Category Archives: Career

A ‘Braided’ Lifestyle

November 20, 2014 By in Career Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The other day I came across the idea of a “braided” career on Penelope Trunk’s website. Penelope is a founder of multiple start-ups including her most recent one Quistic, a site dedicated to helping people discover their next career moves. She now lives on a farm in Wisconsin with her husband and kids. She has a graduate degree in English, played professional beach volleyball, and taught herself to code. Umm…awesome. I was so impressed by her wide range of experiences and ability to not be pigeonholed by one experience.

About seven years ago, she wrote an article on her website in which she coined the term “braided career.” I so wish I had read this in 2007, when I was 24! I would have been three years out of college, and so in need of this advice.

In this article, she says unequivocally, “The most important thing in your life is the people you love, so you need to figure out how to create a work life that will accommodate that.” It’s an obvious statement, to me at least, but I think a lot of people neglect the nitty-gritty of what this actually means.

She goes on to coin the term “braided career,” writing:

“The best way to make sure you will have time and money to create the life you want is to have what I am going to start calling a braided career. Intertwine the needs of the people you love, with the work you are doing, and the work you are planning to do, when it’s time for a switch.” – Penelope Trunk, Letter to new graduates. And how about a braided career?

Can I just tell you how much I love this term? It’s such a perfect descriptor of this new career landscape many of us are navigating.

I get the impression that this post was tailored to millennials having quarter-life crises, BUT it’s absolutely applicable to anyone at any stage in their career. A key takeaway of this article is that a braided lifestyle is almost always going to be in transition because our needs and the needs of our loved ones are always in transition. It means we can’t be afraid to ditch a 70-hour a week job when it’s not aligning with our values for, let’s say, time with friends and family. We need to not let fear guide our decisions, and instead put our values first.

“It feels like you’re all over the place, it feels like you have no plan, it feels like you’re always about to spend your last cent. But you are learning to create stability through transition. You can become a master of transition and you are achieve the thing you want most: A work life that supports the values you hold dear – time, family, friends, community, passion, and fun.”

For me, the key takeaway is that we must learn to be okay with a constantly evolving career.  Like she says, stability through transition.

When and “If” to Course-Correct your Career

November 18, 2014 By in Career 3 Comments

How certain are you that the career path you’re working towards is one that will make you happy? When I worked at film studios after college, the question I asked myself was: “Would I want the job my boss or VP of the department has?” For me, that answer was always no. That’s one of the ways I realized I needed to find a way to write full-time or just find something that would make me feel at least somewhat fulfilled. This basically led to my decision to go to graduate school.

But now, I find myself again unsure if what I’m working so desperately towards (writing for movies and TV) is what will make me happy. Because continuing on, I’d most likely have to live in LA for at least five more years, and I don’t love it here, in fact, at points I think it makes me downright unhappy. Also, from what I’ve seen about how television shows and movies get made, all of the requisite bullshit might drive me to an early grave, or at least to indulge in an unhealthy amount of gin and tonics.

I keep asking myself, why do I find myself so unhappy this quarter at school? What I once found incredible joy and release in (writing) brings me great anxiety now. I’ve been told it’s because I’m in a very competitive program where we’re constantly talking about writing and the industry, and that that environment is not conductive to writing.

I don’t have a definitive answer. Friends tell me to soul-search. But how does one soul search to get to the answer? Should I take a long weekend of meditation or a solo hike down the Pacific Coast Trail like Cheryl Strayed in Wild? I’m a bit of a weenie when it comes to camping, and too antsy to do a weekend of meditation. So I think for me, the answer is closest to this lovely piece of advice from the poet Rilke, who has always been a personal favorite writer of mine:

“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Maybe you just have to keep going, making teeny-tiny course corrections every day. Because course-correcting allows for growth. It’s also a really important life skill to master.

So the question I leave you with is this: Are you sure where you want to go is worth it? This is an important question to ask, and if you’ve been chugging ahead towards a specific goal for a long time, you may neglect even re-evaluating this question, thinking to yourself like I did, “Of course this is what I want, I’ve wanted this for so long.”

But you’re not who you were five years ago, even last week. So maybe it’s worth another look.

Choosing the Easy Career

November 15, 2014 By in Career Tags: , 6 Comments

Whenever I get blood tests, there’s always a chance I’ll faint. Even if no one’s sticking me with a needle, I may hit the floor from even simply hearing talk of medical exams or blood vessels.

