How To Make Your Childhood - and Future - Self Very Happy

Here's my big admission:  I'm obsessed with Google calendar. Obsessed. It's never not open on my computer. Sometimes I stare at my week's schedule in wonder. All too often I'm tempted to enter "event" blocks for the sheer thrill of putting them in there.

Why?

Because a little girl named Becca Lynn created schedules just like this. WAY back before Google. Back before even AOL or Prodigy or - gasp - affordable home computers.

Pen and paper worked just fine for childhood fantasy games, thank you very much. Still does.

Most days I'd sit at my mom's home office desk and ask her to "call" me to make appointments in my business du jour. Hair salon, travel agency, greeting card company, private museum, sign factory...I ran them all (sometimes all at once).

The common task running through all of these businesses was that you had to make appointments to see me. And I reveled in creating elaborate charts to record said appointments.

Now, thirty years later, here I am with my own real live Google calendar, booking appointments with glee. I feel like a delighted little girl every single time I rearrange my blocks to "squeeze in" a student or a client or even some special time with my daughter (yes, I've become THAT person - not because I need a schedule to remember my daughter, but rather because creating blocks is so fun!)

Get in Touch With Childhood Pleasures

I'm telling you all of this because today I want you to reflect not on WHAT you wanted to be as a child, but on what you liked to DO.

Ditch the job titles. That's not at all what we're talking about here.

We're talking about tasks.

In the past I wrote about how career choice may be partly in our genes, with 50% of our interests and 30% of job satisfaction being attributable to genetics. I then wrote a follow-up post encouraging you to consider the innate environmental preferences you have, including a handy list of questions to ask yourself along the way.

When I looked over my questions, though, I realized that tasks isn't even on there. Huge oversight.

The more I work with students and clients on career choice, the more I realize that preferred tasks is where the core of job satisfaction is at. Period.

It's Fine If You Never Had Childhood Dreams

The beauty of focusing on preferred childhood tasks is that it even applies to the people who say, "But I never wanted to be anything when I was a child. I had no career dreams."

No matter. You still did things as a child, didn't you?

Whether at play or on athletic fields or during recess with your friends, you had chosen activities that made you feel happy and free and alive. (I so do not want to know what Jason, the kindergartner who spent recess tracking me down and kicking me in the stomach, is now doing with his life...)

How to Identify Your Childhood Preferred Tasks

So think back - right now! - to that kiddo you were around 5 to 9 years of age, before society's "shoulds" strongly entered the picture.

Then do the following:

• List the things you spent your time doing when you were able to choose your activities (yes, we all spent tons of time in school. Who cares? That wasn't by choice. Now if you were creating a school at home, that's a different matter entirely).
• For each activity, break down the skills and tasks involved in each. For instance, my private museum tours about the Tawls, the wondrous people of the North that I invented (their fort is pictured above...), involved scheduling, creativity, teaching, entrepreneurship, and public speaking. Basically a mini-version of my current life. Basically.
• Then go through your list of skills and tasks and take note of two things:
  • The tasks/skills that appear repeatedly
  • The tasks/skills that you would like to use in the future (i.e., those you believe you'd still prefer, even if you haven't used them in years - or decades!)

If you really want to get serious about the preceding task, make a field trip out of it. Set a time in your schedule (your Google calendar, perhaps...?) to go back and intentionally revisit your childhood stomping grounds. Thanks to the context-dependency of memory, you'll be amazed at all the memories that suddenly appear on your school lot or your childhood street corner (although the latter would prompt me to ask, what were you doing as a kid exactly?).

Childhood = Pure

Sure, our childhood selves didn't know it all. Far from it. We've developed skills and tried out tasks that we didn't even know about when we were 6.

That's no reason to forget the activities we were drawn to when we were little, though. In fact, I'd argue that's all the reason not to forgot those childhood activities.

Because what we did when we were kids, that was the true stuff. It wasn't about adding to the resume or proving ourselves or impressing anyone (Case in point: the coat I'm wearing in the photo above. Clearly impressing was not on the list).

It was about enjoying life, fully and in the moment, for no ulterior motive other than joy.

Which is the goal of any good career search, now isn't it?

So you know what you need to do. Get down to it.

I'll be over on Google. You know, doing some scheduling.

Why Are You Listening to These People?

I've finally identified the common theme running through the lives of my career-conflicted students and coaching clients: They listen to the wrong people.

Who are these "wrong advice"-givers?

Anyone leading a life we don't want to lead ourselves.

Think about it:  why would we listen to these people? Their "you should" and "I would" and "I did"'s are probably not going to lead to a life that's a good fit for us. They're going to lead to a life that's a good fit for them.

To be clear, these advice-givers are not providing "bad advice."

They're benevolently doling out "wrong advice" - advice that is not right for you. Taking "wrong advice" on board can prove detrimental to your psychological health and sense of motivation.

This post isn't about disrespecting people's choices. Nor is it about judging their lives. Whatever works for them, I always say (or doesn't work, yet they're willing to accept...).

It is about comparing the fit between an advice-giver's life and your values, preferred skills, and "flow" activities. If the fit is poor, why the heck are you listening to these people?

My Personal Foray Into Accepting the Wrong Advice

I spent years actively soliciting career advice from tenured and tenure-track professors when I knew I wasn't made to fit into a tenured career.

These professors were nice people, they had good lives (secure, financially rewarding, intellectually engaging), and I respected them as individuals. Why not take their advice on board?

Because it nearly was my undoing.

When I continually accepted the well-meaning advice of people living a life that didn't fit me, I ended up feeling like the oddball.

I constantly had thoughts like:

What the heck is wrong with me?

I should just buck up and find a way to make this path work.

If this life worked for them yet I'm feeling unfulfilled by it, I must be a real failure.

If they're happy in this path and I'm not, I must be doomed to never be happy.

Sound familiar?

Why "Wrong Advice" Happens

As I mentioned, "wrong advice"-givers are not malicious, by and large. Not by a long shot.

Instead, they give into human frailty. They're insecure about their life choices, so they want others to follow their paths to confirm that their lifestyle is "worthwhile."

I can see your "but" coming:  yes, some advice-givers are able to drag themselves out of the way and truly hear you and your needs and your desires.

Don't kid yourself, though:  these people are rare.

I know we want to believe this of people. We want to think people are giving advice and guidance that's in our best interest.

The problem is that what people think is in your best interest often doesn't include a whole lot of "you" in the equation. It's based on personal, biased experience; on what they read or presume (sometimes falsely) about the job outlook for certain fields; on bitter retributions against wrongs that plagued their lives.

Where the heck are you in any of this?

How to Deal With "Wrong Advice"

1. Set up a mental sieve. Before accepting the advice, opinions or judgment of anyone - ANYone - take a look at where they're coming from. If they're using "you"-centered language (e.g., "you seem to...", "I'm hearing you say..." or "it sounds like you..."), you're good. If they're leading a life you'd love to lead and are using "I"-centered language, you're good. Any other situation? It should get stuck in your "wrong advice" sieve and never be allowed to approach your logical and emotional cores. Note:  I'm not suggesting you be confrontational and not listen to the advice. You can listen attentively, say, "I appreciate you taking the time to tell me your thoughts," and then go and live your life with the "wrong advice" firmly snared in the sieve...not your heart.
2. Find people who are living a life that would fit you well. As we just mentioned, it's fine to hear the "I"-centered advice of people who are living a path you desire. Actually, it's beyond fine - it can be invaluable. Hearing about their mistakes and successes on the way to their current state can help you streamline your journey. While you'll still need to make your own choices, their words can prove to be highly motivating, and can support you when you make "unpopular" decisions. (Note: this step presumes you've identified your values, preferred skills, and flow activities in advance.)
3. If you can't find physical people, create a virtual support group. I've had many coaching clients who don't  know anyone living the sort of life they desire. In that case, create a virtual support group. This might take the form of a community of bloggers and/or forum members online, but more often it is created through videotaped interviews, quotations and writings by well-known people whose lives they admire. Surround yourself with these people's words and you'll naturally start to emulate their choices.
4. Don't actively solicit the advice of "wrong advice-givers." This is perhaps the most important step of all - and the one I violated repeatedly throughout my twenties. If you go to people whose careers you don't want and ask them, "So what would you do in my situation?" what do you think you're going to get? The wrong advice! Worse yet, you are ASKING for it. You're asking to feel more conflicted, anxious and depressed. Stop rubbing salt in your wounds. You're not a fit to live their life. That's OK. Actually, that's great. Celebrate your authentic spirit and then go and find the right advice. Trust me, it's out there.

Have you ever taken "wrong advice"? What are your strategies for dealing with it?

Photo Credit: ModernDope

Quit the Comparisons

See if you recognize yourself in this story: It's a sun-drenched day. My two-year-old daughter is swinging before me on our town playground. She whizzes through the air for tens of minutes, the wind tugging at her corkscrew curls, giggles spilling out of her like a bird chattering at the dawn of a spring morning.

She quiets only when a man and his son approach the swings. Under her intense gaze, the man lifts the boy into the rubber seat and elevates him high into the air.

"Whee!" the boy squeals when his father releases him. "More!"

The father pushes hard, causing the swing set to shake. The boy flies so high, his torso becomes horizontal to the ground. I wonder if he might flip clear over the top.

My daughter cranes around to look at me, her face contorted. "Mommy, higher," she says. "Higher!"

I try with all my might.

"Higher!" my daughter yells, looking at the boy soaring beside her. "Higher!"

I push and shove and grunt. My arms start to burn. I feel sweat breaking out on my forehead. Still, my daughter's only halving the height of the boy beside her.

"I'm sorry, sweetie," I say after many minutes. "This is as good as it gets."

With that, she bursts into tears.

The Social Comparison Scourge

Although it's been a while since you frequented a swing set, I bet you recognize yourself in my daughter's reaction. Especially if you're a millennial. As Paul Angone says in 101 Secrets for Your Twenties:

"Obsessive Comparison Disorder is the smallpox of our generation."

How could it not be, given the omnipresence of social media?

All these social comparisons are our great undoing. They not only block us from pursuing the work we'd find meaningful, they make us more likely to experience all sorts of negative emotions including:

• Defensiveness
• Regret
• Envy
• Guilt
• Unmet cravings
• Lying to protect self and others
• Loneliness

I don't want these to be my daughter's reality. That's why the swingset episode hit me like a gut punch. The only way she'll learn to quit the comparisons is if I learn to stop them myself.

But how?

I turned to the research to find out. And boy did it come through.

1.  Don't Use Social Comparisons To Make Yourself Feel Good

As I wrote in I'm Awesome. Except Next to You. And You. And You, social comparisons have an upside. They can bring us joy...IF we're the one on the swings flying higher than the kid next to us. In fact, they feel so good we get hooked on them as our source of self-worth:

Feeling crappy about your hair? Dig up that horrid Facebook photo of your friend on a humid day.

Feeling upset about your drudge job? Think of your buddy who hasn't landed a single ounce of paying work.

Feeling icky about your breakup? Check out your friend's tweets about her loser boyfriend's antics.

