PIVOT: MAKING SENSE OF YOUR JOB CHANGE
For the past seven years, I’ve been on a steep climb to adapt my skills and work experience to the for-profit world. It’s been the kind of pivot you’re supposed to make in your 30’s, when you have time to matriculate through Hard Knocks U, to emerge on the other side with a resume of wins and losses, all of which translate into positions with more responsibility and higher pay. And ideally, deeply satisfying work. However, this pivot I started when I was 47.
While I don’t know where you’re at today, I know this: Besides an unexpected job change having the power to deal a death-blow to fear (soup chef Jack Canfield has it right: “everything you want is on the other side of fear”), this transition you may have feared could turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to you.
I speak of what I know.
My own journey of job transitions has been more a mission of survival than a roadmap for job promotions, provoked more from necessity than aspiration, more from crisis than career advancement planning.
Nevertheless, because of my stubborn optimism and more importantly God’s grace and leading, I have ended up in jobs that have moved me closer and closer to my calling, even while each assignment has been very distinct from the others.
I will unpack these take-aways in the blogs ahead, but this will give you a fly-over view of the land:
Here are 7 Career Truths I’ve discovered along the way (and hinted at in the thumbnail photo of the climber hanging off a rock):
The setting sun of the Mojave Desert silhouettes a climber clinging to the edge of a rock overhang in Joshua Tree National Park.
1. Don’t work so hard, and make peace with “not knowing”–it is the path to astonishment.
2. Celebrate each person’s unique wiring, even as you come to understand patterns of personality types that help you communicate.
3. When life events shove you down, push back back really hard.
5. Be willing to do things out of order, challenge the status quo. You can do it, or someone will do it for you.
4. Remember “Career” is a trap–just provide for your family and keep making decisions (some of them small and hardly consequential in the moment) that take you closer to your ideal work, and not away from it.
6. Who, who, who. It’s always about who. While revenue goals are important (we don’t have jobs without them), at the end of the day, it’s the growth in people, among people, through people that matters. Everything else, ultimately, fades.
7. It’s what has been trained into you that comes out–not the goals and expectations that you set for yourself. Therefore, goals need to lead to new ways of thinking and acting in order to have their greatest effect, and thinking and acting the right ways have to be practiced–and practiced.
At the time I didn’t fully appreciate how important this decision would be—to “retool” for new roles in the for-profit marketplace—I did have a hunch. In fact, just one day before I found out I was on a massive list of layoffs at Focus on the Family, I started an MBA. With the downturn of the markets in 2007-08, and plummeting donor funds tracking with that decline, I knew I needed to reposition my work experience (from teacher to pastor to non-profit leader/executive).
The fact is, few of us know when we start out in a career exactly where that path will lead. Thank goodness most of us don’t choose the job we’ll have the rest of our lives, when we are too young to know what our passions and skills and talents and values are (or will become).
That was back in September of 2009, and since then I have successfully worked in head of marketing roles, first at a fast-growing software company and then at a financial advisory services firm, and third in a marketing agency I started (www.MKFStrategicMarketing.com).
And now, once again, I am pivoting.
Pivot. That’s something I did cutting inside an offensive tackle as a quarterback on a high school football field. It was move I made planting one foot, and jabbing the other, on the way to the basket for a lay-up on…a college court in the Philippines one summer (a long way from my UC Davis undergrad world in California), an experience I later came to understand was really about
learning to give my life away, one pair of basketball shoes at a time. All of that was a lifetime ago.
Pivot’s not really what you have to do when your life is progressing along as planned: degree(s) hanging on the wall, LinkedIn network lighting up like a Christmas tree, Facebook photo updates telling your story of exotic places and interesting people. You with family and friends—and sometimes even with famous people—of fascinating places and fancy dinners and smiling family and beautiful friends. Pivot is sometimes the best you can when you find yourself on a career path headed for a big, giant “Caution: Area Under Construction” sign with no detour marked out.
Today, for me, it’s a word with layers, metaphorical nuance, metonymy– Career: Path. Pivot: Career change. It’s the word I use because, frankly, it’s the positive angle on figuring out what to do when there are not any clear paths emerging.
The fact is often job changes involve the raw emotions that come from uncertain career paths and unpredictable life events and unbelievable turns of events and shake us to our foundations. I’m sharing my story specifically because so many of my friends are going through some kind of career transition, some I would even call a crisis. It’s also true that an especially difficult career challenge isn’t a lot different from one friend’s struggle to pick up the pieces to his life following a divorce he didn’t ask for.
