Right v Wrong

Last weekend, the Boy was in town. He was at the condo and as we were getting ready for breakfast, he was looking at his phone. The Boy has had a phone/screen addiction in the past, so naturally I get a little triggered when I see him staring at a screen. There was an empty paper towel tube on the counter and I grabbed it and started slapping him on the butt with it.

"I just paid a crap ton of money and sent you away for two years so you wouldn't look at your phone anymore! Argh!"

He cracked up at my little deranged fit, and grabbed the paper towel tube out of my hand. "Seriously, Mom, I am okay." 

He is right. He is okay. Here I am, looking at what is wrong (him looking at his phone for five minutes before breakfast) instead of what is right:

• He gets out of bed every day.
• He goes to school.
• He is getting good grades.
• He is going to graduate from high school.
• He is learning to cook, and he likes it.
• He does his own laundry.
• He has guy friends.
• He has a girlfriend.
• He talks to his parents.
• He applied to college on his own (with help from a college counselor).
• He is going to college next year, and he is excited about it.

Two years ago, I didn't see a future for him. He didn't see a future for himself. Now, he is moving forward.

For that, I am grateful.

FOMO, Part 3: Comfort v. Faith

Tomorrow I start my new job. 

I have a vague idea what I will be doing, but they seem to think I will be a good fit and they will on-board me with what I need to know. I could be freaking out, but I am not. 

(Okay, I am freaking out a little bit.) 

I had been planning to cram on the topic of what I will be dealing with, but my last two weeks at my old job were crazy busy as I was on stage for hours a day of voice recordings, transferring the knowledge of my job to whomever takes over my role.

I think back to when Lance offered my my first job after being a stay-at-home mom for years. I asked him what his group does in the organization. When he told me, he sounded like the "whah-whah-whah" voices of the adults talking in Charlie Brown cartoons.

I have no idea what this guy is talking about, I thought, but I took the job anyway. Therein was my Great Leap of Faith. And it was fine. The people were (and still are) nice, and the work had the perfect balance between being not too easy and not too hard. I learned a lot and was growing.

The other day I was listening to a meditation by Tamara Levitt called Optimal Anxiety where she shared a quotation from Karen Salmansohn: "The best things in life are often waiting for you at the exit ramp of your comfort zone."

Tomorrow, I will be getting off the highway of my comfort zone and getting on the exit ramp to the unknown, the unpredictable. When I was in PTA, I had an expression: "We are making this up as we go along." Except for surgeons and other people with precise and repetitive positions, of us are making it up as we go along. Which can be fun, if we have faith in ourselves.

Which is all well and good. But what else? Tomorrow feels like the first day of school, and I still have a case of the first day of school jitters. What helps with that? 

New shoes and school supplies.

These look like something my mother would have worn. The Boy helped me pick them out.

The grown-up version of crayons and spiral notebooks.

FOMO v Putting up with Shit, Part 2

The other day I was talking to one of my co-workers about my impending departure from the company where I work, and I gained a new perspective on my career move. My friend was shocked that I was leaving, but not surprised. At the beginning of the conversation, she asked me if I had turned over every rock to see if I could have found any way to stay, to make it work.

"The group I was a part of no longer exists," I said, "and there really hasn't been a reasonable replacement that can offer any career growth."

"Maybe if you waited, the company will bring the group back. Maybe if you are patient," she said.

"The level of uncertainty with my position was increasing, not decreasing," I said. "I was hired to help design the data and determine how it should be structured. Now, I was likely going to get pushed to a data entry job."

She stopped her line of questioning and changed direction.

"Sometimes patience is bad," she said. "At my old job, they told me I needed to wait to get promoted, so I waited for a few years. I was content, but was that a good thing? Our company could recreate the Information Management team in a few months, or you could wait for a long time." She worked at a company using their legacy technology (read: old but still used), which in the market place is far less desirable. This is a challenge that has been around since I was in HR compensation consulting: Companies acquire a new software, but can't get rid of the old stuff. New people who know the new software are hired at a higher pay rate than the current employees who know the old software. To add insult to injury, the current employees have less value in the job market because they don't have the most up-to-date skills.