The problem is, using this feel-good strategy comes with a heavy price:  we end up feeling badly about ourselves most of the time.

"Frequent social comparisons may, in the short-term, provide reassurance. But in the long-term they may reinforce a need to judge the self against external standards." - Dartmouth Professor Judith White and colleagues

In other words, comparing yourself with others becomes an addiction. You end up scrambling around Facebook, desperate for a hit of "I'm rocking life compared to that person," but in the process you're exposed to a whole lot of "wow, that person is doing so much better than me."

2.  Find Happiness

This may be a bit chicken-and-egg, but if you can "find happiness," you may be less tempted to look at the boy swinging next to you. And less affected if you do.

Studies show that unhappy people make more frequent comparisons and take them more to heart, compared to happy people.

Of course we could fill 15 million posts on the question of how to "find happiness," but I'll stick with the psychology-based answer I strongly believe:  lasting happiness comes not from fleeting pleasures, but from structuring your life around endeavors that are personally meaningful and that frequently plunge you into the state of flow. That's why I advocate for creating a work life filled with purpose.

3.  Practice Mindfulness

This one gets a bit deep:  We can either view ourselves subjectively (from the inside out) or objectively (looking at ourselves as if we're an object). People who do the latter engage in more frequent social comparisons, according to research, and thus feel less content.

"Viewing one’s self objectively cuts one off from mindful experience, resulting in mindlessness. Not only are we holding the self still, in order to view it objectively, but also we are holding still the dimension on which we are making the comparison. In a mindless state, a person automatically accepts the positive or negative consequences of a social comparison." - White and colleagues

The best way to counteract mindlessness is to practice mindfulness, such as by meditating.

If you're new to mindfulness meditation - an approach that makes no spiritual claims and has been shown to decrease stress, anxiety, and blood pressure - Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Wherever You Go, There You Are is a great starting point.

Researchers note that making social comparisons may cause mindlessness, so you'll need to reconnect with a mindful viewpoint daily to keep things in check.

"In a mindful state, the same social comparison information can have a completely different meaning, and thus different consequences." - White and colleagues.

4.  Set Internal Standards for Self-Worth

Finally, getting clear on what you care about, then prioritizing your life around those values takes the punch out of social comparisons.

"People who are uncertain of their self-worth, who do not have clear, internal standards, will engage in frequent social comparisons." - White and colleagues

In other words, if you believe that "success" results from meeting YOUR goals - not the goals of your parents, friends, teachers, or "society" at large - you'll be less likely to succumb to the agony of social comparisons.

Thinking this way is a lifelong process, of course, but you can start the process today. And you should.

Because when it comes down to it, a day on the swings is always better than a day stuck at home. Regardless of who's swinging beside you.

Recap

So it all comes down to four steps. Four tangible, doable, why-not-make-these-a-priority-because-life-stinks-if-you-let-comparisons-rule-your-existence steps:

Step #1:  Don't use social comparisons to make yourself feel good. More often they'll make you feel bad.

Step #2:  Spend more time in activities that give you a sense of flow and that are personally meaningful.

Step #3:  Set aside ten minutes (or more!) to meditate daily.

Step#4:  Identify your personal priorities and work toward them, regardless of what others say you "should" do.

What do you think? Can we do it? Our futures depend on the answer.

Source:

White, J. B., Langer, E. J., Yariv, L., & Welch, J. (2006). Frequent social comparisons and destructive emotions and behaviors: The dark side of social comparisons. Journal of Adult Development, 13, 36–44.

Photo Credit: Taylor.McBride™

Staying Put Doesn't Necessarily Mean "Settling"

I never thought I'd say this:  Contractual obligations are the best things that ever happened to my work life. From teaching college, to writing textbooks and supplements, to taking on odd jobs around campus, almost all the work I've held, I've been contractually obligated to finish.

This used to make me insane:

I have STAY PUT for set periods of time? What if I HATE what I'm doing? What if I suddenly realize I'm BETTER SUITED for something else?

What if I - gasp - end up having to SETTLE for a life less than the one I could have?

The Beauty of Striving-in-Place

The thing about those nasty little contracts, though, is that they forced me to learn my greatest lesson of finding meaningful work:  the lesson of how to "strive-in-place."

Striving-in-place is my term for becoming our best selves in the context of our current situations.

The process includes job crafting, environmental refinement, and perspective shifting to create your best working life - without jumping to a new job. [I offer examples of this approach in my new free eBook 15 Ways to Make Your Job More Fulfilling - Today.]

Don't get me wrong:  changing jobs is often necessary to better our lives. To be sure, virtually all of my coaching clients leave their jobs at some point in our coaching process because they need to:

• They're in completely the wrong field for their interests, values, and preferred skills
• Their work environment is positively toxic (e.g., abusive management, ethically questionable practices, soul-sucking tasks with no flexibility to change them)
• Their conception of "work" has shifted so far from the traditional notions of 9 to 5 - healthfully so - that they need to construct an entire new way of living

Barring these situations, though, striving-in-place is a terrific skill set to have. It not only makes work life more fulfilling, it's good practice for life in general, in which one enters into arrangements - e.g., marriage, parenthood, caring for ill relatives - from which it's difficult or impossible to run.

Striving-in-place is not about settling. It's about living fully and intentionally. Right where you are.

Job Hopping is Too Easy

I suspect striving-in-place will be unpopular advice in some camps.

For instance, in the very camp where I specialize:  millennials.

At least statistically speaking, it should be.

The average length of time a worker stays at a job is 4.4 years, according to Forbes' article "Job Hopping is the 'New Normal' for Millennials," while millennials' average is about half that time.

Most articles on the "job hopping millennial" trend lament it from a corporate perspective (e.g., it costs about $25,000 for each millennial that needs to be replaced) or view it as one more opportunity to jump on the "anti-millennial stereotype" bandwagon.

A few, though - such as "Millennials Should be Job Hopping" from Business Insider - actually make the case the that job hopping is the best strategy for economic and emotional well-being of the individual.

My approach would probably fall somewhere between the two. I can't see how perpetual job hopping could lead to satisfaction; it creates the peception of too much choice, the very thing that undercuts our happiness.

Besides, it takes time, energy, and negotiation to bring any working endeavor to its fullest potential. Job hopping makes it too easy to jump to the "next possibly perfect thing" instead of working to make the current position the best it can be.

Of course, to put striving-in-place into practice, one has to be careful and intentional about choice of jobs. Otherwise you end up with one of the first two "need to switch" work situations I outlined above.

In addition, sometimes a situation turns out to be totally different than what we'd expected while interviewing. Believe me, I've happily run from some work endeavors as soon as the contract freed me to do so - and I even wrangled to legally abort one particularly toxic situation.

These "sometimes" situations, however, shouldn't lead to job hopping every one or so years. If work is chosen intentionally and crafted effectively, one-year tenures would be anomalies, not habits.

Don't Let Your Workplace Off the Hook

Before we wrap, I want to make three things clear. This post is NOT:

• A plug for living a mediocre, vaguely unsatisfying life. I have fought tooth and nail to create a meaningful, rich life that aims to extend service far beyond myself. If you have the opportunity to forge such a life for yourself - and I'd argue we all have that luxury, even if we cannot switch positions or secure high-status jobs - then you're shirking your life's responsibility by living anything less than that. Striving-in-place is all about aiming for more. Without changing jobs.

• A finger-wagging at millennials. It makes sense to switch jobs more frequently in our early work lives as we gain an awareness of who we are and what we like to do, and begin to master the skills of striving-in-place. Besides, I believe much of the "job hopping" phenomenon lies at the hands of a society that believes it's acceptable to make young people labor for free and outdated workplaces that are utterly unequipped to ensure the highest functioning of its personnel.

• An agreement with unhealthy corporate cultures. Hopefully my preceding point made this clear.

With regard to unhealthy workplaces, part of our striving-in-place mission needs to be forcing our work environments to evolve with us. Some companies already offer mentoring, workplace flexibility and community service programs to enhance retention and engagement of workers. There needs to be more.

Workplace enrichment will only come if we demand it. Often and loudly.

Keeping in mind, though, that sometimes the best way to make a demand isn't with our feet. It's with our voices.

What do you think? Have you ever stayed put and found growing satisfaction, or is moving on necessary to find our best place in the world?

Want Well-Being? Fix These Two Aspects of Your Career

One of my former students recently stopped by for a chat. An intelligent, eager woman in her mid-20s, she's moved beyond the wide-eyed optimism typically worn by new graduates. Too far beyond it.

"How's your job?" I asked.

"It's work," she said. "You know. It pays the bills. I mean, what more can you expect? Besides, it doesn't really matter. It's just work."

My cringe of the century followed.

JUST work?

Not only would I beg to differ on my least feisty day, she crossed my path days after I learned of large-scale, representative research showing how wrong she is.

Poor girl.

I'll spare you that long-winded, hand-flailing, eye-bulging version here. In fact, I'll boil my point down to just four sentences:

Work matters to your overall well-being. Big time. More than anything else in your life.

And your "work health" can be summed up with the answers to just two questions.

Now for Pete's sake read on because this concision thing is killing me!

The Two All-Important Questions

We'll start by unveiling the two questions that not only predict your Career Well-being, but your well-being overall.

(Is it just me or does this feel as tense as a Jerry Springer "is he the daddy?" moment.)

The two all-important questions are:

• Do you like what you do each day?

AND

• At work, are you able to do what you're best at each day?

Notice there's nothing about your boss or your co-workers or your physical office or your hours. According to Brandon Busteed at Gallup, it all comes down to liking what you do and using your strengths. Period.

So if you can "strongly agree" with both of these questions, you're in great stead. Grab some Pirate Booty and get back to work.

If, on the other hand, you only "agree" or are "neutral" or are - duh dum - in the "disagree" camp, it's time to take a good look at your career. Afterall, work is the most important factor affecting your overall well-being.

Career Disproportionately Affects Our Well-Being

Not ready to believe me about the importance of career health to our overall well-being? Can't say I blame you; I am a bit biased.

We'll turn to the good people at Gallup to back me up:

"Gallup finds that Career Well-Being is the most important predictor of well-being across the board. Though not a guarantee, it is likely that someone with high Career Well-Being also has high Social, Financial, Physical, and Community Well-Being. Across every country Gallup surveyed, people said that a good job trumps everything, including health and happiness." - Brandon Busteed of Gallup

These are strong words:  Regardless of nation, career matters. More than health or relationships or money!

In fact, "people with high Career Wellbeing are more than twice as likely to be thriving in their lives overall," according to Tom Harter and Jim Rath in their book summarizing the Gallup research, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements.

In other words, all my blabbering on about the importance of meaningful work is well-founded. By research!

Amazingly enough, prior to last week, I didn't even know it.

(If you imagine that I was doing back flips when I heard Busteed announce this at a recent conference, your imagination simply isn't wild enough.)