I visited a relative in the hospital last year. A doctor came up to me to explain the testing and examinations they were doing. In the middle of our conversation, I began to hear the familiar ringing in my ears, and my vision started to blur over. “Excuse me,” I said to the doctor, and walked down the hospital hallway. I stood in a corner and tried to make the dizziness stop before I fainted.

I can never be a doctor.

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I sometimes work at medical shows…but I feel fine there. I haven’t fainted yet, anyway.

 

I have similar issues when I fly. During takeoff and landing, I will turn away from whoever I’m talking to. I will put down the book if I’m reading, or look solidly away from my phone. I may close my eyes. These are all preventative tactics I discovered over the years which stop me from developing motion sickness. On boats, these tactics still don’t work, and I have to take dramamine…which still may not work.

I can never be a flight attendant. Nor can I work on a ship.

There are certain careers that just don’t come naturally. You can always excel at a job if you put your mind to it, but sometimes it may be better to forsake certain vocations that are extremely easy for others but super difficult for you.

Not always, of course. If I really wanted to become a doctor or a flight attendant, I guess I could try to fight my natural sickness. But there are many people who don’t get sick at all from these things. They have a natural advantage.

There are less black and white career choices that cause a lot of confusion. I took a computer science class in college and really enjoyed it. However, I was horrible at programming. I just didn’t have a knack for it. Programs that took me two hours to create took many of my classmates 10 minutes. Sure, I’d eventually make the program work, and maybe I’d get faster if I kept at it, but it wasn’t the natural way my brain worked. I got so extremely frustrated with computer programming that I ended my minor in Computer Science and minored in Psychology instead.  Still, I wish I’d stuck it out longer– computer programming is something I still really want to do.

Then there’s acting. I love acting. I’m good at acting. But right now I don’t want it enough to go through the ‘business of acting’ – to act as a career. Some people will give up anything to be an actor- they’ll sacrifice, they’ll go through rejection after rejection, they’ll surrender time and money for quite awhile. And I admire the heck out of them. And I want to want it. But I just don’t want it enough. Especially not to go through all that. Not now, anyway.

Are you happy with your chosen career path? Or are you in a field or at a job where you feel like you’re fighting your natural instincts every day? I’m not saying it’s never worth the fight. Sometimes it totally is, if you want it bad enough. But pick your battles carefully. Look for the balance between what you’ve always been good at and what you’re willing to sacrifice for. And remember that many tasks which seem simple to you may be the same ones that cause others to faint dead away.

 

Restarting In Your Thirties

November 12, 2014 By in Career, Health and Wellness Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Has your computer ever stopped working? Perhaps it completely froze up after you tried to download something, or the timer kept spinning when you attempted to install a new operating system? Were there times when you couldn’t fix the problem? Did you have the urge to take the whole beautiful machine and just throw it on the floor?

Last week I was working at an event in New Orleans where all technology kept breaking down. We had an Apple TV, various iPads, spotty wifi, scanners, lots of sound equipment, HDMI cables, bluetooth, and more all used in our multiple presentations throughout the day. Various times, after troubleshooting a problem for awhile ourselves, we’d break down and have a tech person come over and look at things. More often than not, the solution ended up being:

1. Hold down button to force close device.

2. Count to ten.

3. Push button again to turn on device.

That was it. Then it would be smooth sailing once again. I’d say about 70% of the time, that was all it took. After catching on to this deceptively simple trick, I was troubleshooting issues like a pro, and we had a lot less need for tech support. Strangely enough, people kept commenting on how tech savvy I was, even when I explained the solution to them. 70% of the time, it’s such a simple answer!!

When I got back to New York after the event two days ago, I was exhausted. However, I went to bed really late and didn’t get enough sleep, so I was even more tired yesterday. Still, I put some major items on my to do list for the day. Since I finally had a day off, I was going to attack the list, which included ‘write 3 articles, meditate, switch summer/winter clothes, clean out closet, go for 7 mile run, cook lunches for the week, unpack suitcases and do laundry, clean out email inbox, return all emails. These items seemed pretty basic to me, and I was sure I could get them done in a day. But instead of doing any of them, I forced myself out of bed and wandered my apartment like a maniac, sitting down to meditate and then getting up immediately. I turning on the stove and then turned it off. Sat down, got up, opened the laptop, closed it again. Turned on the shower faucet, turned it off. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt jittery and anxious. An hour or two went by and nothing got accomplished. I berated myself for wasting precious time and made myself even more anxious.

