted to shake my student and say, "Snap out of your self-pity!" and then to hug her while cooing, "I know. It sucks. I get it. This hurts."

The thing is, I do get it. I've felt it. I sometimes still feel it. I mean, why can't we all be above average? Well, because, obviously, we can't.

So the real question is, why did we get it in our heads in the first place that we could be?

Partly it's due to the self-esteem movement - you know, the campaign that had you winning "Participant Ribbons" rather than real trophies in grammar school - but even more importantly, it's due to our natural cognitive development.

During adolescence, we all think we're special. No one has to tell us we are, we simply believe it. Nobody has ever had these thoughts before, we tell ourselves. Journal, dear journal, you are witnessing the dawn of a magnificent mind afire. With thoughts like these, I'm destined to take the world by storm.

Don't believe me? Then you haven't been reading many blogs.

The thing is, it's healthy and normal to think this way. For a while. It's called the personal fable and it's part of normative adolescent egocentrism. Psychologists debate its origins, but it may arise as a way of coping with individuation - the process of becoming your self, a being who is separate from those around you.

Sound familiar?

I think it should, because that's what you guys are grappling with every. single. day. I watch it in my office. I read it in your blogs. I see it in our class discussions. Figuring out who you are - and doing so independently of the subtle, all-encompassing, often-overlooked influence of your parents - is what today's twenties are all about.

So here's what I believe:  the personal fable and egocentrism aren't just an adolescent thing. They're here and they're now.

And they're screwing you over. Two times over.

They're paralyzing your quest for a fulfilling life and career, coming and going:

1. When the personal fable is in full effect, you're afraid of making a misstep that would prove you aren't actually special. I remember thinking just this in my early 20s:  what if I leave my Ivy League "I can prove I'm smart by just saying where I go to school" grad school and simply become a person with a job? Who am I then? And what will have happened to the "mind afire?" I'm too special, too unique, too destined for greatness for such an end. I know I'm not satisfied with my current life, but if I make the leap, take the chance, reach out for the life I really want...<pause for a freak out>...I might end up realizing that everything I've believed about myself has been a complete and utter lie.
2. Then, as the personal fable wanes, you give up the will to strive for a better life. Wait, I'm not actually special? you begin to think. Everyone else thinks like this, too? Crap. Then who am I to believe I can do anything wonderful with my life? Who am I to bother to fight for fulfillment and to try to "do what I love"? That's impractical. That's unreasonable. Best to just suck it up and take a cubicle job and sell my soul down a river of memos and meetings and incessant cesspools of insipid, pithy emails.

The thing is, both ways of thinking are flawed. We're not all above average. Statistically, that simply doesn't work.  But we do all have the right to a life that gives us a sense of purpose and passion and meaning. There's no quota on that; no requirement that only 10% of us get to engage in that search.

In other words, when my student was standing before me last week, ineffectually blinking back her tears, the urgency welling within her wasn't about a paper. It wasn't about her performance. It wasn't, even, about being "average." It was about being blocked from a life worth living.

And so I said, "No, we can't all be above average. But we can all live extraordinary lives. If we choose to."

She stared at me for a long moment, the tears ceasing to flow. I could see the epiphany creeping into her. Inch by inch. Cell by cell. Atom by atom. These are the teaching  moments we live for, through many a botched lecture, through many an awkward class discussions, through many a hand-cramped session of grading.

Finally, she spoke.

"Uh. So what about my grade?"

Sources:

Lapsley, D. K (1993). Toward an integrated theory of adolescent ego development: The "new look" at adolescent egocentrism. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 63, 562-571.

Vartanian, L. R. (2000). Revisiting the imaginary audience and personal fable constructs of adolescent egocentrism:  A conceptual review. Adolescence, 35, 639-661.

There simply aren't enough ribbons to go around. (Photo credit: ideath)

Is Life About Checking Off Boxes?

Here's a good way to feel pressured and unfulfilled:  treat life like you're earning a Scout badge.

You remember that process from childhood, don't you? Your Scout leader announces the troop will be working toward some new badge - the Staying Fit badge, perhaps, or the Savvy Shopper badge, or maybe the Car Care badge (gee, I need those now) - and you all work down a preordained checklist to earn the badge.

Sure, there's some flexibility to the checklists - usually you only have to complete "any eight of the following twelve steps" or something of the sort - but it's pretty much, "do this, and you get this." For instance, with the Netiquette badge, you earn the knowledge of "how to make -- and keep -- my online world a positive place." (Wowzers, I could get my wacky cousin to stop spouting off below every single one of my Facebook statuses? That's quite the power.)

It has always seemed to me that our educational system - especially college - is little more than the earning of an exalted Scout badge. Now there's even a push toward having job merit badges in place of college degrees. (BTW, I so want the King of the Party Badge.)

It shouldn't be shocking, then, that after we leave college, we act like we're still in some great quest to "check off the boxes." In tribute to this mentality, here are - drum roll, please - the first official Career Avoidance 101 Life Badges! (This is precisely what you've been pining for since graduation, isn't it? Admit it.)

I've borrowed some prototype badge images from the Boy Scouts; we really must work on creating our own Career Avoidance 101 versions. Extra credit if you send one my way.

The Kickin' Kareer Badge

(Earn any eight check marks)

• Get a full-time job offer within two weeks of graduating from college. [Note: Award yourself two check marks if you have a full-time job offer in hand before graduating.]
• Cover your own health insurance. That's big time.

  

• Move out of your parents' house. And stay out for at least three consecutive years. [Note: This check mark does not count if they are paying your rent.]
• Earn a company match on a 401K plan. [Note: 403b plans - used for schools and nonprofits - only count as half a check.]
• Have a sturdy name plate on your desk. On which your name isn't attached with velcro. And that you didn't buy for yourself. [Note: Parental purchases are also disallowed.]
• Be given stock options. Not that you actually know what to do with them.
• Have at least ten people contact you begging you to help them get a job.
• Earn a salary higher than your best friend does. [Note: Award yourself two check marks if your salary is higher than all of your real world friends.]
• Be given an office with real walls. In a corner. With big windows.
• Enlist a C-level three letter acronym to chase after your name (examples:  CEO, CFO, CIO, CSO, CKO, CBS, CUS, CLC...alright, I made those last three up - any guesses?)
• Found your own company that has an IPO and instantly makes you rich (Defined as:  "you could buy more than one house").
• Get a doctorate. Just for the hell of it. [Note:  Three master's degrees may be substituted to earn this check mark.]

The Highfalutin Home Life Badge

(Earn any six check marks)

• Locate a suitable spouse. (Defined as:  someone who is currently unmarried and who appears unlikely to steal from you.)
• Connive said suitable spouse into marrying you.
• Buy a home. [Note:  Award yourself two check marks if you buy first house with 20% down.]

  

• Have 1.86 kids. [Note: Seriously consider having only one as onlies are a hot trend, which may render the 1.86 kid requirement obsolete by the time you complete this check box.]
• Serve your family solely food that is made from whole, organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free ingredients that were produced within 50 miles of your home.
• Buy a vacation home. Even though you're too busy with your Kickin' Kareer to go to it.
• Rid your home of all plastic items (examples include plastic toys, plastic bags, plastic ziplocs, plastic utensils, hygiene products, and other things to which your mind can wander).
• Subscribe to a parenting philosophy. All the better if said philosophy starts with a capital letter.
• Get your children to do any three of the following:  be sleeping through the night by four weeks; be walking by 10 months; have 50 signs by age 1; be speaking in full sentences by 18 months; be fully potty-trained by age 2; be able to recite the ABCs and count to ten by 2.5 years; be able to add single digits by age 3.
• Attend all of your children's sports events, plays, class presentations, awards ceremonies, dance recitals, and any event in which they will appear before more than fifteen people.
• Secure a standing appointment with a psychologist. [Note: You may substitute regular appointments with any two of the following:  Life Coach, acupuncturist, Reiki Master, psychic, ayurvedic healer, masseuse, an illicit lover.]

The Sassy Socialite Badge

(Earn any four check marks)

• Dredge up at least 1000 friends on Facebook. [Note: This total may be reached by summing followers across all social media sites, provided that the same individual is not counted more than once.]
• Have accounts on at least six social media sites simultaneously.

  

• Maintain a blog. That has at least 2000 followers. And that gets at least twenty comments per post.
• Receive more than 200 emails a day, averaged across a one-month period, for at least three consecutive months.
• Average 40 "likes" on each Facebook status for six consecutive months.
• Eat out with a friend at least five times a week. [Note: If you have children, you may meet this requirement by meeting for a meal only three times a week.]
• Have not an hour of your day go by without receiving a text, every day, for five consecutive months. [Note: The hours you are sleeping do not count.]
• Tweet at least five times a day, every day, for one full year.
• Have so many friends that you stop being able to keep track of their last names. Start referring to them by location instead, such as, "Lucy from the book club" and "Ben from the gym."

Add some age restrictions to these badges - You must complete The Kickin' Kareer Badge by age 25! - and, voila, you have the quarterlife crisis.

The thing about checklists is that they do give us comfort; for instance, we actually behave more creatively when working within constraints. But at the same time, they put pressure on us. And homogenize us. And presume to imagine that we can know now what will be important to us then.

The way I see it, it's one thing to have goals. It's another to have requirements. Particularly requirements ordained by someone else.