Why Career Well-being Matters So Much

Work affects our well-being for a variety of reasons:

1.  We spend a whole lot of time working. About one-third of our lives, in fact.

2.  Work spills over into our entire lives:

"Imagine that you have great social relationships, financial security, and good physical health - but you don't like what you do every day. Chances are, much of your social time is spent worrying or complaining about your lousy job. And this causes stress, taking a toll on your physical health. If your Career Wellbeing is low, it's easy to see how it can cause deterioration in other areas over time." - Harter & Rath, Wellbeing: The Five Essential Element

3.  Work shapes our identity. So much so that...

"Our wellbeing actually recovers more rapidly from the death of a spouse than it does from a sustained period of unemployment." - Harter & Rath    (Graphical evidence of this phenomenon is on Gallup's site)

If You Can't 'Strongly Agree,' You're Not Alone

Now that you know how important Career Well-being is, you may be fretting over your initial answers.

Don't worry:  if misery loves company, you're all set.

Of the 10,000+ people around the world to whom Gallup posed these questions, only 20% "strongly agreed."

Only 20%!

Considering that Career Well-being is the singlemost important factor in our overall well-being and only 1 in 5 people has Career Well-being, no wonder we're a people obsessed with pursuits of happiness and get-pleasure-fast schemes.

We should stop chasing happiness and start working. Happily.

"Sort Of" Doesn't Count

By the way, if your answers were something like "well, I kind of agree" or "some days I feel like that"? <BZZZZZ> Sorry, no Career Well-being for you.

According to Busteed, a person has to "strongly agree" with those questions EVERY DAY for their overall well-being to be positively impacted. Less frequent simply doesn't cut it.

Does this seem like a ridiculously high standard?

Perhaps, but it's attainable, too.

How to Use These Findings Positively

How do we know it's attainable?

Because if we turn the 20% figure around, it can serve as a guiding beacon for us all:

1 in 5 people has found work that they like and that uses their strengths EVERY DAY.

Think about it:   You know, what, about 600 people? (Sorry, your legions of Facebook peeps don't count.) This means you know approximately 120 people doing the sort of work that would make a huge difference in your overall well-being.

There are 120 people you could go out and informational interview.

There are 120 people you could shadow at work.

There are 120 people you could simply spend time around, soaking in their work-fulfilled energy and gaining courage to seek it out for yourself.

In other words, when you get thinking that meaningful, fulfilling work is impossible to find, you're simply not talking to the right people.

We're out there. It just might be hard to catch us.

We're too busy working.

4 Steps to Surviving Your First Autumn After College

This guest post by Avery Johnson of Some Blissful Thinking is part of our Millennial Perspectives Series. Check out the guidelines if you'd like to add your voice to the series! My vision of life after college was a fairytale of cheerful coffee mornings and power meetings followed by clinking glasses with my coworkers during happy hour. After graduating last May and starting a full-time job, occasional days somewhat resembled my dream. More often, though, reality found me eating marshmallow fluff straight from the can as I watched Pride and Prejudice for the millionth time, freaking out over having no idea what I want to do with my life.

Besides the occasional break down, the summer months felt somewhat like any other summer. Between working, going to the beach on the weekends, and meeting my family for vacation, it seemed like nothing had really changed. Then September rolled around.

I felt myself growing increasingly anxious around mid-August. It felt as though something was coming up or an important date was fast approaching, but nothing was. I was consumed by a deep-seated need to prepare for something and found myself cleaning out my closet, throwing away old magazines, and rearranging my drawers, anything to make this feeling go away.

It didn’t.

Something was off.

During Labor Day weekend, my Instagram feed flooded with “First weekend back at school!” photos from my friends in college and grad school. I felt like I was missing out.

Everyone is doing something with their lives, I thought. What about me?

It all came together in that moment: my life until this point revolved around learning. It started on a Monday in late August, took a month off around Christmas, then powered back through until June. This was always how it was.

After extensive debate, I came to the conclusion that signing up for the GRE and applying to graduate programs was not going to quench my nostalgic thirst to walk to school with orange leaves crunching underfoot and a backpack of brand new notebooks and pens behind me.

I learned I had to make this fresh-start feeling for myself.

Here are my “Avery-tested” tips on how to transition into your first autumn after college.

1. Establish a Routine

During school, my daily schedules would be packed and all over the place, but I had a weekly routine that kept me sane. I knew what to expect. Getting settled into a daily and weekly schedule helps me feel more established and motivated. Going into each week, I plan meals so I can grocery shop, decide where to fit in runs or trips to the gym, see when projects are due and mark down what meetings are when. To further that fresh start feeling, I buy a new planner with a September start date and a fresh set of felt-tip pens for color-coding to keep me on track.

2. Join a club or a team

One of the things I miss most from college are the extracurricular activities. I found leadership opportunities, fun events, and my best friends and future roommates in my sorority. Being a part of something bigger and sharing space with like-minded individuals is an opportunity to grow in community. That doesn’t have to end after college. Join a book club, a meetup group, running club, or even a kickball team. Meeting new friends and engaging with your passions on a weekly basis will keep you learning outside of a classroom.

3. Plan something to look forward to

Working the 9-5 grind Monday through Friday can get quite mundane. Planning something to look forward to in the future helps to stir up the excitement in the midst of a bad day. This plan could be something as big as saving up for a weekend trip to visit a friend, or as small as simply making a plan to try a new restaurant or local hike during the weekend. Call up a friend, make a date, and mark it on your calendar.

4. Quit the constant comparisons

I wrote to challenge the view on what it means to be happy a couple of weeks ago and was overwhelmed by the response: everyone could relate to just going around with their happy face on all the time. We get on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and see these picture-perfect lives of our friends and former classmates and think to ourselves, What am I doing wrong? How can I become successful/happy/so-dang-put-together? The reality is nobody is perfectly happy all the time. And if they think they have it all figured out at the ripe old age of 22, chances are they are lying.

I will be the first to admit that I for sure do not have it all together. My car keeps dying because I didn’t get its battery replaced when I was supposed to. I shrank my favorite shirt and managed to permanently stain another. I still call my mom to ask how to cook chicken, I want to write a novel but I don’t have a storyline, and my last batch of banana bread was actually really gross. But when I get online, in an effort to stay positive, I never post any of those realities. Social media allows us the freedom to edit our lives down to display only the best parts. So next time you’re having a bad day, call home, call a friend, go for a walk, or read a good book. But whatever you do, don’t get online.

Why Self-Improvement Scares the Sh*t Out of Us

Think of the last time you considered self-improvement in your career, relationships or health. You probably did some reading on the topic. Might have talked it over with friends or family. Maybe even started to implement some changes.

Then, chances are, you backed away from it. Hella fast.

There's a good reason for that:  self-improvement feels awful.

We go into it thinking it'll make us happier and then - just our luck - we feel the complete opposite.

Even with rock-my-world, becoming-the-person-I-always-wanted-to-be sorts of self-improvement.

Today we'll discuss why this happens - and how you can break the cycle of "I want to make change but it feels crappy so I think I'll stay the same, thank you very much."

The Downside of Self-Improvement

"Growth isn't always fun." - Corey Keyes, Ph.D.

Last Thursday I attended the Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP) meeting in Washington, DC, at which keynote speaker Keyes, a sociologist at Emory, showed us just how bad self-improvement can make us feel.

Using data from a nationally representative sample of 3000 American adults, he noted that compared to people who had stayed the same over a 10-year-period, people who had improved their functioning had:

• Less self-acceptance
• More negative emotions
• More depressive symptoms
• Less positive emotions

In addition, the people who had made self-improvements were just as satisfied with their lives as people who hadn't changed at all.

YIKES!

I don't know about you, but this data doesn't exactly make me want to run to Oprah so I can start "living my best life."

Far from it.

Yet hundreds of thousands of people do so every day.

Why do we claim to want self-improvement if all it does is make us feel bad?

Why Self-Improvement Feels Bad

The answer lies in identity.

Take a moment to reflect on how you keep track of who you are as an individual. You probably see common themes running through your entire life, as far back as your earliest memories. There's a sense of continuity that you can cling to in order to understand yourself; a consistency that makes you you.

This stability is worth a lot to us:

"Self-consistency may sustain individuals’ beliefs that the world is coherent and controllable, and could provide confidence in one’s future." - Corey Keyes, Ph.D. (2000)

Now think about self-improvement. Since it focused on changing who and what we are, it violates our need for self-consistency.

Thus, "change doesn't always feel good," Keyes said at the BTtoP meeting.

The Upside to Self-Improvement

So why the heck do we bother attempting to improve our functioning?

Because there's a disconnect between what we feel and what we think.

Sure we feel crappier when we've changed than when we've stayed the same.

Yet we think of ourselves in a better light.

That's because in addition to self-consistency, our identity craves self-improvement. Thus when we manage to make change in our lives, we pat ourselves on the back. This results in well-being that's more cognitive than emotional:  increases in meaning, purpose, autonomy, connection, contributions, and growth - the eudaimonic aspects of well-being.

This brings us back to that meaning-happiness divide we discussed recently. Improving eudaimonic aspects of well-being comes at the cost of "feeling good." As Corey Keyes and his colleague Carol Ryff write (2000):

"Positive change is a mixed blessing: 'I may be different, but at least I'm a better person.'"

How to Make Self-Improvements Last - And Keep Seeking Them Out

The fact that emotions plummet when we improve ourselves, even though we also think of ourselves more highly, has huge ramifications on our willingness to make change. Keyes writes (2000):

"Individuals who feel like having grown personally and at the same time feeling depressed may be less likely to adhere to the positive lifestyle and health habits’ changes. In turn, such individuals may be less likely to seek positive changes in themselves and their lives after having felt depressed about past improvements."

It doesn't have to be this way.

Based on the research, there are three ways to maintain and continue to pursue self-improvements:

1.  Change Your Goals. If you believe the goal in life is to feel good, self-improvement isn't going to be your thing. The reality is that chasing pleasures is never-ending, placing us on a hedonic treadmill, while eudaimonic well-being is lasting (albeit not exactly "ooo, this feels nice.")

Consciously dedicate yourself to the pursuit of eudaimonia despite the pleasure trade-off.

2.  Focus on Your Thinking, Not Your Feelings. If you're willing to embrace a non-hedonic approach to life, you have to walk the walk by valuing your thoughts over your feelings. I'm a big believer in "gut feelings" (there's great data on the science of intuition), but that's not what we're talking about here. Here we mean emotional reactions to a situation - to your self-improvement. Be determined to not let your emotions seem more important than your cognitive assessment of your changes.

Focus on the meaning and significance of your self-improvements. You'll be less likely to be brought down by the emotional junk that accompanies them.

3.  Change Your Behavior, Not Your Self-Perception. Finally, throw your identity a bone. Recognize that when you make self-improvements, it threatens your sense of who you are. Stop saying things like, "I feel like a totally different person" - and do not utter "You're like a whole new you!" to anyone else!  The less we feel like ourselves, the more our emotions take a hit. The crappier we feel, the more likely we are to revert to old habits. The more we take on our old ways, the less likely we are to believe we can make lasting change in the future.

Focus solely on the behavioral changes you made, not on how you have changed. You'll be more likely to maintain the self-improvements for a good long while.

Now I want to hear from you:  Have you ever backed off from improvements in your life because they made you feel awful? If so, what did you do to counteract those feelings?