Or, a relative’s grappling with how much he loathes his state government job, his 3-year target date to retirement more a prison sentence than a race to the finish line. Or, my friend’s continual struggle to pay the bills with a job that will never provide enough income to meet his family’s needs, even though he is doing something he is passionate about. Or the gal who was unfairly and unceremoniously let go simply because the owner couldn’t make up her mind about a business decision. Or, a guy I’ve known for a while whose addiction is coming home to roost while he frantically buys time in his marriage to address his compulsions, take responsibility for the pain he’s caused, and somehow, someway, make sense of the roots of his addiction, a shattered relationship with his father who’s been gone for many years.
In each challenging circumstance, while it might be an analytical way to describe deeply personal challenges, a pivot is exactly what’s needed to create a new direction, with new momentum of hope and purpose.
For me, the circumstances certainly have been unpredictable–messy at times. Even as a tenacious optimist, I have to admit the past seven years have been disorienting: Sleepless nights despite exhaustion. Too often desk-bound and sedentary, resulting in inevitable weight gain. And seasons of being dispirited, my optimism beat down.
After writing The 2:10 Project in 2011-12, my life took a marked turn away from non-profit and ministry work. Instead, I found myself launched like a rocket into 50 to 60-hour work weeks, week-in and week-out a series frenetic sprints of problem-solving and hiring new team members and campaign building and new website launches and email newsletters and trade-shows and webinars and new print collateral and KPI dashboards and innovation retreats and market research reports and spreadsheets and budgets and training employeees and strategic off-sites and PR plans and social media blitzes and senior management discussions—and debates and arguments—and lots and lots of coffee and eating out and late nights and early mornings.
And, for the most part, while I was in it I loved it.
Why? That is something I am thinking and praying a lot about these days. I have a couple of good hunches I’m tracking down. The answer is deep, and it’ll bring vibrant, colorful and distinct images of clarity and insight, that I am sure. Like so many times of transition in the past, It will be what God has been after to change in my life. Primarily, that is what the pivot is for–to figure out who you are on the inside, which is far more important than yours or my next career step.
For now, I am focused on the circumstances, the pivot, and while I can hear God’s invitation to come away with Him to talk about adrenaline and bosses and goals and paycheck amounts and retirement accounts and credit card balances and margin and electronic devices and…and…fruitfulness. At the heart of it all is God’s determination to make me more into His likeness, and to be fruitful and to flourish.
Flourishing.
This career pivot is learning what it really means to grow and bear fruit, to flourish. What does it tell me about my Creator, who He is and what He is like, that He has created me to bear fruit that is for heaven AND for earth, for the now and the not yet.
And get this, I am understanding that God is really, really practical about all this fruit-bearing.
When I get up in the morning, go to work, and expend my time and energy–the two resources every person has been given in life–am I living for a kind of flourishing that is tied into God’s grand Kingdom epic story of intrigue and honor and adventure and significance? Or, instead, am I living in a default setting that makes the investment of my time and resources all about a my own or even others” “personal value” scorecard that has to do with business accomplishments and profits only.
As in the past, God will uncover for me the “interpretive keys” to this time of my life. And just as He has done in the past, He will heal and strengthen. And I will be different again–in fact, I’ll be more myself than the day before.
So, my pivot now comes after the painful and disorienting experience of the job loss in 2009. And, it comes after parting ways with my last employer, amicably for sure, but not without a conviction on both sides that the relationship just wasn’t what it was at the beginning. This last one happened about 4 months ago.
So now I am back to work 110% and loving the work I have–mainly to be involved in building the follow up to The Truth Project. Compared to the Focus down-sizing, this one’s different. Maybe, it’s that I’m different.
The pivot I made last month was in rejoining Del Tackett for the follow-up to The Truth Project. I’m grateful that this time my return to this work also catalyzes a core calling in my life: helping others find their place in God’s story. That’s what the follow-up to The Truth Project, called The Engagement, will be about. Helping people be right where God has called them—and to live fruitful and flourishing lives, giving themselves away for what is most important to Jesus. No small order. (If you are interested in reconnecting with Del and the TP community, visit www.DelTackett.com, a great site for resources, connecting with other TP folks, and hearing the latest updates for the creation of The Engagement and other resources underway.)
It’s not that the marketing work I was doing in for-profit settings was less valuable than the work I’ll be doing in the days ahead. I am convinced the most valuable work any of us can do is the work God gives us to do—whether that is farming a section of land, or building marketing campaigns for a software company, or working out the engineering specs for a new office building, or laying a pipe, or welding a trailer, or counseling a young couple, or balancing a budget, or serving a restaurant patron, or designing a new brochure, or teaching a class of 5th graders, or… you get the idea… it is God’s gift of work that is the truly valuable investment of our time.
That is some context. Next blog I’ll get on to unpacking the “7 Career Truths I’ve Discovered Along the Way.”