And what if the pursuit of these checklists is more exciting - more like "living life" - than is achieving them? What then? What if you're the 80-year-old with an entire wardrobe of badge-emblazoned vests? (Well, then you'd be seriously fashion challenged, but overlooking that...) What if you get to ponder said wardrobe in your abundant free time because you pushed everyone away in your mad pursuit to earn them? Will that feel like a life well lived?

Maybe. Maybe it will. I'm not quite 80 yet - contrary to my Bates students' beliefs - so it's hard for me to say.

But I personally am sick of earning badges. I'll leave that to the little girls wearing brown and green. And while I'm sitting around not earning a check mark, I'll thank them for their pursuit of their Cookie CEO badge; their Thin Mints sure make my unbadged life a little sweeter.

So tell me, what checklist items would you like to add to our badges?

Overachiever. (Photo credit: Susan NYC)

What Do You Want to Know?

So I'm in the midst of planning a number of "career/life discussion" lunches for my Bates students in the upcoming weeks. This, to me, is like getting to talk about the many forms of Swiss chocolate. And then getting to eat a bunch, too. Seeing as how these are the sorts of things WE talk about in our class all the time, I'd love your feedback. Your thoughts will help me anticipate questions and prepare ways to seed the discussion (you know, for those awkward first five - or forty - minutes when everyone is afraid to speak and people nervously pick at their plates while trying to avoid direct eye contact with me; that part is so much fun).

Here are some prompts to get you started, which, knowing you guys, is totally unnecessary:

• When you were in college (if you've already made your great escape), what did you want to know about career, the job search, identity, figuring your way out of the black, murky darkness of confusion borne from 21 years with a clear path suddenly coming to a close? (sounds so optimistic when I put it like that, now doesn't it?)
• What would it have been helpful to hear? (i.e., what might have cured your insomnia?)
• What would you rather nobody said to you? (i.e., what will earn me a mental slap?)
• What are you still sorting out, even years after college has ended?

I'm open to any and all ideas. And, who knows, they just may inspire one of our upcoming lectures. Let the class discussion begin - GO!

Designed by Brian Pfohl

Self-Focus as a Selfless Act

We all know the common characterization of Millennials:  as self-centered, self-absorbed, narcissistic little twerps who don't bother to look up from social media long enough to gaze beyond their navels. Overlooking for a moment the gross generalizations being made here - and the evidence that such assumptions are untrue - I say:  if you guys do manage to be self-focused in your twenties, more power to you. And more power to society.

Seriously.

I think the most selfless thing you can do during your twenties is look inward to find your authentic self. You see, my favorite quotation in all the world, the one that encapsulates my life's philosophy, is this one:

I believe this quotation with all of my heart (and in a future post I'll lay out my science-based rationale for believing in it).

At the core of Mays' sentiment is the assertion that one must first find their "unique and distinctive thing" in order to then be able to fulfill it. His statement "born into this world" also implies that the "unique and distinctive thing" is WITHIN us, not without. It's as internal as our personality, our preference for pet puppies over pet tarantulas, our feeling that Snooki is more than a tad bit sketchy.  In other words, the only way to find the "unique and distinctive thing" is to look inward, navel gaze, and be a little, well, self-absorbed.

Not forever. No. We're not talking some Peter Pan-ish suspended childhood here. We're talking doing the work of self-reflection - the hard, uncomfortable work that, when done well, triggers an identity crisis - at a time when it is developmentally appropriate. And guess what? In our contemporary Industrialized society, the developmentally appropriate time is now:  in your twenties.

Was the world really better when the age of first marriage and first child were wildly lower? Did people (especially women...) in those generations have the time and space to find their "unique and distinctive thing"? I'd argue - as a mother who knows how one's sense of self can become, shall we say, removed from consciousness while parenting a young child - that much important work may have been left undone. Why else would Oprah have an entire network? There's a big Confusion & Crisis market in a generation that never got to stop and think.

If I personally hadn't had my twenties to figure out my All I Want To Be Statement before jumping into parenthood, my life may be taking a very different trajectory today. For instance, I wouldn't do the sort of advising and teaching I do now, taking Mays' quotation implicitly into consideration at every turn. Or, say, writing this blog. (Which, if you're real students who love snow days and instances of professorial illness, you may see as a decidedly hopeful possibility.)

I can see some of you raising your hands:  yes, good point, many people in contemporary society don't get the luxury to be self-focused in their twenties. Very true. But the way I see it, you can either lament this fact and feel guilty, or you can use this cognizance to make you grateful for the opportunity you have and give you the determination to make the most of it.

And this isn't some insignificant opportunity. Let's consider who stated my beloved quotation. Benjamin E. Mays, the once-President of Morehouse College, knew of what he spoke. Mays' most famous student certainly sorted out his "unique and distinctive thing" and how our nation - and our world - would've been different had this student left his work undone. You see, it was Mays who introduced Gandhi and other key philosophies to none other than Martin Luther King, Jr.

In an odd twist, Mays also happens to be an alumnus of the very college where I teach. I fell in love with his quotation while miserably floundering through grad school. Then I stumbled on my job at Bates College and, years later, put it together that Mays was a Bates alum. (Apparently I can be painfully slow-on-the-uptake:  I often walked past the residential building named after Mays on my way to my car. Uh...what was I saying about twenties navel-gazing?)

All in all, don't apologize for your natural tendencies to introspect, to "find yourself," to figure out what the hell you're doing with your life. This is your time to do it. Your family, your community, and perhaps even the entire world, will be better for it. Being self-focused now is the most selfless thing you can do for later.

Have you found your "unique and distinctive thing"? Or at least have some semblance of a clue about what it might be?

Why Your Friends Have it All Figured Out (And You Don't)

Because they're lying. To you. To their parents. To themselves. I say this for three reasons:

1. Having it "all figured out" is a fallacy, which we've discussed in the past. Distrust anyone who tells you otherwise. They're either actively hiding their reality from you, or they're passively hiding it from themselves (denial is a powerful, powerful thing). Lives are simply too dynamic to have everything perfectly arranged simultaneously. Ever.
2. It takes work to figure "much" of life out, and, these days, that work takes most of the twenties. (We can, and will, get into why it takes so long nowadays, but that's another day's lecture.)
3. Taking on others' desires and goals looks identical to having figured things out for yourself. You read it right:  you can LOOK like you have it all figured out - and truly BELIEVE you have it all figured out - by adopting the interior life of people around you (most often your parents). This is what psychologists call "identity foreclosure" (yes, we finally get to talk about foreclosure without getting depressed about the economy). This point is so juicy that we'll spend the rest of our lecture here.

Identity foreclosure is a sneaky little devil. It completely imitates true identity achievement; i.e., knowing who the heck you are. The only - and key - difference lies in the process to get there. To achieve a sense of identity, you have to go through a crisis. There's no simply no other route to finding yourself. (If you've been sleeping through class, review the class notes to brush up on crises).

To reach foreclosure, on the other hand, you don't go through any searching or struggling or weighing of options. You simply wake up and know what you're doing. Ta da!

The difference between identity achievement and foreclosure is a lot like that between, say, Halle Berry and Tori Spelling. Some people have to work to become actresses; some, well, don't.

I certainly don't blame anyone for being foreclosed. I myself was foreclosed until I was 29. And I didn't even realize it.

I'd been teaching for five years when my mom watched me sit in the faculty section at Bates' commencement. When I found her after the ceremony, she had tears in her eyes. "I always wanted to be a teacher," she said. "And now here you are! I am so, so proud."

I quit a year later.

It's not that I didn't want my mom to be proud (I'm not that mean). It's that, when my mom choked up from the fulfillment of her dream deferred, it all clicked:  why I felt discontent in my work, why I always vaguely felt like I was doing it for someone else, why I was resentful of a position for which so many would've traded their 1st edition Harry Potter book. How had I never put this together before? Simple:  because foreclosures are usually super subtle. 

Most of us are too independent and rebellious to follow our parents' blatant demands to "become a doctor" or "become a lawyer." But we hear our parents' off-hand remarks about how artists don't earn anything, we see the selective attention our parents bestow on certain people our age (cooing about our cousin the accountant while ignoring our cousin the history major), and we notice our parents' ever-so-subtle facial expressions and bodily tension when we bring up certain career paths. We're designed to read our parents' cues; it's what ensures our survival as babies and young children. As adults, though, tracking our parents' subtle signals is what keeps us trapped.

So what do we do?

Foreclosure is like coming across an  "I Was a Finalist in Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Challenge!" t-shirt at the thrift store (score!). When you wear it, the pats on the back and accolades for "your" accomplishment feel great at first. Over time, though, you start to feel unsettled, like something is off. Eventually you chuck the shirt; you simply can't wear it in good conscience any longer. Then you decide either:

• That you'd rather wear a shirt that is more personally meaningful to you (who they heck cares if you ate a ton of hot dogs?).
• OR, that you really would like to wear that hot dog shirt and you start training to earn your own.

I did the latter. Well, not literally! (Yuck.) After quitting Bates, I spent a year pursuing my dream of becoming a writer, which wasn't all it was cracked up to be. While I was wallowing in that realization, I simultaneously found myself missing my good ol' teaching job. When I started bringing photocopied hand-outs to mothering groups (I kid you not), I knew it was time to make a change. Fortunate for me, Bates asked me to come back. Ever since I have loved teaching, without any hint of ambivalence. Because now it's not for my mom. It's for me.