Sources:

• Keyes, Corey L. M. (2000.) “Subjective Change and its Consequences for Emotional Well-Being.” Motivation and Emotion, 24, 67-84.

• Keyes, Corey L. M. & Carol D. Ryff. (2000.) “Subjective Change and Mental Health: A Self-Concept Theory.” Social Psychology Quarterly, 63, 264 -279.

Embracing the Shipwrecks in Our Lives

We're obsessed with shipwrecks. The Titanic alone takes up more than its fair share of square footage in our minds, and it's been a century since that icy night.

Where does this obsession come from?

Here's one guess:  self-recognition.

The Metaphorical Shipwrecks

In her recent book Shipwrecked in L.A.:  Finding Hope and Purpose When Your Dreams Crash, Gettysburg College professor Christin Taylor uses shipwrecks as her central metaphor:

"Shipwreck is the metaphorical coming apart, the crash that rips through the very fabric of our identities. Everything we have thought about ourselves, our lives, our futures, even our faith, suddenly comes apart beneath us, and we are left scrambling, trying to put together any type of lifeboat to make it to shore. These shipwreck experiences can be large or small, and we can hit more than one shipwreck during college and beyond." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Although shipwreck experiences can occur at any point in our lives, they're especially common in the twenties when we first test out our dreams and identity.

All too often, our maiden voyages crash against the hard rocks of reality:

• The world isn't waiting for us to make a difference.
• There aren't fulfilling jobs waiting on every corner.
• We'll never have it "all figured out."
• We're not special after all.

How We Set to Sea

Before we can discover these realities, however, we have to set out to sea.

Compelled by society and the our passing birthdays, we undertake our first fully independent acts:  finding jobs, apartments, relationships, and a lifestyle all our own.

In the twenties, though, nothing is truly "all our own."

We like to think we're finally independent, but the influence of our parents looms large. (I've yet to get through a coaching session without a twentysomething client mentioning mom or dad!)

Taylor points to work by scholar Marcia Baxter Magolda to explain our parent-centric perspective:

"We each have a voice around us that informs our sense of the world, which [Magolda] calls the 'external influences that shaped you as an adolescent.' These external influences form a basic foundation for the way we view life as we step out into college and life beyond, helping us decide who we want to be and what our purposes in life will be. These come from our families, friends, and mentors and are the voices inside our heads guiding us and influencing each decision we make. The beauty of all these voices and expectations is that they form the first “ship” that keeps us afloat on the sea of life...We take with us the maps and navigating systems that guided our families’ or caregivers’ boats. We know these maps; we’re familiar with them, so they are our first lifeline. It’s not until we hit storms that we begin to rethink exactly how these maps and compasses work and whether they work for us at all. " - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Developmental psychologists call the process of rethinking our inherited "maps" individuation. Through it, we gradually become separate individuals with stable personalities and goals that may or may not match those of our parents.

To say that this process can be painful is an understatement and a half.

And no wonder:  since birth, we relied on our parents to support, guide, and care for us. Breaking from their expectations - however benign or benevolent they may be - can feel like a betrayal, both to us and to them.

Or, put differently, it can feel like being washed up on the shores of an unknown land.

Emerging from Shipwreck

To emerge successfully from the "shipwreck" process, we need some help from someone or something beyond our family.

Taylor points to research by psychologist Nevitt Sanford, who found that "every society sprouts up institutions beyond the family unit to help develop a person’s identity. He says, 'It is as if the society understands implicitly that it cannot leave the development of the individual personality to natural maturation.'"

These institutions include colleges, graduate programs, military settings, churches, psychotherapeutic and coaching relationships, and corporate mentorship programs.

For many of us, these "rescue vessels" don't appear naturally in our lives. We have to go and seek them out.

Finding one is well worth the effort. With the help of institutions that help us draw new maps, we find a fresh path forward:

"The journey out of shipwreck is the journey of coming home. If it were not for the cold waters of pain and chaos that shipwreck plunges us into, we would never reevaluate the faulty presuppositions we’ve had about the world and ourselves. We would never be forced to sift through the dead weight of our identities. Shipwreck shatters us, so that we are forced to pick through the rubble, to see clearly what no longer works, and find what has been a part of our being all along." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

The Beauty of Shipwreck

As someone who has experienced her twentysomething shipwreck and watched countless others hit their own, I can attest that it's a lonely, challenging phase.

It's also completely necessary.

If we forever rely on the maps of others - the expectations, goals, and "shoulds" passed down to us implicitly and explicitly - we never get to doing the work that holds meaning for us.

Lasting happiness is something for which we'll constantly struggle, relying on passing pleasures to fill the void rather than trusting in the resonating power of deep, grounded fulfillment.

Most importantly, the work that will make a genuine difference beyond ourselves remains undone, replaced by work that someone else wants us to be doing.

When we instead choose to accept the shipwreck process, actively seek out supportive institutions as we run aground, and then set sail anew, our lives take the form we'd always hoped for them.

"What’s the net gain of this pilgrimage home? The world gets bigger, and we grow with it. And though we would never wish to go through the pain of shipwreck again, though the gain does not nullify the pain, we also wouldn’t trade this newfound sense of the world around us and ourselves. We are grateful for the more nuanced view we now have of the world. The ground feels firmer and the horizon looks brighter." - Christin Taylor, Shipwrecked in L.A.

Related articles

• Breaking Down The Gen Y "Quarterlife Crisis": A Generation's Expectations in Context
• Quarter Life Crisis
• So this is 25.
• My Quarter Life Crisis [Part 2]
• The Vulnerability of Growing Up

The Vulnerability of Growing Up

Today I'd simply like to share the preceding quotation with you. I discovered it in Brene Brown's terrific book Daring Greatly:  How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. If you haven't read it, now's the time. Truly.

In the spirit of vulnerability, I will say that this I'm keeping this post quotation-centered because that's all I can muster at the moment.

Over the past week I drafted two full-length posts but when I read them this morning, they simply didn't ring true.

They sounded like someone trying to sound like she knows what she's talking about.

The reality is, life is a process of trial and error. It's a deep, all-encompassing, often-frightening foray into questions that only you can answer for yourself.

Which begs the question, what can I say on Working Self that you can't discover for yourself? What can I write that hasn't already been said by countless life coaches and self-proclaimed personal growth gurus? What can I offer that truly enables us all to transcend the platitudes and wrestle with the messy stuff, side by side, one seeker next to another?

I believe in my core that community and reading and research can help us grapple with possible answers.

I know in my gut that the blogosphere was created for just this purpose - not for making money off of ads and affliliates or spouting more cliches or self-promoting ad nauseum.

And I know beyond all other knowledges that I'm here to help others discover the work they're meant to do, and to walk beside them as they finally get down to doing it, lest that work never be done.

Yet translating that into a website? <sigh> Hard stuff.

I'll be giving this place a facelift soon, and I want a contentlift to accompany it.

I just don't know how.

(Sheesh, no wonder I can't write any more!)

So here's my vulnerable moment:  I'm scared I may never be able to fully do the work I'm meant to do. I'm afraid I'll squander this prime opportunity to trigger the unfurling of others' great, important work. I'm terrified that I'll write for decades only to look back and discover that I did nothing to further the conversation, adding only more hollow words to the already overloaded information explosion.

Maybe that's precisely will happen.

Life has no guarantees.

But I'm determined to keep writing all the same. One word at a time.

And with each word, I'll thank you for continuing reading. We can grow more vulnerable together.

In what ways have you become more vulnerable as you've gotten older? 

(PS - Since I know how amazingly supportive this community of readers is, I want to head you off by saying that I'm sincerely not fishing for compliments. I realize that the standard I hold myself to may be higher than what others may expect from me. In some domains this may be problematic, but on this blog I think it's reasonable:  you're worth as much. And more.)

Meaning or Happiness. What'll It Be?

You walk into a bar and the bartender asks, "So what'll it be tonight? Meaning or happiness?" "I'll take both," you say.

He laughs hard. "No, come on. Meaning or happiness?"

"Both," you repeat, unamused.

He abruptly stops smiling and stares you down. "You honestly don't get it, do you? You're gonna have to pick."

Welcome to the bar called Life.

And boy have I been feeling it lately.

A Foray Into a Meaningful, Unhappy Existence

As you probably haven't noticed in the crush of your busy life, I've been largely silent over the past week or so. No blog posts. Barely any social media presence. No newsletter that is now weeks overdue.

That's because I've been positively drowning in meaningful activities lately.

And totally miserable to boot.

Between intensive care of a molar-teething, potty-training, not-sleeping toddler; shepherding a gaggle of first year students into my Psychology 101 class; advising sophomores on their choice of classes, majors, and that little thing called life; helping senior students prepare mandatory proposals for their empirical theses (due today); attending meetings to improve purposeful work and student thriving on campus; and of course being fully present and available for my amazing, making-life-changes-as-we-speak coaching clients, it's been an "interesting" couple of weeks.

Don't get me wrong:  everything I listed I have worked very hard to have in my life. They are all the product of intentional search. In fact, the list reads precisely like the vague vision I held in my mind over ten years ago when I quit my graduate program and stumbled confusedly into the woods of Maine.

In other words, every single thing I'm doing is deeply and urgently meaningful.

Then why have I been so gosh-darn unhappy recently?

The Meaning-Happiness Disconnect

As I'm wont to do, I looked to the research for an answer and, by golly, a study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology in August gave it to me.

The survey of 400 Americans indicates that if we want to be happy, it's likely we won't have as much meaning in our lives. If we want to pursue meaningfulness, it's likely we won't have tons of happiness.

That's because happiness and meaning arise from different sources. Which tend to be in conflict.

"Meaningfulness is associated with doing things for others. Happiness is associated with others doing things for oneself. Engagement with others that sacrifices the self or that builds relationships over time contributes to meaningfulness, but it has a negligible or negative link to happiness." - Psychologists Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, and Emily Garbinsky (2013)

To be fair, meaning and happiness overlap a good deal. In fact, "almost half of the variation in meaningfulness was explained by happiness, and vice versa," Baumeister writes in a recent insightful article in Aeon Magazine.

But that other half - the half that doesn't overlap - is highly telling. It hints at all of the choices and compromises we must make as we intentionally and purposefully construct our lives.

Where Meaning and Happiness Diverge

Baumeister and colleagues found five areas where happiness and meaning diverge:

1. Getting What We Want and Need. "People are happier to the extent that they find their lives easy rather than difficult," Baumeister writes in Aeon. On the other hand, "the frequency of good and bad feelings turns out to be irrelevant to meaning, which can flourish even in very forbidding conditions."
2. The Time Frame We Focus On. The old mindfulness adage about staying present to increase happiness is true. Thing is, being present-focused doesn't contribute to meaningfulness. The study showed that "the more time people spent thinking about the future or the past, the more meaningful, and less happy, their lives were."
3. Social Life. Relationships contribute to both meaningfulness and happiness. That said, taking from social relationships increases happiness but reduces meaning, while being a giver is associated with meaning but not happiness. In fact, "helping others can actually detract from one’s own happiness." This especially seems to be the case in parenting. While parenthood has been frequently shown to reduce happiness, people still pursue and undertake the endeavor because it adds meaning to one's life.
4. The Hard Times. Positive life events make us feel both happiness and meaning. It's the hard times of life that reveal a divide. "Stress, problems, worrying, arguing, reflecting on challenges and struggles — all these are notably low or absent from the lives of purely happy people, but they seem to be part and parcel of a highly meaningful life," says Baumeister.
5. Identity. On this site I repeatedly emphasize the importance of finding work that expresses who you genuinely are. This is good advice in terms of increasing meaning in your life. But happiness? Not so much. "Even just caring about issues of personal identity and self-definition was associated with more meaning, though it was irrelevant, if not outright detrimental, to happiness." So, uh, I just decreased your happiness by asking you read this article...Sorry.