"You need to take care of yourself," my friend said. "You have to take care of yourself. It is good that you got a new job. You are ready. Even if this is fail and it doesn't work out, it is worth the risk. You will learn new skills and you will grow, and that will be better than waiting for something that may or may not happen."

What am I missing out on by staying in place?

"The current job is comfortable," I said. "I know how to do it. It isn't that demanding. I can coast."

"And you are ready for more," she said. "You want to grow, and now you have the time and energy."

Before I looked at FOMO with my current employer: they might change and then I would miss out. But what if they never did change? Then what? I could look at FOMO another way: What would I miss out by staying place? 

FOMO v Putting up with Shit

I was talking to a friend last night who was having some issues with an ex. The ex has a truckload of problems and yet she feels like she is missing out when she isn't around him. 

I can relate. I have recently had challenges at work and at home. At work, I was orphaned. The group I was part of was disbanded, my teammate was laid off, and my VP said, "We aren't a bank or Amazon. We don't need data." I felt like I was three minutes away from becoming the guy in Office Space with the red stapler whose office gets moved the basement and he stops getting paid.

And yet even though I felt like my situation at work was moving in a downward direction, I had this nagging fear that as soon as I would leave, the seas would part and there would be a great revelation and everyone would understand the need for integrated data. I fear that once I leave, everything will get better. Without me. Like my departure will be the trigger for insight and change for the better. Because of this fear that things will get better, I stick it out. I put up with tons of shit instead of reading the tea leaves that explicitly said "Get out. Run. Run fast." My soon-to-be former manager even told me to look for a new job, as in "Save yourself. The ship you are on is going down. I am doing my best to save it, but I can't." Initially, I took offense at this, but really he was telling me something I couldn't see for myself.

I have a new job starting in a week, which is a good thing, even though change is hard. But why did I want to stay with something bad because it might get better? Isn't that kind of crazy? The Germans and the Japanese* have words for everything. Maybe they have a word for "Fear that as soon as you leave a bad situation it will miraculously improve upon your departure." Why do I fear that leaving a bad situation will be worse that the bad situation in the first place?

* The Japanese work "tsundoku" means buying more books than you can read. I love it.

Courage

Yesterday I was talking to a friend who remarked on my courage in the past few years.

"You blew up your marriage and your family because you knew your son needed help," he said. "That took a tremendous amount of courage. Many people get stuck and stay in untenable situations. You didn't. You took a chance and made a change."

Awwww... It is nice to hear from an outside friend how far I have come in the past two years. I am also starting a new job in two weeks. My current employer said they don't value data, and my role there was as a data analyst. I could have fought and argued and bitched, but that would not have changed the fact that the company changed directions. Instead of trying to control a situation I could not control, I changed. That also took courage. The old me might have sulked and pouted for awhile. (Okay, I did do some sulking and pouting. I was irritable and unreasonable at times, but not as bad as I might have been.) I updated my resume, my LinkedIn profile and told lots of people I was looking for a new job. And voila! A new job found me.

I am currently reading Ladies of the House: A Modern Retelling of Sense and Sensibility by Lauren Edmondson and I came across a few lines that resonated with me:

• "Nothing forces us to know what we don't want to know except pain." -- Aeschylus
• "...nothing good in this world was made so by a woman keeping her mouth shut."

Pain. No one likes pain, and yet sometimes it is our best teacher, and indicator that change is needed. 

And speaking up, which also means taking action when action is necessary, versus staying quiet and meek.

Ballet v Basketball

I have a new job! Ask my kids would say: "Yay! Go me!"

While I am thrilled to be starting something new, I feel sad to be leaving the old job and especially the people on my team and my favorite stakeholders.

One of the biggest challenges of my current job is the leadership where I work does not believe in data. This is a problem because I am an analyst. They don't agree with the premise of my job, let alone how my job should be done. While this was frustrating, they are the leaders and they get to choose what is important and what is not. I also have a choice; hence, the new job. (Go me!)

I was talking to my soon-to-be-former manager this weekend, and we were doing some post-game analysis, wondering what could have be done differently to save the analyst role on our team. I will skip all of those details here, but today during my meditation, I had the thought: Ballet versus Basketball.

