A demanding job is sometimes the safest place to hide from your true feelings. In Corporate America, she had been a financial auditor and internal consultant, squeezing divisions for more profit. She bossed people around, acting like the expert. She transferred between divisions, including stints in New York and Hong Kong for two years, before settling in Cincinnati so she could be closer to home.
One day she made plans to attend her younger brother’s dress rehearsal for an upcoming play. He was a senior down in Lexington. The play didn’t start until 8 p.m. She would finish work early, drive down and make it in time. At 5 p.m., she was summoned to a conference call. The call droned on endlessly. Evan watched the clock, panicking, suffocating. She snuck out.
Her brother and fellow students had adapted a book to the stage. The book was Frank X. Walker’s “Affrilachia,” about the African American experience in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. The students danced, had a good time, improvised. Evan had never seen her brother’s work before. How talented he was!
“They seemed so free, so spirited, and happy. I wanted a taste of it. And that was it. My eyes were opened. Seeing him, I knew I couldn’t do this kind of work any more. I went in and quit the very next day. With no prospects or plans for the future.”
I asked, “Did you really just quit? Cold?” I’d found that people used this phrase when it was often more complicated.
“I told them I had some personal issues going on. They told me if I went to therapy, I could take a leave of absence. I had no intention of going back. But I thought the therapy would be good for me.”
Evan was aware that she’d mistook her career for her life. So in Louisville she built a life with plenty of room – room to read, room to socialize, room for love (there’d never been time for love!), room to learn about her roots from her parents, room to build a tighter bond with her parents, room for complexity and ambiguity, room to exercise regularly. Room to take classes in art, psychology, and writing. Most of all, it was a life with room for emotional closeness and introspection. The kind of life in which her career was going absolutely nowhere, the kind of life that MBAs often sneer at, the kind of life that might provoke the comment, “You want to find yourself? Look in the mirror! Now get back to work!”
Sometimes people don’t need a new profession, they just need a better life outside work. So often, we use the demands of our job as an excuse for not having that life. The truth is, we’re afraid of rejection from would-be friends, our relationships with our family are strained, we don’t feel cool enough, we don’t think we quite belong. Meanwhile, our work is always happy to have us. It’s easy, emotionally, even as we take pride in how supposedly “hard” we have to work. It’s far more threatening to slow down and listen to needs that have been ignored.
If you ask the wrong question, you’ll get the wrong answer. Leela de Souza found fulfillment when she stopped asking what will make her happy and instead asked “to what could I devote my life?” Evan Hambrick stopped looking for her needs to be met entirely by her career and realized the answers she’d been looking for were in her personal life.
Reference book: What should I do with my life: Po Bronson
http://www.pobronson.com/WSIDWML_Evan_Hambrick.htm
One day she made plans to attend her younger brother’s dress rehearsal for an upcoming play. He was a senior down in Lexington. The play didn’t start until 8 p.m. She would finish work early, drive down and make it in time. At 5 p.m., she was summoned to a conference call. The call droned on endlessly. Evan watched the clock, panicking, suffocating. She snuck out.
Her brother and fellow students had adapted a book to the stage. The book was Frank X. Walker’s “Affrilachia,” about the African American experience in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky. The students danced, had a good time, improvised. Evan had never seen her brother’s work before. How talented he was!
“They seemed so free, so spirited, and happy. I wanted a taste of it. And that was it. My eyes were opened. Seeing him, I knew I couldn’t do this kind of work any more. I went in and quit the very next day. With no prospects or plans for the future.”
I asked, “Did you really just quit? Cold?” I’d found that people used this phrase when it was often more complicated.
“I told them I had some personal issues going on. They told me if I went to therapy, I could take a leave of absence. I had no intention of going back. But I thought the therapy would be good for me.”
Evan was aware that she’d mistook her career for her life. So in Louisville she built a life with plenty of room – room to read, room to socialize, room for love (there’d never been time for love!), room to learn about her roots from her parents, room to build a tighter bond with her parents, room for complexity and ambiguity, room to exercise regularly. Room to take classes in art, psychology, and writing. Most of all, it was a life with room for emotional closeness and introspection. The kind of life in which her career was going absolutely nowhere, the kind of life that MBAs often sneer at, the kind of life that might provoke the comment, “You want to find yourself? Look in the mirror! Now get back to work!”
Sometimes people don’t need a new profession, they just need a better life outside work. So often, we use the demands of our job as an excuse for not having that life. The truth is, we’re afraid of rejection from would-be friends, our relationships with our family are strained, we don’t feel cool enough, we don’t think we quite belong. Meanwhile, our work is always happy to have us. It’s easy, emotionally, even as we take pride in how supposedly “hard” we have to work. It’s far more threatening to slow down and listen to needs that have been ignored.
If you ask the wrong question, you’ll get the wrong answer. Leela de Souza found fulfillment when she stopped asking what will make her happy and instead asked “to what could I devote my life?” Evan Hambrick stopped looking for her needs to be met entirely by her career and realized the answers she’d been looking for were in her personal life.
Reference book: What should I do with my life: Po Bronson
http://www.pobronson.com/WSIDWML_Evan_Hambrick.htm
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