In short, I stepped back, had my crisis, and earned my career.

So if your friends seem to have it all figured out while you're thrashing about, struggling to find your future, don't envy them. Feel badly for them. They have a long, hard road ahead. And they don't even know it yet.

Your Assignment:

Read Hand-Me-Down Dreams:  How Families Influence Our Career Paths and How We Can Reclaim Them by Mary Jacobsen. Then scour your life for signs of foreclosure.

Your reading assignment (Amazon)n't even realize it.

I'm Awesome. Except Next To You. And You. And You... (aka Millennial Failure Pie)

Which of these scenarios makes you feel better about yourself:  You're at a bar with A) your uber-attractive, date-bait friend whose mere presence ignites a firestorm of sexual interest, or B) the friend who might as well be a beer-lacquered bar stool in the eyes of potential suitors? You are totally lying if you said A.

Being around people who do better than us - whether it's at scoring numbers on the social scene, answering questions correctly in orgo, or having futures laid out in organized little lists (ha, what a ruse) - can make us feel like total crap. Yet we continue to hang around these people. And, more importantly, to compare ourselves to them. (BTW:  this never ends. The 30s redux are uber-parents who present organic snacks in fabric pouches and sew their own cloth diapers. I tell you, after a toddler playdate I think my life is in such shambles that Lindsey Lohan's looks good in comparison.)

Why do we do this to ourselves?

Because we're hard-wired to. Social comparisons enable us to see ourselves and to understand the value of our abilities. This is necessary and can be helpful, especially when there aren't any objective criteria available. How else could we know if we're a worthwhile friend or a talented writer or a good singer ? (RE: the latter - you're not. Hasn't American Idol taught you anything?)

The thing is that doing too much social comparing, especially in one direction, can drive us to drink, as my dad likes to say. The comparisons that tell us how badly we're doing relative to someone else - "upward comparisons" - do have some pluses:  they can make us feel like we're part of an elite group (e.g., if I'm comparing myself to Beyonce, I must be doing something right) and they can make us want to try harder. But they can also make us feel downright cruddy.

Enter "downward comparisons." Here we look at someone with a worse circumstance and think heck yea, I'm doing pretty good!  Downward comparisons give our self-esteem and well-being a major boost.

Thing is, I feel like a total schmuck when I make downward comparisons. For instance, I'm in the children's library the other day and there's a young mom feeding her 1-year-old Gatorade out of a bottle and Doritos. Then she throws a puzzle (that my 2-year-old can't yet do) at her daughter's feet and proclaims, "She's so lazy. She doesn't even try." That would have been a perfect scenario for me to make a downward comparison or two. But how crappy would it be to look at that scenario and think, Wow, I am a good mom! Go me! Ugh.

You Millennials seem to have the same hesitancy. For all the talk about your generation's narcissism, I find you to be loathe to make downward comparisons. Oh sure, you'll cut someone down for a bad choice (Can you believe she's wearing those boots with those pants?). In a heartbeat. But you're also super-attuned to social and economic disparities and you don't seize on others' unfortunate circumstances as an opportunity to feel good about yourselves.

Which means that you're left making a ton of upward comparisons and very few downward comparisons. No wonder you guys feel like you're always failing.

Especially since failure hinges on social comparison.

Worse yet, while there is no absolute standard for failure (even the "absolutes" that do exist - like the average score on an IQ test - are actually constantly shifting), we continually talk about failure in absolute terms.  Common phrases heard in my office:  "I totally failed at that interview I went to." Or "I'm really failing in my stats class" (by which the student means getting a C). Or, most disheartening of all, "I'm failing at everything I try."

This is stupid talk. We don't go around saying things like, "That building is taller" or "That guy's pecs are bigger" or "Donald Trump's hair is scarier." They're meaningless statements. (Well maybe not that last one.) We were taught in the first grade to state comparisons when we use "-er" words.

The problem with failure, then, isn't that it's based on social comparisons, it's that we don't acknowledge those comparisons. We act like failure is a state of being that has no referent when in actuality it has "comparison" smeared all over it.

Put this all together, and you get Millennial Failure Pie (MFP):  You're making tons of upward comparisons, not balancing them with downward comparisons, and doing it all unconsciously. Disaster.

There are probably a million things we could do to try to address the MFP. But how about starting here:  changing the way we think and talk about failure.

1. Failed compared to who? For instance: "I failed at that interview." Meaningless. "I failed at that interview compared to the person who got the job." True. "I failed at that interview compared to the person who walked into the interview room hammered, vomited on his shoes, and then fainted." Actually, there you kicked some butt.
2. Is the comparison reasonable? For instance:  I failed the SAT compared to my cousin who got a perfect score. Twice. (Yes, really.) But who didn't?

If we thought and talked about failure in this way, it might unconsciously activate some of the downward comparisons that we need to make in order to stay psychologically healthy. And we wouldn't feel like callous, pompous pricks while we're doing it.

Then maybe we could hang out with our gorgeous BFF, our I-could-calculate-the-molecular-weight-of-plutonium-without-trying classmate, and our has-it-all-together friend and not feel as crappy as Taylor Swift's latest ex. We'll just feel like us. Which is more than enough.

Michelle Kwan was awesome. Just not on the Olympic podium. Is that failure? (Photo credit: cliff1066™)

Three Cheers for Failure!

What did you fail at today? No, really, I want an answer. Don’t cringe, don’t cower, don’t accuse me of being harsh. What did you fail at today?

Sara Blakely's dad asked her just this every single night. You know Blakely. She's "The One" - that mythical being sent to save us  from the specter of rumpled waistlines, saggy behinds, and had-many-too-many beer guts. While we could debate the value of her invention, there's no debating whether it worked out for her:  she was the youngest woman ever to make the Forbes billionaire list.

And all because her dad continually asked her if she failed.

“If there were no failures, Dad would be disappointed,” reports Kathy Caprino in her excellent Forbes article, 10 Lessons I Learned From Sara Blakely That You Won’t Hear in Business School.

“When I did fail at something, he'd high-five me," Blakely said.

I heard Blakely mention this in an interview long ago, back before she was a billionaire and was instead a lowly reality TV star. (Yes, I am coming clean and admitting that I watched Richard Branson's reality show Rebel Billionaire. On Fox. Which pretty much sums up my 27th year of life, in case you're wondering.)

As soon as I heard about her dad's strategy, I loved it. What better way to de-stigmatize the “f” word than to use it every single day, in a positive way? Instead of searching for “success” – which, let’s face it, is a slippery notion that should be self-defined but that we typically allow society to define for us – we could search for failure.

In fact, I love it so much that I’m planning to do this very thing with my daughter. When she’s old enough to hold a conversation that involves more than Dora, why we can't always be naked, and her vacillating desire to pee-pee on the potty, that is.

When I told my plan to the students in my upper-level developmental seminar, they looked horrified. Two of them audibly gasped. One shouted out, "That's awful!" And I'm not kidding here. You’d have thought I’d suggested feeding my kid a nightly dinner of raw sewage and Ice Cream Brrrgers (seriously, have you seen that thing? D.i.s.g.u.s.t.i.n.g.)

Failure is that powerful. It makes us react in visceral, unhinged ways.

Especially you guys, the victims of the vaunted Self-Esteem Movement (a crusade just begging to be lionized in an upcoming post).

But what if failure wasn’t so powerful? What if it was just a word, like ramen or coffee or sexit? (Wait, what?) Even better, what if it was a word worth reaching for, not avoiding? How would you live your life differently if that were the case?

“What I didn't realize at the time was that he was completely reframing my definition of failure at a young age," Blakely said about her dad, according to Inc.  "To me, failure means not trying; failure isn't the outcome. If I have to look at myself in the mirror and say, 'I didn't try that because I was scared,' that is failure.”

Of course you can’t turn back time and have your parents reframe “failure” for you (you also can't go back and get them to buy that drum kit you really wanted. Sorry.) But you can choose to reframe failure for yourself. If you want to.

That said, it's not an easy thing to do. Although I heard Blakely discuss her dad's approach eight years ago, fear of failure remains as chained to me as Rihanna to Chris Brown. But I like the idea of asking ourselves everyday if we failed, and celebrating said failures. Maybe we should hold each other accountable:  Yay, we’re a bunch of big, fat screw ups! We're messing up royally everyday! One could wonder how we gather the scraps of dignity to go on! Go us!

Unconvinced? I don’t blame you. Our negative connotations with “failure” are hard to shake. But we've got to do it, one way or the other, because, as we'll see in upcoming posts, failure is critical to development. So however you manage to ditch the fear, it's time to toss it to the curb. Like that Ice Cream Brrrger.

What’s your reaction to the question, “What did you fail at today?” Would you have liked it if your parents had asked you this?

I'll spare you my feminist diatribe about Spanx and stick to the point: Their founder gets "failure" right. (Photo credit: apalapala)

One Month Milestones

Enrollment in our "class" officially opened one month ago, on February 1. Since that time, our class has had 1000 views, 100 likes, and nearly 100 official students (and a whole slew of stalkers apparently, but whatever!). To say I'm overwhelmed is an understatement. I really thought I'd be lecturing to my Morton's toe for months on end, before giving up and drowning myself in Krispy Kremes. Thank you for saving me from that fate (although is it really "saving" when Krispy Kremes are involved?) More importantly than the site stats is the community we're building here. I rush to the computer every single morning, eager to see your comments and ideas. This virtual classroom has become like my real world classroom; I'm learning much more from all of you than I'm managing to dish out.