Then I remembered all the ‘broken’ technology this weekend. I felt broken.

And then I thought about my solution. It had worked 70% of the time before: Turn it off. Wait. Turn it back on.

I scrapped my to do list. I lay in bed. I stared at the wall.

Then I opened to a blank page and wrote:

1. Shower

2. Meditate

3. Take care of self.

4. Enjoy day.

I stared at the paper. “I can do this.” It was actually still difficult. I found it hard to move, but eventually I dragged myself into the shower.

With that simple action, I started to move forward, and afterwards I turned on my meditation music and stayed seated. When I finished, I stared at the ceiling again for awhile. Then I watched a show on Netflix. Then I went and met a friend for dinner. I listened to podcasts on the subway. My shoulders slowly unclenched. Then I slept for almost 12 hours last night… I must’ve been pretty tired.

Today I feel slightly better than yesterday, although I’m still prioritizing a careful need for rest. And for time.

Sometimes solutions are as simple as turning off and turning back on again. Meanwhile, let yourself enjoy the off moments in between. Sometimes you just need to restart. Try it for yourself- it seems to work 70 percent of the time.

 

 

A humorous look at the 30’s

November 11, 2014 By in Career 2 Comments

Two Sundays ago, there was a great op-ed in the NY Times called “The Terrible 32s” written by Kate Greathead and Teddy Wayne. The title immediately drew me in, because I’m exactly 32 years old myself and I read anything and everything about this life stage, including way too many BuzzFeed listicles. You can kind of guess what the article is about from the title – a humor piece about life in your early 30’s.

Here’s the link:

The Terrible 32s

You can get a taste for it from the first line:

“The Terrible 32s are a perfectly normal stage in your youngish adult’s development, characterized by cranky self-pity over the discrepancy between the life she has and the one she feels entitled to based on popular-culture narratives and her peers’ achievements, such as those of Laura, who recently landed a big promotion, and maybe it’s worth calling her to see if there’s an opening at her company?”

Being 32 myself, I thought this was both hilarious and comforting. The authors poke fun of MFA programs with little post-grad career prospects, hate-reading Facebook wall posts, and more. Have I made you want to read this yet?

All jokes aside, the truth is that not only do we all have different ideas of success, but we all have different timelines for success. Some of my favorite playwrights and authors didn’t even publish work until their fifties or sixties. My classmates and I often talk about how challenging it can be when we hear about all peers getting literary managers or agents, selling scripts, winning awards, etc. and how it makes us feel like we’re behind somehow. What helps is remembering that we’re all on our own journeys. Cliche but true.

And after all, if other people are achieving success in your chosen field, it means it’s possible for you too. When a classmate gets a top-notch agent, I think, okay – there’s hope for me, too.

Help! I’m 30 and Never Followed My Childhood Dream!

October 31, 2014 By in Career Tags: , , , , 1 Comment

There was this episode of “How I Met Your Mother” where Ted and the gang all realize that they may never accomplish “someday” childhood career dreams they’re all still holding onto.

Someone had always wanted to be a painter, someone else a rockstar, and then there were a few really ridiculous ideas…I can’t remember all of the dreams. The gang reminisces about the career pursuits they once longed for. Some of them try to pursue the dreams once again in order to turn them into a reality. They realize they’ve all been hoping to accomplish their childhood dreams ‘one day.’ By the end of the half hour, they let the dreams go, and keep on the path they were on before. The moral seems to be: we need to put those childhood dreams to rest for something better to take hold in our lives.’

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Lily wants to be a painter. Barney wants to be…a knight? Who knows? Hahaha, he’s pretty funny no matter what.

 

I was never satisfied with that episode. I think one of the reasons it got under my skin was that my career path has taken such a different turn from what I’d originally expected. When I watched that episode, I wondered if I’d given up on my childhood career dream. Am I still holding on to the belief that I’ll one day pick up my former dream again? Is that belief false?

Right now, I’m a self-employed Corporate Spokesperson and Product Specialist (to be better explained in another post), and I work in a lot of different industries, traveling at least half the time. I really enjoy what I do. When I don’t ponder dream careers and childhood ‘what I want to be when I grow up’s”, I feel a deep satisfaction with my job….for now. But then I think along the lines of: ‘Am I pursuing my dreams?’ ‘Is my inner child satisfied?’ ‘Do I know what my career dreams are?’ The questions lead me down all sorts of analytical paths.

I wonder what it means to feel satisfied right now while not pursuing my childhood dream. 