Why Meaning is Still Worth Pursuing

After reading all of this, you might be thinking, "Screw meaning. I'm going with happiness." And in my present condition, I can't say I blame you.

The thing is, life is about much more than right now. Our existence is dynamic; life's unpredictable curves are liable to snatch our present pleasures at a moment's notice. Not only that, but questing after present pleasures becomes a constant search, called the hedonic treadmill, in which we adjust to what we have and always desire more.

Meaning, on the other hand, is satiable and "more stable than emotion...so living things use meaning as part of their never-ending quest to achieve stability," Baumeister writes.

That's probably why meaning is associated with higher life satisfaction, better physical health, and even lower mortality rates.

Not that I'd advise living my life the way I have the past two weeks. Sleeping, eating healthy food sitting down, getting a moment or two to brush and bathe and be braindead - those things do matter. And while there not be a way to strike a genuine "balance" between meaning and happiness - as "balance" is an unattainable desire in most any domain of life - a tad of present pleasure goes a long way.

That said, in the Bar of Life, given the choice, I'd go for a thick swill of meaning any day.

"If your life had a purpose and you didn’t know it, you might end up wasting it. How sad to miss out on the meaning of life, if there is one." - Roy Baumeister, psychologist

4 Ways to Cope When You Have Too Many Options

When it comes to career, do you feel like you simply have too many options? Did you believe so fully in the "you can do anything" mantra of childhood that you don't know how to let it go?

Can you think of a ton of things you could imagine yourself doing, but can't figure out how you'll ever pick just ONE?

I get it. I felt the same way.

And so do many of my college students and coaching clients. In fact, it's one of the most common questions I hear.

Yet we all know we have to narrow it down. We can't be a doctor AND a professional musician AND a world-class artist AND a entrepreneur.

At least not while staying sane!

So HOW do we do choose?

Here are my four steps for overcoming career choice overload and the dreaded paralysis that accompanies it. (Hint: Your logical brain is probably putting options out there that you don't truly want.)

After you watch, I want to hear from you:  What strategy do YOU use to overcome career choice overload?

Are You Getting Frustrated Productively?

What do you do when you're frustrated? Not sure? Then consider what you'd do in the following situation:

Last week you had an interview for your dream job. I'm talking, the job so perfect you couldn't have created it if it had been pulled straight from your imagination. The interview went amazingly well - you clicked with the panelists, your answers were spot-on, and you could see in the panelists' eyes that you'd synched it.

Problem is, you haven't heard from them since.

The phone finally rings. It's the Head of HR at Dream Company. "Sorry," she says. "We're unable to offer you a job at this time. There were many outstanding applicants and rest assured that our inability to offer you a job is not a reflection on your qualifications. We hope you'll consider applying again in the future."

After you hang up, what do you do?

A) Think, "Oh well. Whatever. I didn't want that job anyway." Then sit down and watch Netflix for hours on end.

B) Immediately start sobbing. Then keep sobbing. Then sob every time you recount the outcome to friends, family, or the random woman buying grapes beside you in the market.

C) March out to your roommate and scream, "They don't want me?! Who do they think they are, not wanting me? I'll show them! One day I'll be the biggest news since Miley's foam finger and they'll be sorry. Really, really sorry." After yelling, you feel better, although a glowing ember of anger remains in your core.

So which one is you?

And which response do you think is the healthiest?

If you answered C to both questions, your future is in good shape. If not, read on!

What We Learn By Frustrating Babies

My first paid job in my twenties was frustrating babies. I'm not kidding. (See? Your job could be worse.)

I was literally paid to talk moms into bringing their 4-month-old sweethearts into a laboratory so that I could make said sweethearts mind-numbingly, red-face-screamingly frustrated.

I did this by teaching the bambinos how to turn on a picture by pulling a string...and then, once they'd learned it, making the picture and music not turn on when they wanted it to.

After the families left - oddly cheerful because I gave them a bib in exchange for the crying - I got to watch videos of the babies' screaming faces in super slow-motion for the rest of my work day.

While it may sound like I was involved in some uber-sketchy torture ring, this was in fact valid and valuable research conducted at The Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey.

And what we learned from the research could change your life.

Three Ways of Responding to Being Frustrated

When we watched the videos, we noticed that the babies who got MAD when frustrated had the most productive behavior. Their tiny faces contorted into anger expressions - eyebrows knitted, mouth in a square, nose wrinkled - and they pulled the crap out of the string for minutes on end, determined to make things go their way.

The babies who got sad simply gave up. They sat there like limp little blobs, the string dangling flacidly, their only motion being intense, racking tears. (We often had to stop the study session early to relieve these kiddos - and their distraught moms.)

Notably, not a single baby became emotionless, the way many adults do when frustrated. That's because apathy is a learned response. It's a defense mechanism consisting partly of repression ("I'm not upset") and rationalization ("I couldn't care less about that job anyway.") Babies don't do this sort of thing. Since it's so unnatural, we shouldn't either. It's no wonder repression has been linked to many physical ailments, including high blood pressure, cancer, asthma, and diabetes.

How To Best Respond When Frustrated

The bad news is, your response to frustration is probably largely innate. Hence why 4-month-olds showed different patterns; it was inborn.

The good news is that you can fight what's innate.

Simply having the knowledge that anger results in better outcomes than sadness and apathy can enable you to make the choice to go against your first impulses.

I'm not saying not to express your sadness if that's what you're feeling. Go ahead and express it. But then move the heck on.

Get pissed. Rile up the works. Shake a few limbs.

Force yourself to channel that sadness - a passive emotion - into anger - an active one.

Whatever you do, don't go off into a corner and cry for days. Or weeks. Or months.

How Frustration Response Relates to The Twenties

In the years since frustrating babies for a living, I've watched countless twentysomethings relive the frustration patterns time and again.

No shocker there:  the twenties are inherently frustrating times. In a very real way, they're like having a picture that used to show up when you pull a string suddenly start to show up randomly, or not at all.

To be sure, all of adult life has its frustrations. But it's in our twenties when we first learn we're not in control the way we used to be. Which is hella frustrating:

You used to do all your homework and receive verbal praise from everyone around you. Now you do all your work in the office and the niece of the boss/the blowhard/the socialite gets all the praise.

You used to put your best foot forward in a class presentation and earn an A. Now you prep like crazy for an interview and get a "no thank you" in response.

You used to have many ways to pursue your interests:  picking college classes you liked, choosing paper topics that resonated with you, doing extracurriculars that lit you on fire. Now you're spending your days doing what's dictated to you, and you don't have the time or energy to pursue your own interests when the day of dictation ends.

In short, the twenties are about adjusting to having the rug pulled out from under you.

Are you gonna cry about it, or are you gonna get up and weave a new rug?

The angry babies, they'd do the latter.

And I'd highly suggest you do, too.

Because the twentysomethings I've seen get angry, they're the ones who are actively creating the lives they desire.

The ones who are crying and withdrawing? They're working the crappy jobs and lamenting that their adult lives will never be what they imagined.

So what's it gonna be?

It's your choice.

Now I want to know:  How do you typically respond to frustration? What are you going to do differently going forward? Write your answer in the comments below!

Ready to get riled up? There's no better way to make constructive use of your anger than by getting clear on your vision for your life, setting goals based on that vision, and making a plan to get what you want.

Let's work together to turn your anger into action!

Check out my coaching page for details. September slots are going fast!

Work and Career Are Not Synonyms (And Only One Matters)

How much time have you spent trying to find your career? How much time have you spent trying to find your work? If you think I'm asking the same question twice, think again.

Not only should these questions yield distinct answers, the ratio between them may deeply affect the quality - and length - of your life.

What is "Career?"

"Career" is the buzzword everyone wanders around searching for. It's where networking and resumes and cover letters and all those cut-and-dry, formulaic elements come into play.

"Career" is positively entangled with extrinsic rewards, most notably money and status.

Notably, career isn't defined by what happens within a person. It's defined by what happens around him.

What is "Work?"

Work has a million connotations, not all of them positive. Regardless of formulation, though, work implies a concentrated effort on some task.

"Work" encompasses far more human experiences than "career:"

1. "Work" moves beyond a focus on pay. Think of the full-time parents or the retired guy making birdhouses in his basement to give to neighbors and community organizations. Would we call their activities "careers?" Highly unlikely. But are they "working?" Absolutely.
2. Our circumstances don't affect our ability to work, while they may affect our ability to pursue a career. We can work when chronic illness keeps us shut in our houses. We can work when our children need us so heavily that having outside commitments is laughable. We can work when we're imprisoned, as Victor Frankl did, spurring him to recognize work as one of the three sources of meaning in life.
3. "Work" moves beyond the obsession with full-time status that gets hooked to "career." For instance, it may be hard to make a career of waitressing, but you certainly are working when you're doing it.
4. Our relationships with others can fall under the category of "work." We "work" on our friendships, don't we? (Or at least we do if we want to keep them...)

The Work vs. Career Search Ratio

My contention is that we spend far too much time looking for a career and far too little time looking for work.

I honestly couldn't care less what career you end up with. And I'm frankly sick of my college seniors bumrushing my office to inquire about career options.

What do you want to DO? That's the question I want you to figure out how to answer.

What do you want to BE? That's irrelevant.

This can be freeing because career is somewhat out of your control in your twenties, especially in a tight job market. You'll end up being something-or-other, at least for the next five to ten years. But you can DO anything.

You get to pick your work.

The Question That Matters

Of course work doesn't necessarily add value to our lives. There's a lot of meaningless work out there.

That said, since work is internally defined, it naturally lends itself to some other wonderful internally-defined attributes. Such as feeling meaningful and purposeful.

This is important since having meaning and purpose in life are tightly linked to quality of life and happiness. Even more remarkable, having a sense of purpose is associated with a lower mortality rate in late adulthood.

The lead researcher of the purpose-mortality study, Patricia Boyle, said when explaining her findings:

The take-home message is that people need to be thoughtful about their lives, because having that sense of meaning or purpose will make a huge difference.

So from now to the end of your life the important question is:  are you doing work that matters to  you?

If this work is unpaid, so be it. If this work is something you only engage in during the wee hours of the morning or the still, haunting moments at the end of the day, so be it. If "the world" doesn't recognize this work as a "profession" - or worse, actively criticizes it - so be it. If this work is solely centered on your relationships with others, so be it.