Most of my learning happens by reading your blogs. I'm obsessed with your blogs, so much so that I think my husband believes I have some online lover. Given my new-found blog reading obsession, it's only right that, on this one-month anniversary, I share what I've been reading by accepting THREE awards. (THREE!) Here goes:

THE LIEBSTER AWARD

Nominated by MJ at Unlost in Translation, where terrific, complicated, thought-provoking career/life grappling takes place.

To accept this award I have to answer 11 questions she posed for me:

1. Favorite Country: Switzerland. Clean, efficient, friendly, gorgeous. Can’t beat it.
2. Favorite color: The chestnut brown of my daughter’s eyes
3. Favorite non-work activity: Work is fun to me (I’ve finally gotten to that point in crafting my career!), but outside of “work,” I like to take day trips around the Maine coast with my family
4. Best movie: Oh boy, toughie. Probably “Frequency.” It got bad reviews and it’s sort of weird, but I love the idea of it.
5. Favorite movie to watch when down: “13 Going on 30.” Makes me smile every time (don’t judge me)
6. Favorite fiction: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
7. First thing I read every day: The time on the clock to see how long my toddler daughter has managed to sleep. Then email.
8. Different first name: Sheesh, I had a hard enough picking a name for my kid. Girls’ names are rough. I like Rebecca because it’s pretty neutral. But maybe I’d go with Adeline to have a little more flair.
9. Favorite TV show: The Amazing Race. Vicarious travel on a weekly basis.
10. Tattoos: None for me (life is painful enough!), but I appreciate them as body art and personal expression for others.
11. Favorite City: Quebec City

I also need to award the nomination to 11 blogs with less than 200 followers:

1. Life Here at Twentysomething http://lifehereattwentysomething.com/
2. The Science Bit http://thesciencebit.net/
3. INFJoe http://infjoe.wordpress.com/
4. Erasing the Stripes http://erasingthestripes.wordpress.com/
5. Beating a Quarterlife Crisis http://quarterlifecrisis.org/
6. Clues to Life http://cluestolife.wordpress.com/
7. Ally Denton http://allydenton.com/
8. Quarter Life Crisis http://kendalllarae.wordpress.com/
9. It’s a Man’s World http://emilysteezy.com/
10. My Dialogue http://myndfuq.wordpress.com/
11. KGalvino http://kgvalino.wordpress.com/

And then here are the 11 questions that I would like the bloggers above to answer. We'll stay topical!

1. What is your definition of "career"?
2. What did you want to be when you were in elementary school?
3. What major did you expect to have when you started college?
4. What major did you actually graduate with?
5. Why did you change, if you did?
6. If you didn't have to worry about any practicalities, what career would you pursue right now?
7. What one thing holds you back most from your dream career?
8. Whose career do you admire the most? Why?
9. What does work-life balance mean to you?
10. What could be done to better encourage/support career and identity development during college?
11. What's your current incarnation of your All I Want to Be statement?

THE VERY INSPIRING BLOGGER AWARD

Nominated by Raimy at Creative Guru, where creative soul-searching lives. She's not just a great blogger, but also the MOST active member of our class and the person who has most kept me wanting to write this whole month. Without her, class simply wouldn't be the same. I think we should make her our mascot. With a little outfit and everything.

Anywho, the rules for this award are:

1/ Display award logo on your blog; 2/ Link back to the person who nominated you; 3/ State 7 things about yourself; 4/ Nominate 15 Bloggers for this award; 5/ Notify those bloggers

Here are the seven things about me:

1. I'm allergic to chocolate. Have been since I was in kindergarten. People seem to always find this fact horrifying and incredible.
2. One of my favorite destinations is Hershey, PA. (See Fact #1 if  you are wondering why this fact is notable.)
3. I grew up on the Jersey Shore. No, it's not like on TV.
4. I won a contest in the fourth grade to adopt the favorite class gerbil, Cinnamon. It was one of the proudest days of my life. (Said gerbil lived to be FIVE years old. And survived being attacked and carried downstairs by our cat. Super gerbil.)
5. Geraldo Rivera - then an unknown - knocked on my mom's door and asked for an interview when she was pregnant with me. She told him to get lost because she thought he looked like a weirdo. That is the closest I've ever come to fame. (Lest this read as if he wanted to interview her BECAUSE she was pregnant with me, let me clarify that he wanted to ask her about a controversial house being built down the street.)
6. Bloopers shows crack me up. Way more than they should.
7. I am so sensitive to caffeine that simply drinking a caffeinated root beer at lunch time causes me to be awake all night. (Bummer that I craved root beer throughout my pregnancy and didn't realize that Barq's "bite" is caffeine....it was a long 9 months.)

And the 15 blogs I nominate for the award:

1. On Crafting a Life  http://oncraftingalife.com/
2. Good at Life http://darapoznar.com/
3. Life on a Branch http://lifeonabranch.wordpress.com/
4. Seize the Reins http://seizethereins.com/
5. Sweetly Indecisive http://sweetlyindecisive.wordpress.com/
6. No Debt Brunette http://nodebtbrunette.com/
7. Bipedalling http://bipedalling.com/
8. Habits of Thinking http://habitsofthinking.wordpress.com/
9. Things Career Related http://thingscareerrelated.com/
10. Three Sassy Ladies http://threesassyladies.wordpress.com/
11. Musings of a Recent College Graduate  http://awritespot.wordpress.com/
12. Sara Perring Coaching http://saraperring.wordpress.com/
13. A Path to Pursue http://apathtopursue.com/
14. Patrick Goonan http://patca63.wordpress.com/
15. Career Seeker’s Guide http://irishcareerman.wordpress.com/

The Versatile Blogger Award

Nominated by Ashsappley at Chaos and Words, whose perspective is fresh and confident, and who has become an amazing contributor to our class discussions. Looking forward to hearing even more from her!

For this award you're also supposed to say seven interesting things about myself but the thing is, I just did that for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award and we're scraping the bottom of the barrel. ("Interesting" and "college professor" do not mix.) So please see above if you want to find out anything vaguely interesting about me.

But now onto the good part - the nomination of 15 blogs for this award:

1. Stuff Grads Like http://stuffgradslike.com/
2. Counting Ducks http://countingducks.wordpress.com/
3. The Thriving Creative http://thethrivingcreative.com/
4. Eunoic http://eunoic.com/
5. Cute Potato http://cutepotato.com
6. 20somethings in 2013 http://twentiesblog.wordpress.com/
7. Gently Used Foliage http://likenewleaf.wordpress.com/
8. Jonathan Hockey http://jonathanhockey.wordpress.com/
9. Hearing With the Eye http://hearingwiththeeye.wordpress.com/
10. Figuring Out Fulfillment http://figuringoutfulfillment.wordpress.com/
11. Stressing Out College http://stressingoutcollege.wordpress.com/
12. Things + Flesh http://tonyvlahos.net/
13. Mindful Stew http://mindfulstew.wordpress.com/
14. Espirational http://espirational.com/
15. Minding the Workplace http://newworkplace.wordpress.com/

Thank you so much MJ, Raimy and Ashsappley! I am honored. Usually my students just give me dirty looks. This is so much nicer.

Listen up class - here's your homework assignment:  Visit the nominator's blogs first, then visit the nominated blogs. I love them all and I think you will too. And then come back here and get ready - we still have fear of failure yet to be covered. Yikes...

(And if you want a little more of a challenge, then I invite you to answer the 11 questions I posed for the Liebster nominees. I'd love to see your thoughts!)

Why You Aren't Reaching Your Goals

Because you stink. No, that's not why. But you tell yourself something along these lines every time a goal eludes you, right? I know I do.

It's like, I told myself I'd do XYZ, I wrote it down, I even told my friends and family I was going to do it, and now look at me, washed up, never going to achieve XYZ, or probably anything else I set out to do. I'm lazy and lack willpower and might as well give up and lay on the couch for the rest of the day. And then I go eat a pint of ice cream.

The thing is, we've been going after goals all wrong. And nobody bothered to tell us.

Based on sports psychology research, we've been told we should make our goals SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-Bound

We've also been told to write those goals down. (For a particularly hilarious example, check out the uber-detailed list midway down this post by Rebecca Cao). And to commit to the goals by telling others about them.

By that reasoning, I should be on my third published book by now. HA!

In actuality, what psychologists call "goal intentions" - such as, Update my LinkedIn profile. Get a job in a museum. Avoid going insane from the overwhelmingly lost feeling of leaving college. - don't work much better than having no goals at all.

This is especially true for goals that can be waylaid by emotions, including the overpowering fears we've been discussing lately. (Show me a goal that isn't susceptible to emotional influence and I'll show you a camera-shy Kardashian.) For instance, researchers told spider-fearful (but not phobic) people to set the goal "I will not get frightened" and then showed them spiders. These people did no better at staying calm than spider-fearful people who didn't set a goal at all.

The problem is that setting goal intentions doesn't help us know HOW to reach the goal.