I wonder what my career dream really is. I always thought I wanted to be an actor- but that’s not my dream at the moment. What do I make of that? Have I given up? Was it never really my dream?

I think of the famous men and women who began what became their ‘defining career start’ later in life. The long list of people includes Vera Wang (40 when she entered the fashion industry), Henry Ford (57 when he created the Model T), Suze Orman (36 when she started her financial group), Gene Hackman (37 when he got his first film role), Colonel Sanders (62 when he franchised Kentucky Fried Chicken), Stan Lee (38 when he created his first comic: The Fantastic Four), Julia Child (50 when her first cookbook came out), Laura Ingalls Wilder (65 when the “Little House on the Prairie” books came out)….and many more.

Some of these people pursued a childhood dream that was finally accomplished late in life, and others ended up on a completely new career path…or two or three. I’m sure all of them had moments of confusion about the paths they were on. I’m sure they had many more moments of feeling like they failed. But the important part was that they kept on, proving that they were trying even while possibly failing and failing again.

Right now, I’m satisfied with my career. I’m not pursuing my childhood dream, but it’s not what I want at the moment. And for now, all I can do is listen to my gut. There are times when I’m filled with doubt, and times when I feel confused, but I find clarity in trusting myself and continuing forward, trying to be brave enough to fail and fail again. I make changes as I go, add and subtract, and above all, I continue questioning.

Careers twist and turn, and it’s both okay to pursue your childhood dream with a vengeance, or to let it go to make room for other dreams…or then to pick it back up again years later. Stay honest with yourself, know it’s never too late, and let yourself question your dreams, both old and new.

 

Living with Paradoxes

October 25, 2014 By in Career Leave a comment

Two days ago, I was on the bus and a homeless man got on. He carried a rolled-up blanket, three plastic bags, and wore some sort of Scottish looking kilt. Not a strange sight at all for a city bus in Los Angeles. I’ve also seen this particular man taking naps at the Big Blue Bus benches around Santa Monica so I think my assumption that he is homeless is probably accurate.

But, here’s what surprised me and got me to look a little deeper. He also carried two dry cleaning bags. When I looked closer, I saw that the bags contained crisp black suits. I couldn’t help but find this surprising. It’s interesting that he chose to spend his money on dry cleaning, but also ambitious that he would do this, maybe this small gesture and choice would help him land a job after an interview.

For me, the image of this homeless man carrying dry cleaning bags reminded me of the paradoxes we live with every day.

As I’ve started to embrace my 30’s, I’m finding that there are more and more paradoxes in life. For me, one of the most challenging paradoxes has to do with my writing career. I’m the type of person who reads self-help books and believes in positive thinking. Yes, I’ve read “The Secret” and I do believe there’s some truth to it. So I sometimes visualize myself working in a TV writer’s room, feeling financially secure and creatively productive. But I also am working on accepting myself and realizing there are many external factors that will play a role in whether or not this dream happens for me. For a very long time, I thought that I simply wasn’t working hard enough – I wasn’t putting in the hours to my writing which is why I wasn’t writing for Shonda Rhimes or Jason Katims (Parenthood, Friday Night Lights, About a Boy). But the truth is – there’s a very real “market” out there, and the market may not want to buy my work.

Trying to hold both of these ideas in my head at the same time is a challenge. And I think it’s a great challenge of life, especially as we get older – learning to live within the paradoxes.

Egg Freezing Procedure Covered by Employers Apple and Facebook

October 16, 2014 By in Career, Health and Wellness Leave a comment

You’ve probably heard the news that Facebook and Apple are now offering to pay for an egg freezing procedure for their female employees. Essentially, this policy was put in place to help women free up time to focus on their careers… without the stress of declining fertility and the pressure to have a child stat. You can read more details about their new free egg freezing policies in Bloomberg Business Week’s thorough article: Later, Baby: Will Freezing Your Eggs Free Your Career?

The procedure costs anywhere from $7,000 to $12,000 plus storage fees, which run about $1,000 yearly. The majority of insurers do not cover this procedure.

I’m all for women having flexibility and choice when it comes to deciding when to have children. As someone who’s nearly 33 years old, I know firsthand the stress of wanting to have children but also wanting to get further in my career; It feels like this heavy invisible weight I carry around, knowing I have to make this very important decision soon. For me, egg freezing is not an option, mainly because I don’t have $10,000 to spare. If it were free, I would probably get my eggs frozen. So I’m thrilled that companies like Apple and Facebook are paying for their employees to have extended time to make what is likely the most important decision of their lives.