All that matters is that you're regularly engaging in work that gives you meaning and purpose. Then you'll have hit the jackpot of life.

Your career is beside the point.

Turning Meaningful Work Into a Meaningful Career

You might be thinking, "But I want to find meaning and purpose in the thing I make money doing."

Fair enough. Our ideal goal may indeed be to have a career full of meaningful work. It's nice to not have to worry about paying the bills with AND making time for meaningful unpaid work.

It's also true that having a misery-inducing career is sure to detract from one's meaningful work.

Assuming a level of "good-enough-ness" to one's career, though, sometimes turning meaningful work into a career isn't the goal. There are situations in which doing so kills the meaning (e.g., turning an enjoyable hobby into a hard-driving, profit-driven business.) And sometimes it's downright impossible to make meaningful work into a career (e.g., in the case of parenting.)

Even if a career filled with meaningful work is your goal - as it has long been for me - to get to that meaningful career, you almost always have to first do meaningful work that isn't part of your career. For instance, by volunteering, engaging in a hobby, taking on part-time jobs, starting a side hustle that makes $0 for years on end.

So how should you spend your time?

Identifying the work that genuinely matters to you and engaging in it regularly. 

Not chasing your next hot career.

You Don't Want Grad School. You Want Your Childhood Autumn Back.

When you think of autumn, what springs to mind? Crisp evenings? Shortening days? Earthy scents? Halloween pranks? Oh come on, you're holding back. Just try to convince me you don't think of school.

And no wonder you do:  after umpteen-odd years of trucking off to pencils, books, and dirty looks at the first drop of a leaf, autumn and school are strongly conditioned in our minds.

Which is fine and all.

Until this association starts making you think you want something that you don't.

The Dangerous Grad School/Autumn Link

Let's get this out of the way up front, lest I be labeled an anti-gradschoolite. There are many valid, terrific reasons to attend grad school. For instance:

• Working toward better placement/career potential in a field in which you have proven and sustained interest
• Increasing your knowledge of a subject about which you have proven and sustained interest
• Engaging with the brightest minds in an area in which you have proven and sustained interest

(Sense a theme?)

If everyone were attending grad school for valid reasons, though, I wouldn't see a sudden surge in "hey former prof, I'm thinking of going to grad school!" emails every darn autumn. Which I do. Every year. The onslaught is a-coming.

To understand why the "huh, grad school is sounding good" blitz is a seasonal phenomenon, we must travel back in time to our childhood autumns. In particular, to the prelude of our first day at school. (Cue the wavy lines and do-do-do-do music.)

The New School Year Scene:  Your mom is ironing the brand-new outfit you’ll wear on your first day, and you’re loading your crisp, clean backpack with all manner of school supplies. Your erasers are pink and four-cornered. Your pencils are sharp and smell like a day in the words. Your notebooks are ripe with blank pages so fresh and new that they stick to one another in their spiral spine.

Can you feel it?

I'll bet you can.

For twentysomethings, The New School Year Scene is as irresistible as the (ever so brief) 'N Sync reunion.

Why Twentysomethings Crave Autumns of Their Past

How come? Because in our twenties, we're positively unmoored by the lack of what I call The 3 P’s:  possibility, predictability, and purpose.

When we conjure The New School Year Scene, those 3 P's become tangible all over again. We remember what it felt like to be poised on the edge of an entire new existence. Life seemed organized, opportunity-filled, and oh-so-beautifully structured.

No wonder, then, when autumn comes lugging its conditioned associations to The New School Year Scene we think:

“Oh! I could have those feelings again! I want that! I think I’ll go to grad school!”

Sorry to break it to you, but your days of experiencing an externally-imposed sense of the 3 Ps are over. Period.

The twenties are all about accepting that very point. And then figuring out how to create your own internally-driven sense of predictability, possibility and purpose all the same.

This process is often termed "becoming an adult." And it sucks. Totally sucks. No sugarcoating there.

Thing is, going to grad school solve the underlying issue of needing to learn how to create for yourself what the world once created for you.

It only defers it.

(Full disclosure:  I write this not as someone who took my own advice, but rather as a recovering Autumn-Allure Addict. Yes, a AAA. As bad as it gets. To avoid facing the fact that my days of externally-derived 3 Ps were over, I jumped into grad school AND teaching. That's right, I'm here to scare you straight.)

The Problem With Going to Grad School To Relive Childhood Autumns

Point number two why grad school is the wrong answer if it's just hitting you each autumn:  not only does grad school fail to provide the 3 P's for the long run, it also fails to square with nostalgia.

To see what I mean, please join me again in my time machine. This time we're traveling back to about two months into any given school year.

The Two Months In Scenario:  You’re back to wearing hand-me-down clothes that fit awkwardly and get you teased. Your backpack’s bottom has blackened and the zippers have begun to show signs of rebellion. Your erasers have turned into dark, amorphous blobs that are inexplicably sticky. Your pencils are perpetually broken and smell of cheese puffs. And your notebooks? Oh, your notebooks. Once a stack of possibility, they now hold words and symbols you barely care to try to understand and their voluminous ranks have been decimated from notes passed to friends and paper airplanes flown at recess.

Had you forgotten that scene? Ours minds are convenient like that, scraping the moderately crapping portions of life from our memories. Hence the onset of Twentysomething School Nostalgia.

This delusional nostalgia is a major issue. I’d wager it causes a good portion of poor-grad-school choices, with desire to impress and social comparisons being the other major reasons. (Or you can be really awesome and go for the trifecta. I did!)

The reality is that grad school consists much more of the Two Months In Scenario and barely any of the New School Year Scene.

In fact, you don’t even get The New School Scene beyond the first year of grad school - if you even get that - because you work your butt off year round. And you’d better be damned sure that you care about the words and symbols that you’re writing in notebooks because you won’t only be jotting them down, you’ll be creating some of those jammies of your very own.

(For the record, the same could be said of teaching, so don’t even go there unless you have a “proven and sustained interest” in pedagogy. Identical urge, different cloak.)

How to Fight the Autumn Siren Call to Grad School

Alright, now for the good part:  how to not end up like me.

1) Start by accepting what you’re actually craving each autumn:  a return to a life you’ve outgrown. Allow yourself to grieve the loss of the rhythms of childhood and the comforts those rhythms brought.

As Meg Jay writes in The Defining Decade:

“Our twenties can be like living beyond time. There are days and weeks and months and years, but no clear way to know when or why any one thing should happen. It can be a disorienting, cavelike experience.” –Meg Jay

2) After grieving, create ways of infusing your current existence with hints of seasonality. It’ll take the edge off the false allure of autumn. For instance:

• Schedule a day-long clothes shopping trip every autumn (bonus:  take mom with you; nostalgia and financial support in one fell swoop)
• Go back to using a paper planner and choose an academic year one even though you now live on a calendar – or fiscal! - year
• Reinvigorate your office supplies every fall with a fresh infusion of pens and desk organizers. And some of those big rubber erasers. Just for kicks.

3) Make a concerted effort to construct the 3 P's – purpose, possibility, and predictability – for yourself. This is, of course, a humongous task. No wonder I devoted an entire website to the process.

All in all, do whatever you have to do to experience the clear path, opportunities, and “my life is all in order” feeling of your childhood autumns…without jumping into grad school. Your wallet, social life, and mental stability will thank you for it.

I’d love to hear you commit to one thing right now:  what are you going to do l to create a sense of purpose, possibilities and predictability this autumn – without entertaining the notion of going back to school? Tell me in the comments below!

Ready to jump into the creation of your 3 P's? There's no better time to start career & life coaching than in the fall! That said, I have room for only FOUR new coaching clients this September, so if you're ready for some Action & Accountability in your life, become one of those four by checking out my Coaching Page. ASAP!

The Great Fear of the Twenties: Wasting Our Potential

How often do you think about the potential of wasting your potential? Once a year? Once a month? Once a day? Once an hour? If you're anything like I was, that last choice rings the buzzer. If it comes with a parenthesis that says "or maybe more..."

I spent most of my twenties fearing I'd waste my potential. I mean, intensely fearing it. Thinking about it every time a room went quiet. Avoiding "successful" friends because they reminded me of it. Experiencing cardiovascular conditioning over it, without moving a single muscle.

Yet I never spoke this fear to anyone.

I'd picture myself old and gray, sitting on a porch talking to some faceless person, saying

"I could've been anything. I could've done so much with my life. And instead it all slipped by me."

I came to hate the word "potential" itself, resenting it and all that it symbolized. "Potential" was the concentrated pill containing crushed-up remnants of my hoped-for adult life.

"Potential" also feels so damn patronizing. Like, "oh, there's Sara. She has so much potential." And you just know that 9 times out of 10 that's said in that tone that implies "and she's not doing a frickin' thing about it."

I actually had a guidance counselor come up to me in high school and say, "I saw the colleges you applied to. Sure undershot your potential, didn't you?"

Did I? Well maybe in his book I did, but not in mine. I applied to schools that were a genuine "whole person" fit for me.

Which is how, for the most part, I lived my 20s - making choices that resonated with something deep within me and that squared with my awareness of my identity and deeply-held desires.

The rub was, I felt guilty about every single decision. Like I was "letting everyone down" by being true to me.

Like I was wasting my potential.

Smart people get PhDs, don't they? Star college students get high-paying jobs, don't they? Good daughters stay close to home, don't they?

At my core, I knew the answer to all of those questions is not necessarily. And that the answer for me personally was hell no.

Yet I felt pushed to live up to those stereotypical goals. Lest I waste my potential.

"Potential" felt like an imposition of another person's storyline on top of my unfolding story. (Cue Sara Bareilles' King of Anything).

I'm writing all of this not to complain but rather to say what someone might have said to me, had I had the guts to admit how much this fear ruled my life:  you do not have to live in fear of wasting your potential.

How do you break free?

By getting clear on this one key, vital, the-contentment-of-your-life-hinges-on-accepting-this-fact fact:

The only person who is going to be sitting in that rocking chair at 90 years old is you. Not your mom. Not your dad. Not your teacher or brother or best friend's aunt. YOU. What'll feel like wasting your potential then isn't having failed to live up to their standards for you. It's having lived someone else's story.

Period.

All clear? Good. Then you can move onto bigger and better things. Like figuring out what you want your story to be.

How to Not Be Pathetic: Stop Talking, Start Doing

Last week in a rental house along the Maine coast, I had a run-in with full-on patheticness. I’m not saying this to be judgmental. I’m saying it to be honest. And let's face it, we all could use a little honesty when it comes to being pathetic.

The Crux of the Pathetic

Here’s the scene:  It’s 10pm. In the small backyard of an adjoining rental house, eight twentysomething men sit shirtless around a bonfire. They swig on beers and blast music while talking incessantly about the “chicks” they’d hook up with if they went to the local nightclub. They laugh and brag and curse and boast, endlessly rehashing the moves they’d use to “snag” the girls.

Until 2am.

Every night.