In walk "implementation intentions," which researchers have been studying since the mid-90s (why didn't anyone tell me?!). Psychologist Schweiger Gallo and colleagues describe them like this:

Implementation intentions are if-then plans that spell out when, where, and how a set goal is to be put into action: “If situation x is encountered, then I will perform behavior y!”

And these little nuggets of power really work.

In the spider study I just mentioned, a group of spider-fearful participants were told to set the implementation intention "if I see a spider, then I will remain calm and relaxed!" And guess what? When they saw a spider, they remained as calm as people who had no fear of spiders. The fear was completely eliminated.

It turns out that implementation intentions work for a variety of goals, ranging from dieting to exercising to recycling to doing breast self-examinations to writing reports. Sure as heck we should be able to apply them to career goals!

Implementation intentions work for two reasons:

1. They draw our attention to a particular situation (the "if" part of the statement.)
2. They tell us what we should automatically do if we encounter that situation (the "then" part of the statement.)

And the beauty of implementation intentions is that they DO become automatic. Very quickly. They require little cognitive effort on our parts, psychologists find. Goal intentions, on the other hand, require us to THINK about them to get them to work. That's why I used to try taping my goals to my bathroom mirror. And then, you know, ignored them after a couple of days.

Most importantly, implementation intentions work even when things are fighting against our goals, including external circumstances (such as distracting images being shown while we're taking a test) and internal states (such as fatigue and hunger). And there's no doubt that we have plenty of those!

So let's try setting some implementation intentions related to the Twentysomething Career Search:

• If I sit down to job search and feel like I'd rather be prying my toenails off, then I'll tell myself that I just need to send out ten resumes each day and I will get 'er done.
• If I try to work on my "All I Want To Be" Statement and feel so overwhelmed that I seriously contemplate running off to become one of Hef's concubines (yes, even if you're a guy), then I'll tell myself this is only a first draft that I can change anytime and I'll write something down.
• If I start to tell my parents that I don't actually want to follow the career path they'd hoped for me and I fear pangs of fear so intense I think we might need to call 911, then I will tell myself to stay calm and to breathe and to remember that my parents love me (or so I hope) and I'll tell them anyway.
• If I look at my bank statement and start to call myself all sorts of nasty names because the balance is so low, then I will remind myself that I can search for a stop-gap job to help me through this rough time and that this will not last forever and I'll keep searching for a fulfilling career. (And then I'll go find a loan. Right quick.)

So bottomline, if you enjoy avoiding a fulfilling career, by all means, keep setting your goals. Type those bad boys up, hang 'em high, announce them for all to hear!

But if you're ready to actually start meeting your goals, it's time to get down with some if-then implementation intentions.

What's the first implementation intention you're going to set for yourself? (It doesn't have to be career related; we still have many psychological blocks to work through before we're fully there...!)

Source:

Schweiger Gallo, I., Keil, A., McCulloch, K. C., Rockstroh, B., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2009). Strategic automation of emotion regulation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 11-31.

See if doing this actually helps you. As if. (Photo credit: lululemon athletica)

Oh, Grow Up! (Emotionally, That Is)

"I guess I'll be able to handle it when I'm a senior," one of my freshman students said, talking about the thesis she'd have to complete before graduating. "But for now it totally freaks me out." This student held a reasonable assumption that we all cling to:  we'll outgrow our fears.

Hate to break it to you, but we do not outgrow our fears. (Just ask my grandma, who still hates the dark.) Fears themselves don't "go away" as we get older. What changes is our ability to manage those fears, and other strong emotions. The 20s are a key time for that development.

OK, we're going to get into brain science so get ready. (Do not fall asleep on me, people!)

During puberty, the area of the brain that creates emotions - the limbic system, including the amygdala - grows rapidly. This causes emotion overload, with strong feelings popping out left and right. I think of it as a field of fireworks that has accidentally caught fire, causing the fireworks to shoot off randomly and in all directions.

That's why your feelings were so intense during adolescence, and why they changed so frequently -  because your brain was churning out emotions the way the Duggars churn out kids.

If there were some way to control the surges of emotions - if we could, say, put a protective barrier over the blazing fireworks - then it wouldn't be too bad. And eventually, as we get older, we are able to do just this. But not for a while.

The part of the brain that controls emotions - the prefrontal cortex - is still developing into at least the mid-20s. In the early and mid-20s, nerve cells that we don't use die off. This makes our prefrontal cortex more efficient at controlling emotions. In addition, insulation (myelin) is accumulating around the nerve cells in that area of the brain, making the neural impulses faster. This insulation building may continue into the 30s.

In other words, we're still a bit unhinged in our 20s.

“The prefrontal part is the part that allows you to control your impulses, come up with a long-range strategy, answer the question ‘What am I going to do with my life?’" said the lead researcher, Jay Giedd, in the New York Times article What Is It About 20-Somethings. “That weighing of the future keeps changing into the 20s and 30s.”

So what's this mean for you? Well, you're not quite your adolescent self any more (thank goodness). But it also means that you do have a lot of "growing up" left to do.

Not "growing up" in the sense of getting rid of fear and the other emotions that block us - an emotionless life would be awful - but in the sense of handling them. That's what psychologists call emotion regulation, and it's a process we begin in the toddler years. (Not so successfully, I might add, as the frazzled mother of a 2-year-old.)

So, as a twentysomething, what can you do?

1. Accept that your emotions are going to overpower you sometimes (often?!). Especially so-called negative emotions, like being afraid and feeling hurt. You literally can't help it. Your brain isn't equipped to override these emotions efficiently yet. When you feel afraid or sad or angry, just say to yourself "Oh sheesh, there goes my out-of-control amygdala again." You can even say it out loud. But only if you're looking to shed some friends.
2. Use this knowledge to step back and let the emotion flow past you, whenever you can. You now know that emotional control isn't yet your strong suit, developmentally speaking. So choose to not let the emotions get the best of you. Emotions last only as long as we allow them to last. In her book My Stroke of Insight, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor writes "there are certain limbic system (emotional) programs that can be triggered automatically, it takes less than 90 seconds for one of these programs to be triggered, surge through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our blood stream." If we keep thinking about whatever triggered the emotion - like fear that we'll let our parents down if we choose to pursue art instead of law - then our bodies continue to feel a flood of chemicals that cause the emotion. If we choose to think differently, the emotion passes. That's where #3 comes in.
3. Come up with strategies to deal with fear and other strong emotions. Not thinking about fear and anger and sadness sounds great, but how do you do it? Strategically, that's how. You can override your brain's immaturity, if you have a plan in place. Since I've already bludgeoned you with neuroscience today, though, I'm going to end class here. In our next lecture this is where we'll pick up - with strategies that help us regulate emotions, especially that naughtiest one of all:  fear.

In the meantime,  your homework is to write about how your emotions have changed since your teen years. Do they feel different now, or do you just manage them differently?

Brain structures involved in dealing with fear and other strong emotions. The amygdala is a key part of the limbic system. If you're still reading, you might note that this is the most serious caption I've written on this blog. Go me! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Fear and Courage

Fear. Need I Say More?

I'm afraid of writing about fear. There, I said it. I've been stalling - see the Why Interviews Rock post for proof - because the topic of fear is so huge, so central, so debilitatingly fundamental to career avoidance.

And because I'm no expert in handling fear. By any stretch.

But I am an expert in having fear.

I've been plagued and paralyzed by fears and anxieties ever since I can remember. I was that kid who ate the exact same food for every meal, laid in bed at night wondering if my parents were still alive, and avoided costumed characters like the plague (fine, they still freak me out, but I won't get into my psychological profiling of people who take jobs as characters here). I always thought something was wrong with me. Especially when I reached my late twenties and fears still hounded me. By that point I held adult-type fears - fears of failure, of success, of making the wrong choices, of social censure, of disappointment, of "forever" - but still, shouldn't I have been past fear by then?

It wasn't until my late twenties when I sat down with the book The Courage to Write:  How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes that I accepted that having fear is normal - it's even healthy and beneficial - but obsessing over getting rid of fear is not.

He writes:

We often use the terms fearless and courageous as if they were synonyms. In fact they're closer to antonyms. Mark Twain defined courage as "resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear." General Omar Bradley called it "the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death." In The Courage to Create, Rollo May pointed out that existential philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre all concurred that courage didn't mean the absence of despair; rather it meant "the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."

Apparently this is a lesson I've had to learn repeatedly. I jot the date whenever I read a book; the inner cover of The Courage to Write reads like Heidi Montag's plastic surgery log, exhibiting the need for frequent hits:

• "Read 5/2005 (age 27)"
• "Re-read 9/07 during a crisis of courage (age 29)"
• "Re-read 6/09 during yet another (every 2 years?!) (age 31)"

Clearly fear is a common denominator in my life. [A friend once remarked that I have more fears than just about anyone she knows, yet have done more in my life than just about anyone she knows. (RE: the latter, apparently she doesn't know many people.)]

I have faced numerous crises of courage, just like I see many of you grappling with on your blogs. Whoever's in their twenties and claims otherwise, they're lying.

When I picked up and left an all-expenses-paid PhD program in which I was earning an A+? Scared out of my mind. When I moved 400 miles away from all of my friends and family? Frightened beyond belief. When I chose to go part-time while teaching at Bates College, then chose to take a year off to write, then chose to turn down a class just a month ago, even though I need the money? Anxious, terrified, petrified.

Yet I did all of those things. And those are just the career-ish decisions of my life.