That said, I’m unsettled thinking that only these elite Silicon Valley companies are offering this ‘perk’- (I have about a .01% hope that bigger, more ‘corporate’ companies will offer this anytime in the next five years). These large companies are the same ones that offer perks like free candy bars with frozen yogurt/ unlimited sweet goodies (Facebook), on-site barber shops (Facebook), Shuttle bus services (Apple), and many more freebies I can only dream of.

The idealist in me wants every woman to have an egg-freezing option, not only women that can afford it, or women that work for one-of-a-kind silicon valley companies who *may* be offering this as a general PR play or HR recruiting tactic.

So you Chose an Artistic Career Path and now You’re in Your 30’s and YOU BE BROKE

October 11, 2014 By in Career, Money Leave a comment

Okay, so broke is not the right word. I’m not broke – but I don’t have a sizable savings and buying a nice jacket on a whim at Banana Republic is not an option for me now. But, I am not complaining – because I chose this option. I want to write for TV and Film, and I could be toiling for many more years to get there, ‘there’ being the point where I’m paid for that work. That means though, that I can’t take a job with long hours or a ton of after-work responsibilities because I need time and mental energy to focus on my writing. So I’m stuck in a land of entry to mid level admin type work.

Which isn’t bad – it’s something to be thankful and grateful for – BUT,  as I get older and head into murky early thirties-mid-thirties territory, I worry about the “what ifs,” what if I don’t break through for awhile? What if I’m 45 before I do? All that saved salary I miss will have an impact. How will I afford children, if I choose I have them? Yes, my ‘husband’ can pull more of the weight but what psychological impact will that have on me as a woman? Will I feel it necessary to give up more ‘writing time’ to watch the children because he’s paying more for the household?  And very importantly, what about retirement – how can I keep up with saving enough money to retire one day?

I’m not sure what I’m trying to say with this post, but I do think making this sort of choice highlights something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. That life is all about paradoxes and compromises. There’s a internal richness that comes with making a decision to follow what some might call a very risky career path, but there’s the flip side of that – which is the very real worry of monetary security.

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Working Away From Home on Your Birthday

October 6, 2014 By in Career 2 Comments

I’m self-employed and my job takes me out of town a lot. Three years ago, I worked away from home during my birthday. I was in Chicago, staying at a Holiday Inn with two coworkers. After a long day of work, my coworkers were tired and didn’t want to go out.  One of them sweetly bought me a beer and appetizers at our hotel bar/restaurant. It was a kind thing to do, but I couldn’t stop feeling like the whole day was extremely depressing, and I swore to never work away from home on my birthday again.

This year, I broke my promise and was out of town working once more on my birthday. I ended up getting a really amazing job in Dallas that I’m still out of town for. The job takes me out of town for 24 days, one of them being my 30th birthday.

At first I was worried I was going to feel really lonely and depressed. I had already planned a birthday dinner out with my closest friends (a tradition I love every year) and when I got the job, I cancelled the dinner. Then I had a better idea, and changed the date of the dinner for when I got back. Having a birthday celebration still happening at a later date made me feel a lot better- like the party hadn’t stopped, it’d just gotten delayed.

I was then much calmer about being away for my 30th. And once I let go of my expectations, an amazing thing happened- I ended up having one of the best birthdays ever- even while away from home. I relaxed and simply made a plan for the night. I invited everyone I worked with out for dinner and drinks, and I researched restaurants and bars in Dallas. I found a well-reviewed (go Yelp!) Afghani restaurant (never had Afghani food before in my life) called Nora and it ended up being awesome. Then a coworker recommended we head to a line-dancing, two-stepping, mechanical bull-riding (never done any of those things) bar called Cowboy Red River. It was like nowhere I’d ever been before, and we had the coolest night, Texan style!

Letting go/relaxing on my birthday was the major foundation for a great night. I had no real expectations, but it helped to have a plan and get people on board with it early. I was also lucky to be surrounded with really supportive people who made the day feel special.

I guess this once again all figures into my favorite quote- “wherever you go, there you are.” Even though I was away from home, I felt much more centered this year, and I took that feeling with me. No matter what happened, I knew that I was okay. And it was nice to feel at home with myself on my birthday, even on the road.

At Cowboy Red River, after riding the mechanical bull and before an attempt at the two step..

With my amazing coworkers at Cowboy Red River in Dallas, after riding the mechanical bull but before attempting the two step.