If I could have summoned my ballsy alter ego, I would have marched into the glow of their bonfire and said, “Get the hell off your asses! Why don't you parade your pathetic selves down to that night club you’re talking about that's what? A fifteen minute walk away? And go TRY some of those moves you’re talking about. Then tomorrow you’ll actually have something to talk about. No, it probably won’t be about the “chicks” you “snagged." Instead it’ll be about something that actually matters – like WHY you can’t get “chicks” and the fundamentals you need to change to make an encounter with the opposite sex actually possible.”

What makes those twentysomethings pathetic, in my mind, isn’t their redux of a B-grade college movie motif, nor even their patently offensive objectification of women.

It’s their incessant talk with no action. That’s the crux of the pathetic.

Why We Slip Into Talking Instead of Doing

I don’t hesitate to label that gang of guys pathetic because I’ve been there. Not scoping nonexistent chicks (!), but lingering in looping chatter about a life I’m about to go out and live...once I’m done talking about it. Believe me, I know pathetic intimately.

It's a common trap to fall into because talk does help to feed our goals. The problem is that it’s too darn comfortable to get stuck in the talking phase.

Let me explain by sharing my view of the goal-pursuit process:

1. A goal enters our mind in half-baked, tentative form.
2. We cocoon around the sliver of a goal, keeping it to ourselves. At this point we make the decision to either let it blow away in the wind of distractions and fears, or to feed it with visionary thoughts that enable it grow into something of substance.
3. We hesitantly share the goal with one or two of our closest friends or relatives. The choice of confidants is crucial since the goal is now a tender pulsing mass that’s full of potential but can be crushed with the smallest doubting look.
4. If the goal is not obliterated by its early reveal, the goal gains strength from the “realness” of being put out there in spoken language in the world.
5. As the goal becomes less vulnerable, we share the goal more widely with people who are further from our inner circle of trust. This enables the goal to become even more fully real and worth working toward.
6. Finally the goal stands before us as a living, breathing entity and we take action to pursue it.

Look back over that list and identify how many of the items involve talking about the goal.

Three.

Half the list!

And how many involve DOING?

Just one.

No wonder we get confused and stuck. Talking is crucial to goal formation and pursuit.

But that tiny 1/6^th of the battle - the action stage – that’s where the money’s at.

How to Stop Talking and Start Doing

So how do you avoid being those pathetic guys on the shore, talking about a life that they aren’t bothering to try to live?

By taking an honest look at your life and doing the following:

1. Make a list of all of your goals, large and small. What are the things that are motivating, bothering and/or consuming your thoughts right now? Those are the basis for your goals.
2. Identify each goal’s stage. It’s unusual for all of our goals to be at the same stage simultaneously. Some you might be cocooning around, others might be half-formed, others might just be waiting to be acted upon. If you don’t know where your goals are, you can’t move them forward.
3. Make a plan to move each goal to their next stage. And then the stage after that. And after that. If your goals have stalled – especially in the “talking” phase, the most common site for lack of progress – it’s time to give them a kick in the rear. If you’d like, my alter ego could come and tell you to “get the hell off your ass.” (Since she's much more effective in the imagination than in the physical world, feel free to borrow her. Indefinitely.)

It is a mistake to try to substitute action for talk too early in the goal-pursuit process. That said, it’s way too easy to mistake talk for action.

My rule for determining when it’s time to move from talk to action? If I've said a goal to at least five people and find that it’s not changing form, I know it’s time to stop talking and start doing.

Otherwise, it's just pathetic. And believe me, nobody wears that well. Even in the light of a bonfire.

What do you do to keep your goals moving forward? In particular, how do you turn talk into action?

Where else to talk incessantly but beside a bonfire? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

3 Life Lessons from Einstein

While conducting research for my recent piece Are You Trying to Find Yourself or Construct Yourself?, I repeatedly stumbled upon life lessons from Einstein. He had fascinated me in my days as a physics major (back before my first surge of authenticity) because in many real ways he was the most nontraditional scientist, while also being the most brilliant. Thus it felt oddly comfortable to get back in touch with this man's great ideas, which extend far beyond the lab. Here are the life lessons he had to share about finding solutions, keeping balanced, and making space for important work. In other words, about all of the things with which we grapple here at Working Self!

Life Lesson #1:  Sudden Insights Come From Preparation

As we discussed recently, you can no more “find” who you are than Einstein could “find” the theory of relativity. It wasn’t written on some bathroom stall just waiting for him to happen by one day. “Oh my!” he’d exclaim upon seeing it all scrawled there, the superscripts hovering in bathroom-y bliss, “There it is! Now I know!”

It’s true that we often do experience a flash of insight – a moment when the answer we’ve been seeking suddenly appears in full form in our mind – and Einstein was famous for having such flashes of brilliance while bicycling. Insight is most likely to arrive while we’re doing something unrelated task that lets our mind wander – e.g., showering, hiking, doing the laundry you’ve put off for three weeks.

But here’s the trick to suddenly “finding” the answer:  you have to have put in a good deal of effort before that moment. It’s like a garden. One day, suddenly and without warning, your plants spring forth from the ground. But you have to have tilled and seeded and fertilized and watered first.

Einstein did his “garden preparation” through extensive reading of physics and philosophy. He became absorbed in the topics, marinating in the works’ words and dilemmas regularly and deeply. He put in the time long before any insights came his way.

"A new idea comes suddenly and in a rather intuitive way. That means it is not reached by conscious logical conclusions. But, thinking it through afterwards, you can always discover the reasons which have led you unconsciously to your guess and you will find a logical way to justify it. Intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience."  - Einstein

Life Lesson #2: You Have to Make Room for the Important Work

How nice for him, you may think, to have had time to stew in philosophy and the like, passing it so deeply through his core that it stirred wholly original thoughts within him.

In fact, Einstein didn’t have leisurely hours to do this work. And he wasn't paid to do it. He was reading, researching, and thinking while supporting his wife and small child on a meager salary from a full-time job as a patent clerk.

“One must not think of Einstein as a tranquil academic, brooding at leisure on weighty intellectual problems. Rather one must imagine him fitting his intellectual work into the interstices of a professional career and personal life that might have overwhelmed someone with a different nature.” - writer John Stachel

Einstein wasn’t all that much unlike a contemporary twentysomething – holding down a crappy job, trying to make ends meet, knowing there were bigger questions that needed answering but not knowing how the heck to fit it in.

As Einstein found, the only way to fit it in is simply by doing it. By keeping your family and professional drama to a minimum so you can do the important work of constructing a vision of who you are, what you value, and the impact you want to make on the world, large or small. You must hold down a job, you should keep an active social life, you need and hopefully want to attend to your family. But don’t put your real work – the work of finding you and the work you're meant to release into the world - on the backburner while you do it all.

Life Lesson #3: Remain Active At All Times

While it was a different physicist who famously said, "A body in motion stays in motion," it's certainly a statement with which Einstein agreed. And not just on the lab bench:

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving." - Einstein

Sitting around waiting for "the answer" to appear is the least likely way to find it. Whether that "answer" is who you are, what you're meant to do, or whether the work you're currently doing is the right fit, sitting around contemplating the question won't get you any closer to the solution.

We don't find answers by being in our heads, we find them by trying different possibilities out in the real world and seeing what sticks.

So get out there and ride your bicycle. It's the only way you'll stay upright.

Which of these life lessons resonates most for you? How come? (And if you have any great Einstein quotes to share, I'm all ears!)

Related articles

• Albert Einstein's advice to his son about learning.
• 10 AMAZING LIFE LESSONS ALBERT EINSTEIN Wants You To Learn [VIDEO]
• Albert Einstein Quotes
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• The Secret to Learning Anything: Albert Einstein's Advice to His Son
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For every new idea we create, I believe we have to read at least 50 times the amount. (Photo credit: afagen)

He's still joyfully riding in cities around the world. (Photo credit: adambowie)

What Do I Want to Do? 5 Books That Offer Answers

I'm obsessed with books that offer help me ponder the question "What do I want to do?" The less prescriptive, the better - I want to sort things out for myself, TYVM, but it is helpful to hear what's worked for others. Here are five books that I've dog-earred, scribbled upon, and carried from beach to board room and everywhere in between.

1. What Should I Do With My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question by Po Bronson

What It Is: Po Bronson spent significant chunks of time with seventy ordinary people in order to compile this lengthy, thought-provoking social documentary. The book provides detailed sketches of Americans grappling with questions of career, fulfillment, and purpose and lets you draw your own conclusions.

My Testimonial: This book popped onto shelves - and Oprah's couch - when I was smack-dab in the middle of debating whether to drop out of my fully-funded doctoral program. Reading Bronson's tales of everyday people who made changes in their lives gave me the courage to create my own defining moment. It wasn't long before I wrapped up my master's thesis research, gave notice, and set off to my dream state of Maine!

Favorite quotation: "This theme is going to reappear throughout: It's not easy / It's not supposed to be easy / Most people make mistakes / Most people have to learn the hardest lessons more than once. If that has been your experience, the people herein will comfort you. They did me. That alone was worth the trip."

2. Do What You Are: Discover the Perfect Career for you Through the Secrets of Personality Type by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger

What It Is: This hefty book enables you to quickly figure out your Myers-Briggs Type (you know, those four letter codes people always seem to know about themselves, like INFP or ENTJ). You can then turn to the chapter dedicated to your type and read career profiles, elements of career satisfaction, and ways to job search effectively using your personality strengths. Best of all, the authors lay out specific occupations frequently pursued by people from your type.

My Testimonial: This book gave me wisdom in spades throughout my twenties. My college roommate and I first bought a "dorm room" copy and then, after graduating, passed it through the mail depending on which of us felt lost at the time. The occupations listed for my type are DEAD ON; I've tried or explored most of them of my own accord, even when I've forgotten they were listed in "my chapter." I recommend this book to my Intro Psych students every single semester. (Besides, you don't want to be caught at a party not knowing your MB Type. Total loser moment.)

Favorite Quotation: "The right job enhances your life. It is personally fulfilling because it nourishes the most important aspects of your personality. It suits the way you like to do things and reflects who you are. It lets you use your innate strengths in ways that come naturally to you, and it doesn't force you to do things you don't do well (at least, not often!)."

3. What Now? by Ann Patchett

What It Is: Based on a commencement address she gave at her alma mater Sarah Lawrence College, novelist Ann Patchett (State of Wonder, Bel Canto) offers a refreshingly honest look at the winding path toward career and fulfillment. She explores her own ways of answering "What do I want to do?" while offering commencement-worthy nuggets of wisdom.

My Testimonial: Patchett is my favorite novelist, and I was an aspiring fiction writer myself at the time this book was released. I found it soothing to read that Patchett's road to literary stardom was littered with waitressing, odd jobs, and doubt, a confirmation that I wasn't the only one whose twenties didn't resemble the glamorous adult life we all envision.

Favorite Quotation: "Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

4. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth and Karen Dillon

What It Is: The book is based on a speech Harvard Business Professor Clayton Christensen gave to the Harvard Business School's graduating class. He had just overcome the type of cancer that had killed his father, and his brush with mortality made him urgently consider questions like "how do I find happiness in my career?" and "what is the role of relationships in my work and life?"