I do not, however, believe in the stock notion of "facing your fears." Courage is a muscle that takes loads of mental and physical energy to operate. Why waste that muscle on "facing your fears" as a matter of course? I believe instead in walking past the fears that get in the way of the life I want to lead. The other fears, the ones that are just floating out there not doing me any harm, those don't need to be faced, maybe ever. I mean, I find the Octomom to be scary in many respects, but I'm not about to hang posters of her around my house to get over it.

The way I handle important fears - like the crippling fears that make me want to run to a "secure" and "stable" job every, oh, two months or so - is to simply acknowledge them. And then move on as if they weren't there. Taking Zantac as I go.

And so as we embark on our "Fear Series" here in Career Avoidance 101, starting first with general thoughts on fear and then proceeding to the specific fears that paralyze our career prospects, I'll do the same thing:

I'm scared as hell of writing about fear because I might bungle the topic, not have anything useful to say, and make you all withdraw from the class in mass hordes in the process.

And yet, onward we march. Next lesson:  What does it really mean to "outgrow your fears"? (I promise less professorial navel-gazing in that installment.)

But first, it's time for some class participation (yes, I am grading this):  How do you handle fear?

I suppose that's one way to deal with fear. (Photo credit: Frau Shizzle)

Why Interviews Rock

An anxious senior recently needed my infamous interview pep talk. I offer this up gleefully because I happen to love interviews. I’d go on an interview every day if I could (especially if I didn’t need the resulting job …). Here’s why:

1. You get to talk about yourself non-stop for a half an hour or more. Do you realize how rare this is? Try doing it with a friend and see how quickly they stop returning your texts. You can only get away with non-reciprocal self-talk with therapists and interviewers. You might even say that interviews = free therapy. Gorge on it, people!
2. You have an excuse to buy a snazzy new outfit. Or at the very least you get to pull a dapper outfit out of the back of your closet and iron it. Alright, that doesn’t sound too exciting. But in any event, you get to pick out

   

   attire you rarely if ever wear, which you should do, by the way, at least, say, two hours before the interview. Or else you could end up in a mall bathroom, ripping off tags and squeezing yourself into ill-fitting clothes while a cleaning lady asks you through the stall door if you’re all right. Not that that’s happened to me. And moving on.

3. You have the opportunity to give your best Office Space impression. Take your pick of lines. My fave:  when the interviewer asks you what you did at a previous job, pull a Tom Smykowski. “Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?”
4. You don’t ever have to see these people again if you don’t want to. This reason alone makes interviews the bomb. If the interviewer(s) weird you out – they don’t look you in the eye; or they ask you strange personal questions like how much time a day, on average, you spend in the bathroom; or they confess their plot to steal all of the stamps from a local post office – you get to walk out of there and never go back. Period.
5. If you screw up, you never have to see these people again. The flipside of Reason #4:  the interviewers might decide that you weird them out. This might seem like a real downer, especially if you're losing out on your dream position, but take heart – at least you don’t have to face the people you screwed up in front of ever again. Unlike, say, facing your parents, who you’ve done all sorts of wacko things in front of (try to deny it, but you were a toddler once.)
6. You can use ridiculous fifty-cent words and no one will laugh at you. In fact, they’ll not only not laugh, they’ll nod thoughtfully and scribble little notes. Just try getting that reaction from your friends.
7. For a phone interview, you get to gum on a pencil! It's true: one way to enunciate during phone interviews is to talk with a pencil in your mouth for about ten minutes in advance. You’ll look and sound like a real doofus, but when else since teething have you had the excuse to chew on things? Just be sure to take the pencil out before the phone rings. Not that I’ve done that, either…
8. You can refer to your past positions using inflated, self-important language. For instance, you were a Courtesy Clerk, not the bagging boy at the local supermarket. Or an Ice Cream Artist, not a scooper of ice cream that caked the inner lengths of your arms such that you could never quite scrub the veneer off and that gave you a strange muscle where no muscle should grow.
9. You have a socially acceptable reason to throw snide looks at someone. That tool sitting in the lobby who’s up next for the interview? Yup, that’s the guy to give the snide look to. He’ll return it in kind. You’ll both know it’s nothing personal. When else is this kind of thing OK? (Note:  Just make sure the interviewer isn’t still watching. Again, not spoken from experience…)
10. You get to talk about yourself non-stop for a half hour or more. This reason is simply too good to go on the list only once. Eat it up. Talk about yourself ad nauseum. Just be sure to do so in two to three minutes chunks. Or else the interviewers will either fall asleep or kick your butt out of there. Which, I suppose, may be possible if you take any of my advice above.

So now you know why I usually leave the nit-gritty job search stuff to the career coaching pros. But I do hope this Top Ten list reminds you to stay loose and relaxed when you’re about to have an interview. The more tense you are, the less likely it is to work out. And by “work out” I don’t necessarily mean “get the job.” I mean, get the job that suits you. Because believe me (this time from experience!), you don’t want to be somewhere where they fell in love with a fake version of you. The real you will hate you for it. So chill, enjoy and just be you. And then let the outcome fall where it may.

Next time, back to the big picture career avoidance hoopla. We’ll be diving into the deep-end, students:  fears, in all their stripes and colors. Come prepared.

See Reason #3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Ten Years of Living (Part of) My Dream

Remember how you used to get your teacher off track by asking her personal questions so that she'd cover no testable material? Well today's that day. On Beating a Quarterlife Crisis, Kristi Eaton recently asked about how we figure out where to live. This got me thinking about when I was 24 and completely lost. In other words, feeling like many of you do. And to prove that I work hard not to dole out ideas and advice that I don't struggle to follow myself (despite my quip in my profile, I abhor when people do this), here's a portion of my twentysomething tale. We shall call it The Residential Portion.

At 24 I was enrolled in a PhD program I hated, about to earn a non-terminal master's degree (AKA:  A Degree Worth Nothing in the Real World), and had no prospects for life after dropping out of grad school. But I knew - knew intensely - that I had to quit (which is a rich topic for another post; quitting is an awesome skill to have).

The only stable part of my life was my husband, whom I'd met in high school and had hung onto during the tumultuous "seeing other people" college years before marrying "young" at 22. (By that point, we'd already been together for seven years so we didn't feel young.)

But my career - along with my purpose, my dreams, my goals, my entire existence for being - was a total wash. I'd done what you all are fearing so hard:  I'd gone down the "wrong" path.

Washed up at 24. <tsk, tsk, tsk>

So I did what any reasonable twentysomething would do:  I moved to Maine.

<screech>

Wait. Maine? Don't you mean New York City or Los Angeles or some other glamorous hot spot? Certainly you don't mean Maine. What twentysomething wants to live in Maine?

Well, not many, that's true; Maine suffers from an outflux of young people, called the savory term "brain drain" (I always picture chunky blood going down a sink when I hear that...yuck). But I'd dreamed of living in Maine since I was in 7th grade. It was my one true thing. Well, other than always wanting to be a writer, but that was so not happening. I mean, who takes a creative path with no guarantee of income and a certainty of rejection? No one reasonable, especially not someone with the logical mind that gets you enrolled in a social science doctoral program.

Since high school, my husband and I had said we'd move to Maine when we retired. There we were, though, just two years into marriage, our lives in complete disarray - me having panic attacks from the misery of grad school; him working for Enterprise Rent-A-Car after failing one of the standardized teaching exams in New York (there's the twentysomething dream: washing cars while wearing a suit & tie. Woo hoo!) - and so we looked at each other and said, "Why not now?"

You know, because 25 is the new 65. Or something like that.

I quit my graduate program, the hubby arranged for a transfer with Enterprise, and on June 1, 2003 we moved just outside Portland, Maine.

I had no job. I had no prospects. But I was in Maine! My dream state!

And why was it my dream from the tender age of 12? Oh, you know, because of reading. I'll let your mind fill in the blank with some literary classic set in the state (perhaps some of Longfellow's poetry? Or The Country of the Pointed Firs? Or even The Beans of Egypt, Maine?) Alright, alright, it was a teen horror trilogy The Fire, The Storm and Something I Forget. Oh yeah, high class reading!

All I know is that when I read about the rocky coasts, the foggy days, the lobster boats, I felt in my core I belong there. It's an inexplicable feeling, but I am a firm believer that we all hold this about at least one thing - whether it be what we want to do for fun, or for career, or where to live, or what type of people we want to be around. You can try to analyze it and figure out why you feel it but you'll never figure it out. And you should not; that would be to disembowel the unicorn.

Such is my draw to Maine. In my decade here, the dream of Maine has given way to reality - some of it harsh, like ice dams on the roof that leak into your home and make your ceilings dangle like utters - which was my greatest fear when moving here:  that I'd be sorely disappointed and no longer have a comforting vision to cling to during hard times.

Here's what I discovered, though:  It's much more painful to keep yourself from something you want, out of fear that it might not work out, than to live with the realities you encounter when you let yourself see all of the bumps and warts and beautiful ugliness of that thing.

All in all, it could be said that my life has, so far, unfolded completely differently than I'd expected.

As a child - a progressive modern girl who soaked up Free to Be You and Me - I thought I would secure my career, then find a man, then have kids, eventually retire, then move to Maine, then pursue the hobby of writing.

In actuality, I found a man, moved to Maine, pursued writing, had a kid. And eventually, I suppose, there'll be retirement, but I don't much care about that since I'm already writing in Maine.