When I was growing up, my sport was dance. I had a teacher tell the class or group the steps and I would do them in order and to the music. In high school, I had a friend Julia who had twelve varsity letters. She played soccer, softball and basketball all four years of high school at the highest level. This was an amazing accomplishment. 

"I can't understand how you know what to do on the court," I said. "How do you know where to run, when to pass the ball? When to shoot?"

"I can't image what you do," Julia said. "How do you remember all of those steps? How do you keep them in order?"

As someone who had only one very short season that was way too long of rec league soccer, I couldn't fully imagine the spontaneity required to play any sport with a ball that requires making decisions on the fly. Those sports are fluid. All of this escapes my grasp.

Some job are like dance--they require specialized skills, but there is a precision, and a correct order and a way to do things. There are steps, there is a routine. Think a surgeon who repairs ACLs day in and day out, or a line cook who makes variations of scrambled eggs on Sunday for brunch. Think a math teacher who explains trig every October to juniors.

The work I am in is much more like basketball. We have projects where we create our own steps, but we don't know what those steps are until we figure them out. Sometimes we can follow the plan; other times we need to improvise when we hit blockers. It is a fluid, ever moving game. There is no one right way to do things, and no specific wrong way. We just have to hope that the movements were are making, individually and as a team, are leading us to our goal.

My current job imploded, and Anderson and I can try to figure out what happened, what went wrong, what we could have done differently to have kept the analyst positions in tact. We tried the best we could to prove our case, to make our point. We were fluid and flexible, but we didn't "win." Anderson is actually really good a navigating the politics of the organization. Sometimes it doesn't matter how good your skills are, the games are hard. Harvard Business Review recently had an article of how to "Persuade the Unpersuadable." While that is an interesting idea, it perhaps unfairly places the blame on the person who is trying to make the point if they don't succeed. Or maybe not. Maybe those people who can "persuade the unpersuadable" aren't playing metaphorical basketball. Maybe they are playing soccer, or climbing a mountain. Maybe they are performing a hybrid sport with part routine, part fluidity, like flying fishing. 

I am also learning that we always have other options. When we don't like the game we are playing, we have the option to move and chose a different game.

Interestingly, my friend Julia became a high school math teacher where she is a master of a single set of skills, whereas I became an analyst and a community leaders where I am required to think on my feet. 

The Prodigal Son & Therapy

When I was growing up, I remember going to church and hearing the story of the Prodigal Son. There was a father with two sons. One son wanted to have his inheritance early, and then he blew it all in the equivalent of the biblical Vegas. The other son chose to stay home and dutifully managed the family farm. 

The prodigal son partied and after he spent all of his money, he was so destitute, the only job he could get was herding pigs, which was considered a pretty crappy job in biblical times. When the prodigal son came back home, he was broke and broken; yet, his father welcomed him back with open arms. The father slaughtered the fatted calf for the celebratory feast for his returning son.

The other son was more than annoyed and refused to go to the party. "I was here the whole time, and do I get a big party?"

"Your brother was lost, and now he is found," said the father.

I was thinking of this story after I got back from the family workshop for my son's program. The most common theme is letting your almost grown children make their own decisions, and then accept the consequences, good or bad. Don't rescue, don't protect your kids from failure.

In this story, the father is supposed to reflect God, that God will welcome back those who return from the abyss, from the bottom, and give them the forgiveness they seek.

I thought of this story in a different way: What does the father not do? 

• The father does not chase the prodigal son around and nag him about spending so much money.
• The father does blame or criticize the kid for their choice of bad influence friends.
• The father does not does not spend the other son's money or got broke trying to save the prodigal son each time he makes poor choices.
• When the son is destitute, the father doesn't pick him up from the pig farm and give him a new car.

The father lets the son be. He lets his son fail. When the son falls on the ground, the father does not pick his son up. Only when the son comes back on his own terms, does the father welcome him back.

I think about my son's and my therapeutic path for the past two years. It is so hard to watch your kid flail. It is so hard to let go.

But it is the only choice.

If you don't let them go, how can they come back?