My Testimonial: Christensen is a no-nonsense business prof through and through. It's fun to watch him pair his love of theory and strategy with deep, philosophical questions. The result is practical, useful advice that has a "work it out your own way" twist. I haven't added a book to my list of Top "What Do I Want To Do" Books in almost a decade (and believe me, I've been looking!), so to finally find one worthy enough is testimonial enough. (And it even held up as a brainy beach read, as you can see here.)

Favorite Quotation: "When you were ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible...Your answers then were guided simply by what you thought would make you really happy. There were no limits. There are a determined few who never lose sight of aspiring to do something that's truly meaningful to them. But for many of us, as the years go by, we allow our dreams to be peeled away. We pick our jobs for the wrong reasons and then we settle for them. We begin to accept that it's not realistic to do something we truly love for a living. Too many of us who start down the path of compromise will never make it back. Considering the fact that you'll likely spend more of your waking hours at your job than in any other part of your life, it's a compromise that will always eat away at you."

5. I Could Do Anything if Only I Knew What it Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It by Barbara Sher

What It Is: Career counselor Barbara Sher pulls out all the self-improvement stops in this classic book. You simply can't talk about "what do you want to do" books without mentioning this one. Between the brief exercises, practical tips, and get-off-your-butt wisdom, it really is the starting point for most career fulfillment seekers.

My Testimonial: This is an oldie but goodie, published way back when I was in high school. Its tone and examples are targeted toward a middle-aged audience, but that didn't stop this "there has to be more out there" high schooler from loving it (it didn't hurt that my second-hand copy came with a handwritten erotic love note tucked inside...which is still there!). After finishing the book, I dreamed of creating my own version of the book that would speak to young people. Who knows, maybe one day I will.

Favorite Quotation: "Did you know that fewer people get depressed during war than in peacetime? In a war, everything is important. Day to day, you know exactly what to do. Your life may be frightening, but the struggle to survive gives you direction and drive. You don't waste any time figuring out what you're worth or what you're supposed to do with your life. You just try to keep alive, save your home, help your neighbors. The reason we love to watch films about people whose lives are in danger is because every move is loaded with meaning. When there's no emergency to rise to, we have to create goals that have meaning. You can create such goals, if you know what your dream is."

What did I miss? Let me know your favorite books that help you ponder "What do I want to do?"

The second edition of the Working Self Newsletter hits inboxes this Wednesday! It features an exclusive, full-length article about how to negotiate toward a career you'll love. If you're on the list, watch your inbox (including your "junk" box and "promotions" tab!). If you're not on the list, sign up now:

PS - Check out my latest guest post, published today on Inside Jobs:  Parents Don't Love Your College Major? 5 Ways to Get Them on Board

Related articles

• There's More to Life Than Being Happy
• Meaning of life and Mr. Frankl
• What now?
• New Grad Syllabus: Four Books to Help Jumpstart Your Life
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
• So I'm an ENTJ Parent....

Quarter Life Crisis Q&A

If you want to see someone get crazy enthusiastic about the quarter life crisis - I mean, arms flailing, camera bouncing, cheeks reddening - then check out the interview Nicole Denise conducted with me on the topic. To say I was "animated" while we were talking is an understatement. Don't believe me? Just look at the still image embedded below. <cringe> But there's good reason I get impassioned while talking about the quarter life crisis:

1. Having a quarter life crisis marked a major, wonderful turning point in own my life (as you'll hear on the video).
2. I strongly believe that the quarter life crisis can be an incredible (the best?) opportunity for positive change in the lives of twenty- and thirtysomethings.
3. I know, contrary to popular opinion, that having a crisis is a GOOD sign, not a bad one. It means that you're engaging with life and questioning your future rather than simply accepting what "others" say is best for you. In other words, you're making the time and space to find your true identity! That process should be celebrated, not lamented (or even worse, avoided).
4. I passionately believe that we can't do the work we're meant to do in the world unless we figure out who we are. Period.
5. Ergo, quarter life crises change the world. For the better.

Nicole interviewed me as part of her thoughtful, well-researched post called The Quarter Life Awakening: 20-Something Crisis as The Portal to Epiphany. I highly recommend you give it a read.

Then watch the 8-minute edited clip Nicole produced from our interview, in which she poses the following questions:

• What is your background?
• How did you find your true self?
• What does it feel like to be "not yourself"?
• How would you explain the symptoms of the quarter life crisis?
• What do you believe is the cause of the quarter life crisis?
• Is there a definite answer to identity crisis?
• What should come first:  thinking or acting?
• Do economic woes cause or affect the prevalence of the quarter life crisis?
• What is the solution to the quarter life crisis?

Want to know the answers? Then watch Ms. Ridiculously Enthusiastic give the answers!

When you're done, I want to hear from you in the comments: What are YOUR questions about the quarter life crisis? I'll gather the best Qs to address in future posts (or in embarrassing videos, whatever the case may be!)

Related articles

• Everything In Between: The Quarter Life Crisis
• Quarter life crisis-ing: Facing the inevitable
• A Quarter Life Crisis?
• To Embrace the Quarter-Life Crisis.
• Quarter Life Crisis
• Don't they know I'm in a quarter-life crisis?!

5 Ways to Gain Well Being From Your Life Story

In the grand search for well being and happiness, our sense of identity plays a starring role. We grapple with three major questions:

• Who am I?
• How did I come to be?
• Where is my life going?

The best way to take on these behemoths is by "constructing and internalizing a life story," according to eminent developmental psychologist Dan McAdams and a host of research in support of his theory.

In other words, we figure out who we are by writing a nonfiction narrative starring yours truly.

How Meaningful Life Stories Relate to Well Being

You've been naturally writing your life story since you were an adolescent, when you first became able to identify themes and causation in your personal tales:  "That guy I'm crushing on ignored me because my jeans are so Goodwill. That's just like last year, when mom made me wear those hand-me-down Keds."

As you can probably remember, adolescent stories aren't exactly meaningful.

That's why our twenties are all about figuring out who we are in a way that matters. It's no small task:  when we make meaning from our life stories, we enjoy greater psychological well being and higher self-understanding, compared to people with life stories that have little to no meaning.

"Through meaning making, people go beyond the plots and event details of their personal stories to articulate what they believe their stories say about who they are. Storytellers may suggest that the events they describe illustrate or explain a particular personality trait, tendency, goal, skill, problem, complex, or pattern in their own lives. In making meaning, the storyteller draws a semantic conclusion about the self from the episodic information that the story conveys." - McAdams and McLean

Given that making meaning from our personal narrative creates well being, the obvious question is how can we make meaning from our life stories? Here are five research-based answers.

1. Don't Just Tell Stories for Entertainment

Barstool stories are fun and definitely have their place in our lives (I, for one, wouldn't want to be around someone who is constantly trying to extract meaning from their life stories...which is perhaps why I married my opposite!). If you get hooked on only telling personal anecdotes to get a laugh instead of explaining yourself, you're less likely to create meaning and experience high well being.

Two of my friends come to mind. They always had an elaborate, hilarious anecdote to share for all gathered around, and gatherings weren't the same if they weren't there. These same people were deeply unhappy and dissatisfied with life, however, which you'd only discover if you happened to catch them alone. Perhaps this is one reason why comedians have high rates of depression.

Action Step: Balance your entertaining anecdotes with explanatory anecdotes - and make sure to cultivate friendships that let you share each.

2. Emphasize Your Ability to Control Your World

This is a biggie. If you can reconstruct your life stories to emphasize how much control you have over your world, the more well being you'll experience. In fact, studies show that rewriting your personal narrative to have more self-mastery, empowerment and achievement - aspects collectively called "agency" - is precisely what makes psychotherapy effective. I call this the "Becoming the Hero in Your Own Story" effect.

"Increases in personal agency preceded and predicted improvement in therapy. As patients told stories that increasingly emphasized their ability to control their world and make self-determined decisions, they showed corresponding decreases in symptoms and increases in mental health." - McAdams and McLean

Action Step: Consider how you're telling your life stories. Are you the victim in them, or are you active and impactful? If the former, be the editor of your life tale and rewrite that sucker. ASAP.

3. Consider Whether Friends & Family Accept Your Life Story

The following finding fascinates me:

"When important people in a person’s life agree with his or her interpretation of a personal story, he or she is likely to hold on to that story and to incorporate it into his or her more general understanding of who he or she is and how he or she came to be." - McAdams and McLean

This speaks volumes about the influence of our family, close friends, and significant others on our well being.

It also begs the question:  if the important people in your life don't agree with how we interpret our life stories, are we supposed to ditch them? Since research clearly shows that social integration is key to well being, that probably isn't the best choice. That said, I do believe in pruning friendships that consistently bring more misery than support, and friends' acceptance of your life stories may be one indicator of friendships that have run their course (or were a bad choice from the start).

Action Step: From here on out, actively choose friends and significant others who accept and confirm your interpretation of your experiences. It's your story, after all. Don't let anyone else be the author of your narrative.

Important caveat:  you do NOT want to surround yourself with people who accept your stories if they're full of "why me?" and "life is horrible" - these stories need to be challenged. But if you're telling thoughtful life stories, you shouldn't feel attacked and challenged. Period.

4. Identify the Redemption in Your Stories

Another way to create well being is to find the good in the bad. Psychologists call these a "redemption sequence" and they're important:

Redemption sequences "may sustain the hope or confidence that is needed to weather short-term setbacks while reinforcing long-term commitments to improving the lives of others." - McAdams and McLean

It may be impossible to find the "silver lining" while withstanding a hard time; in fact, feeling the full intensity of negative emotions in the moment may enhance well being. But once the moment has passed, do the hard work of making meaning, one element at a time.

Action Step: After a negative life event - such as an illness, loss or disppointment - make an effort to find the good that arose from the hard time. For instance, are you closer to your family, or know something new about yourself, or feel like you can take on different challenges in the future?

5. Find Attentive Listeners

Finally, studies show that "attentive and responsive listeners cause tellers to narrate more personally elaborated stories compared with distracted listeners." This matches Point #2's take on psychotherapy's effectiveness.

Simply having a designated listener who reflects your feelings and asks clarifying questions can help you create meaning from your life story and find greater well being.

Action Step: Identify the friends and/or relative who consistently act as attentive listeners for your stories and make an effort to spend more time with them. You could also turn to a life coach, psychotherapist, or other professional. No matter how you find it, make sure you're being heard. It's the only way you'll hear yourself.

Now I Want to Hear From You

What do you do to create meaning from your life story? Or when have you actively changed your life story, and why did you do it?

What you have to say could make a big difference in another reader's life, so please share!

Source: McAdams, D. P, & McLean, K. C. (2013). Narrative Identity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(3), 233-238.

Related articles

• 30 Reasons To Keep On Keeping On
• A Life Unedited
• CREATE a Meaningful Life
• Live a meaningful life! (and why "What would they say about me at my funeral?" is a bad question)
• Five of Psychology's Most Practical Tips
• Man searching for 'the meaning of life' steals upwards of 800 books from a single store

Chevy Chase was the life of the party, but behind closed doors he suffered debilitating depression. (Photo credit: Alan Light)

You'll hear yourself best with an attentive listener at your side. Photo Credit: Leonard John Matthews