This is how a life is constructed:  one bit at a time, not necessarily in the order you planned. When everything is falling apart, you can choose to identify and develop the one thing that you know is true and real and swells from somewhere deep within you and then let the other pieces come in their due time. Or you can cling to your plan. And be miserable.

By taking the "wrong" path in my life, I found the right one. If I'd done career "right" the first go round, I'd still be living somewhere else, doing something else, longing for Maine, longing to write, longing to be.

Instead I am being. And loving it.

I wish you as much. And more.

And now back to the material...

The Way Life Should Be. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Critical Thinking is Bad for Your Health (or at least your happiness)

I'm about to go on record as a hypocrite. In the classes I teach at Bates - especially my upper-level seminars - I stress the importance of critical thinking skills. A liberal arts education is about learning to think, write and speak critically and creatively, I always say, my chest puffed up professorily. I even put critical thinking at the top of many of my syllabi. But here goes:  Critical thinking skills will be your undoing. Or, in the context of our class, they'll be your fast path to an A. (I suppose they should top our syllabus, too...) I began thinking about this when reading sweetlyindecisive's recent post What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? She did a nice job identifying and laying out her five dream careers. What struck me, though, was how she immediately justified why each path wouldn't work for her. I recognized myself in her post. Here's a younger version of me:

• I'd love to be a television news anchorperson. But I'm not competitive enough to cut it, and I hate cities, where they're based.
• I'd love to be a fashion designer. But I can't sew worth beans and I don't follow fashion trends closely enough.
• I'd love to be a cow farmer in the Swiss Alps. But heights freak me out and cows scare me. (Alright, some justifications make sense.)

Why are we so quick to shoot down our dreams? Why do we naturally follow up our desires with our "and here's why I can't/won't/will never do it"? It's our critical thinking skills, I tell you. They're the culprit. So hone up those bad boys up, committed Career Avoiders. The finer your critical thinking skills are, the more readily you can train them on yourself. If you want to get really good, go to grad school. Particularly a PhD program. First you'll learn how to tear apart other people's research and writing, bloody shred by bloody shred. Then you'll start tearing your own work apart. Then you'll start tearing your self apart. Before you know it, you'll be criticizing your actions before you even make them. Me at the dining hall (circa 2002):  What was I thinking, reaching out to get a hamburger? That's an awful choice, both for my health and for the well-being of animals the world over. I'll get a salad instead. But wait, is that lettuce locally grown? Or was it shipped from across the country - or worse, from another country - unleashing barrels of used oil in its wake? I think I'll just sit down and eat my nails instead. It's fun. My grad school classmates and I were very happy people. (So what if more than one of us was flagged as "hypochondriac" at the Health Center?) We do the same critical thinking with our dream careers. We shoot them down before we've even begun to make progress toward them. Yes, decision making requires us to discard options so that we can zero in on one choice. But what if we discount ALL of our options? Or worse still, what if we discount them for questionable reasons? Like with my childhood fantasy careers above, I could've learned to sew or to be more assertive; I could've started following fashion trends; I could've realized that many cities aren't big and bad like the New York City in my hometown's backyard. (There is, alas, absolutely no way of saving the cow farmer dream.) I see my students doing this all the time - discarding all of their options, and largely for reasons that are well within their control. There's a term for this:  analysis paralysis. The venerated scholarly source Wikipedia defines analysis paralysis as "over-analyzing (or over-thinking) a situation, or citing sources, so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome." It's highly related to the paradox of choice, which we explored in a previous class. Case in point:  I've been planning this very blog for five years. FIVE years. Talk about paralysis. Entire cities have been planned, built and occupied in less time. But my laser-sharp Ivy League critical thinking skills generated every conceivable reason for why I shouldn't start a career blog for twentysomethings. (I'd reconstruct those criticisms for you here but I'm afraid it would then take me another five years to post again.)

If you're going to dream, then dream. Lose track of reality. Imagine possibilities, not limitations. Conjure what's possible, not probable. After all, is there a little thought cloud that appears in the middle of your nighttime dreams that says "That doesn't make sense! That could never happen!" When I was recently married to Daniel Craig, kissing my real-life husband, and flirting with Dan Stevens all while boldly navigating a raft down a raging torrent that led to a boiling sea of chocolate sauce, nobody said, "that is ridiculous!" (Least of all me; it was hella exciting.) Let your dreams grow - without interference from your meddling critical thinking skills - because I'll tell you, life will throw plenty of "reality" into your path soon enough. The only way you'll make it to some reasonable approximation of your dream career is if you've let that dream grow super-sized and robust enough to survive the chipping away life will inevitably do. It's like hurling a snowball at a friend - if you start with a teeny, tiny, soft, dopey snowball, the friction with the air will make it disappear long before it reaches its target. But if you start with a large, tough, herculean snowball, it won't only reach your friend, it just may knock him out. (Score!) Unless, of course, you're actually here to learn how to avoid a fulfilling career. In which case, enroll in one my real-world classes. I'll give you plenty of training in the critical thinking skills that'll screw you up royally. So tell me, what's your dream? (No reality intrusions allowed!)

I don't know what the heck this is. But it looks as otherwordly as a dream to me. (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

How to Avoid Work

There really isn't anything new under the sun. Long before "Career Avoidance 101" became a class - 64 years before, in fact - there was the book How to Avoid Work by William J. Reilly. The site Brain Pickings does a great job discussing Reilly's 1949 book; hop on over there and give the article a read.

Here's my favorite quotation from How to Avoid Work:

"There is only one way in this world to achieve true happiness, and that is to express yourself with all your skill and enthusiasm in a career that appeals to you more than any other. In such a career, you feel a sense of purpose, a sense of achievement. You feel you are making a contribution. It is not work."

So tell me, what are YOU doing to avoid work? And - my puritanical roots force me to ask - is that actually a worthwhile goal? Or is work - true, hard, not-making-you-so-happy work - valuable?

The End of Confusion is An Illusion

I used to dream of the day I'd have it "all figured out." Nowadays I hear my students constantly speak of this magical land. "I can't wait to have it all figured out," they say. Or "When I have it all figured out, I'll..." Or "My friends have it all figured out."

All Figured Out is a beautiful oasis where you can recline on handwoven hammocks while warm, salty breezes tickle your hair; attractive masseuses knead your legs and feet; and decadent, sweet drinks ooze through every crevice of your mouth.

Life is good in All Figured Out. It's where we all aim to one day land. It's what we're all working for. It's the photo negative of our current complicated and confused lives, its very presence making us discontent with the here and now.

Thing is, it doesn't exist.

Oh wait, should I not be telling you this?

OK, then I WON'T tell you that at this very moment, squarely in my mid-thirties, I'm stressing over:

a) Which town to move to when we eventually get the guts to sell our house:  the dream town near the ocean that has intense schools and that we can't afford, or the practical inland town with solid schools that we can't really afford, either.

b) Whether to try to have another child. And how to afford said child's care and food and sundry needs, if he or she were to arrive.

c) How much time and energy to direct toward my teaching versus my paid freelance writing versus my unpaid writing (read: this blog). And how shifting said energy would affect heretofore specified Questions a and b.

Sound like I live in All Figured Out?

Yet if my twentysomething self had encountered me in the classroom - wow, that's a weird picture, to imagine me teaching me...I think I would've disliked myself from both directions! - I would've thought differently. "My prof has her career, she has her family, she has her home. She has it All Figured Out," I would've said wistfully to my friends. In fact, I did say that very thing about my Psych 101 prof. Many times. Until I got to know her when I was a senior. And I stopped saying it.

Sure, compared to having EVERYTHING up in the air the way it is in your twenties, my life is pretty settled. But it's not All Figured Out. And, with any luck, it never will be.

Yeats said, "Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing."

Ah, yes, growth. How else to account for the fact that people sell their homes about 12 years after buying them, have seven careers in a lifetime, and end 40-50% of their marriages? We're not a static species. As much as we dream of All Figured Out, we don't actually want to get there.

Case in point:  how often do you do nothing? You want to do it a lot, right? You tell your friends all the time that you can't wait to "do nothing," don't you?

But what does "do nothing" consist of for you? Probably watching Netflix or YouTube or Hulu, hanging out on social media, chilling to some music. I sincerely doubt that "doing nothing" means literally "doing nothing." As in, sitting in a darkened room with only your thoughts to keep your company.

When a psych researcher paid people to do just that back in the 1950s (paid them double what they normally earned, no less!), most of the participants dropped out within a day. They couldn't take the boredom. Those who stayed became disoriented,

restless, and even complained of nausea (Bexton et al., 1954).

This is because we have stimulus motives, a basic need for novel stimulation. And we're not alone; other animals show signs of having stimulus motives, too.

In other words, when life gets too routine, we shake things up. It's a need, like eating or sleeping or having sex (you're not giggling, are you?!).

So have I now sufficiently freaked you out?

You are never going to make it to All Figured Out. You may vacation there once in a while. There may be a run of hours or day or weeks when you hang out on those handwoven hammocks. But mark my words, you'll want out. Badly.

Which you can either take as scary as hell - what they heck am I working toward then?!?!?! - or as a relief. Because if no one lives in All Figured Out, you can stop striving to be there and you can just simply be. As in, where you are right now. In the Land of Confusion.

If nothing else, you've got company there. Plenty of it.

This just might be All Figured Out (Photo credit: Edgar Barany)

Time, Time Everywhere, and Not a Second to Use

“I’m too busy” may be the most ubiquitous excuse in existence. Even if you’re not so arrogant and self-important to say such a thing, chances are you’ve appealed to its cousins “I’m not sure if I can,” “I’ll see if it works out,” and plain old “If I have the time.” Why The "I'm Too Busy Excuse" Works So Well

Nowhere does the “I’m too busy” excuse get more play than in Career Avoidance. It’s an effective excuse for two reasons:

1. Because you truly believe it. There really is no time to spare in your life. I bought Do What You Are early in my college career. That fat book moved from dorm room to dorm room to grad school apartment to adult apartment without being cracked more than an inch. It’s not that I didn’t want to read its personality-based career recipes, it’s that I simply didn’t have the time to do it. Alas, what’s a girl to do? Our recent class poll backs this up. 36% of you are too busy working dead-end jobs to focus on the Career Search. Burgers need to be flipped, people. Shirts have to be folded. Cubicles need to be occupied. There’s no time for this “big thinking” stuff.
2. It's hard for others to combat. Even if you manage to have some time in your day, who actually knows it? Does anyone follow you every second of every day, keeping tabs on your every move? (If you answered yes, either call the cops on that stalker or find your mom a hobby. Stat.) In other words, “I’m too busy” is a convincing, bullet-proof excuse to use against intrusive parents; freaky, overinvolved uncles; and way-too-eager professors (not that I know any of the latter...).

Cling fast to the “I’m too busy” excuse, valiant Career Avoiders. Cling fast. It’s one of the goodies.

Just hope you don’t run into someone – some evil, sinister someone – who tries to wrench the “I’m Too Busy” excuse away from you by, say, making the following claims:

Your Leisure Activities Are Telling

In our poll, 36% of you said you turn to YouTube to procrastinate the Career Search. Little did you know that this activity can actually shed light on your future career, if you let it.

The old advice career advice said to figure out your interests, pay attention to what section of a library or bookstore you’re drawn to. Thing is, no one goes there anymore (well, except old people; at the bookstore last week the gray-haired lady sitting next to me was snoring her way through Forever, Erma. Please refrain from commenting on what my bookstore presence - and the instant recognition of her book's cover - mean for my age.)

Instead of going to the bookstore, these days we go online. So mount a virtual camera on your shoulder and keep tabs on what you’re doing. What do you most like to watch on YouTube? What do you most desire to read on blogs? What books and activities fill your Kindle or iPad? It doesn’t take “time,” per se, to keep track of this. It just takes a shifting of attention.

You might argue that much of what you do is solely for “entertainment.” True, true. But I, for instance, don’t think a Truman documentary is entertaining in the least. My husband, on the other hand, would strongly beg to differ. In fact, he has begged to differ for the past three nights. (I used the opportunity to catch up on my sleep...) Is it any wonder he ended up becoming a social studies teacher? Albeit not until he was in his thirties...

Your Leisure Activities Can Actually Help You

If you’re keeping track of the poll results so far, you know there are still some class members unaccounted for. Pop quiz:  what percentage is missing? Oh wait, this isn’t a math class. Thankfully. You’d be screwed if you had me teaching you that.

27% of you procrastinate by Facebook stalking, a time-honored tradition indeed. You probably think you’re wasting time on Facebook, don’t you? What if I told you that you may actually be getting closer to your dream career and happiness by being on there? Seriously.

Research shows that we're more our “true selves” when we’re interacting on social media than when we’re talking with people face to face. In other words, we put on less of a show than in the real world. Studies also show that the more we get in touch with our true selves on a regular basis, the more meaningful our lives feel (which, as we’ve discussed, is one of the two lasting forms of happiness).

In addition, we're more satisfied at work when we're being true to ourselves.

That said, if you are putting on a show on Facebook or Twitter or Site-Too-Hip-For-Thirtysomethings-To-Know-About, the activity isn’t helping you. The pure act of stalking isn’t, either; you have to be actively contributing and getting in touch with you - not Lena Dunham or Robert Pattinson's abs or your grade school crush - in order to reap the benefits.

You Don’t Need “Time” to Solve Problems

In essence, the Career Search is one big problem to solve. You have to take all the disparate, often conflicting information about your interests and your true self – info gleaned from the previous activities – and figure out what it means for a career.

In the last post I briefly mentioned that incubation can be key to problem solving. If you step back from a problem rather than focus on it, you're more likely to reach a solution. Sleeping may be especially helpful (I am indeed giving you an excuse to lay around more).

For this approach to work, you have to seed the unconscious with the problem you want to solve (such as – shameless plug ahead - by reading Career Avoidance 101’s daily Facebook posts or Tweets). This takes little to no time. You do need the passage of time to get to your "flash of insight," but you don’t need chunks of time.

To incubate, Einstein turned to music, developmental psychologist Piaget walked, and physicist Helmholz went on a "slow ascent of wooded hills on a sunny day" (poetic much?). You go on YouTube and Facebook stalk and sit at your dead end job. In other words, you can tell your parents that you're simply "Being like Einstein."

The Decision-Making Process Isn’t As Strategic As You Think

After you’ve determined your interests, gotten in touch with you and used those pieces to solve the career problem, you’ll probably be left with a general, resonating vision for your life (some might call it an, I don’t know, “All I Want to Be” statement…). But how do you translate that into a specific career?

Here’s where you engage your decision-making skills. You need to decide between the various career options that would satisfactorily meet your life goal. Sounds time-consuming, doesn’t it? Actually, it doesn’t have to be, and it's perhaps even better when it’s not.

We’re taught that the best way to make decisions involves reason and strategy and ridiculously long pro and con lists. In reality, that’s not how people do it. People tend to make decisions – even huge decisions, like about what course of cancer treatment they should pursue – based largely on "intuition" or "gut feelings." There’s no weighing of evidence, no systematic elimination, no creation of compulsive spreadsheets. Instead we humans throw our fates to the stars and go with our guts. We silly humans!

Or are we?

It’s not such a stupid approach, it turns out. The gut feeling isn’t some flimmy-flammy, semi-mystical, call a 1-800-psychic number type of thing. It’s actually based on our subconscious picking up lots of subtle – and often important - cues that our overly rational, conscious mind overlooks. The subconscious adds these cues up and, voila, the gut feeling!

So What To Make of the "I'm Too Busy" Excuse?

When we consider these attacks on the “I’m too busy” excuse, it seems the evil someone who presented them pretty much mucked up all hope of using this defense.

Don’t lose faith, though. The process of job searching – a far different process from looking for a career, or, ideally, for looking for something even bigger than career – does take time. Literal, physical chunks of minutes type of time. You have to create a resume, find job openings, send out application packets, go on interviews. There’s no way getting around how much time that takes.

And so, even if you happen to run into someone who pokes holes in your “I’m too busy” excuse for avoiding the big-thinking portion of Career Search (wherever would you meet such a person, anyway?), you can still use the excuse when the pedal meets the metal and you have to find an actual job.

Which is fitting, I suppose, since that’s all you’ll be finding – plain, old, punch-the-clock, end-up-in-a-stupor-from-boredom jobs - if you don’t give the Career Search a good go. Fair enough!

Time always gets in our way...or does it? (Photo credit: ToniVCand over-eager professors.)

How To Create Your "Life Goal"

Just a quickie here, to give you a handout that accompanies the most recent lecture (yes I'm one of those unorganized professors who provides materials out of sequence. Aren't you glad you "enrolled" in such a quality course?). The handout is your very own personalize-able "All I Want to Be" statement. Aw gee, just what you always wanted!

Not sure how to use it? If you want to pass our class with flying colors, then don't bother to read the following. But if class failure (and career bliss) is your goal, read on:

1) Save it on your computer (it's a PDF file; if you'd rather be able to alter it, here it is in Word format).

2) Ignore the file for days/months/years (length dependent on the depth of your Career Paralysis).

3) After the waiting period, stumble upon the file on your hard drive and decide to print it out.

4) Ignore the printed copy for another period of time. (You're really paralyzed, aren't you?)

5) When you're ready - really ready (i.e., you've exhausted all the excuses explored in our class) - hang the blank print-out somewhere you'll see it morning and night, like next to your alarm clock.

5b) Be sure to have a snappy one-liner prepared for when your roommates/friends/parents make fun of you for completing this step.

6) Don't think about the answer too much. Simply look at the blank space daily and let your unconscious mind work on the answer. (This is actually completely serious - psychologists find that letting the unconscious do its work, called incubation, is often key to problem solving.)

7) When your mind one day spurts out a possible completion, jot that jammy down!

8) Live with the drafted statement for a while. Don't think about it too much, but do look at it daily.

9) When a revision idea hits you, print a new copy and try again.

10) Repeat Steps 7-9 ten, 20, or 500 times. Whatever it takes to get an answer. Yes, it's that worth it.

11) When your revisions start to revolve around word choice and sentence structure, you're done! Congratulations on failing this assignment (and being well on your way to failing class)!

(If you're reading these steps and questioning whether it's actually worth all this effort to find a fulfilling career, go directly to Step 2. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. I'll meet you there in the next lesson with another good excuse, you star student, you!)

How many drafts will you go through? (Photo credit: FeatheredTar)